Did he reach out to you prior to that? Neal Stephenson “ Peter KafkaĪnd then cut to where Zuckerberg renames his company Meta and says, I want to build the metaverse and spend billions of dollars. You know, maybe people are actually taking this seriously. So at that point I was like: “Okay, holy shit. When Google Earth came out, word reached me through the grapevine that the Earth application described in Snow Crash had been somewhat inspirational for that. I started to hear from people in the tech industry who were reading it, and it gradually became clear. And so I started getting the idea that it was well-received. I was on the WELL, which is an early BBS, and there were a lot of tech people there. I started hearing about it in the mid-90s, as the Internet became a thing. When did you get a sense that the Jeff Bezoses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world were really influenced by Snow Crash? That this was really meaningful to tech people who were building things? Neal Stephenson You know, maybe people are actually taking this seriously.” Peter Kafka Here’s an edited excerpt from our chat: “Holy shit. We discussed whether the metaverse can exist even if high-end virtual reality goggles never catch on why he’s never been able to turn his work into a movie, TV show, or game and his fear of a looming ecological disaster and the science he thinks could solve it. I talked to Stephenson about Snow Crash’s legacy - some of which got auctioned off this week at a Sotheby’s auction - and much more for the Recode Media podcast. People who’ve never written a line of code love his books - and so do bona fide nerds, like the Google Earth developers who used Snow Crash as inspiration, or Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who hired Stephenson to work on his Blue Origin rocket startup.

Even if the real-world metaverse doesn’t pan out, Stephenson has had an enormous influence on how we think about tech today.

Snow crash