Vanity Fair – Way back in 1992, author Neal Stephenson published his breakthrough novel, Snow Crash, a cyberpunk exploration of then-futuristic technologies: mobile computing, virtual reality, wireless Internet, digital currency, smartphones, and augmented-reality headsets. The book famously opens with a breakneck car chase as the main character, Hiro Protagonist (it’s something of a satire), races to deliver a pizza on time. It’s a literal life-or-death scene as our harried gig-economy driver races his GPS-enabled electric car through the streets of Los Angeles before he runs out the clock and risks angering the mob. TaskRabbit “independent contractors” can surely relate. Twenty-five years later, Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks (including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape. Among the the more prophetic inventions in the book is something Stephenson called “the Metaverse”—the same sort of wireless, online virtual-reality experience that Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other major tech company are now competing to commercialize…Dystopian or no, Stephenson’s vision of the future is almost here, and at least one tech company virtual-reality start-up Magic Leap, has snapped up Stephenson in an official capacity—he became its Chief Futurist in 2014. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart…”