Long before Facebook became Meta, a novel predicted our digital future. In this episode of Cabinet of Science and Fiction, we dive into Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk masterpiece, "Snow Crash." We'll explore the world that gave us the terms "Metaverse" and "avatar," and examine its startlingly prescient vision of a fractured society seeking escape in a sprawling virtual reality.

But how does Stephenson's 1992 dystopia hold up today? We'll dissect the novel's core themes—corporate sovereignty, data privacy, and virtual inequality—and see how they map onto the technological and ethical challenges of our current push toward a real-world Metaverse. We'll also look at the aspects Stephenson himself admits he didn't foresee, including the specific revenue models driving modern social polarization.

Finally, we  ...