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Snow Collision—one of Web3’s most formative texts — much predictable, but doesn’t describe the climate of speculation that accompanies today’s NFTs. No character in Neal Stephenson’s novels is shown flipping avatars for profit like NFT traders on the OpenSea or Blur marketplaces.
Stephenson is not always wrong.
Stephenson told Decryption that he sees an eventual shift away from the purely financialization of digital assets—a fundamental shift that is key to building a thriving version of the metaverse, where people perceive the value of digital assets as exceeding what they are sold for.
“I hope that we can move away from this kind of one-minded attempt to finance everything and start trying to develop a more diverse economy that, based on that, will become a more stable economy,” he said.
Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel pioneered the term “metaverse”, which describes it as a 3D virtual world in which many people engage with and own things. In the novels, the metaverse is also a popular social scene, imbued with status symbols of consumer life—young people frequent the “computer games section at the local WalMart” to purchase common starter avatars such as a pair of affordable sneakers.
While no one has purchased NFTs at WalMart yet, many elements of the novel reflect aspects of the current digital asset ecosystem in terms of both ownership and identity. In a similar way to how some NFTs are designed as profile pictures and used to convey aspects of a person’s digital presence online, virtual avatars can be rented, owned, or coded from scratch in Stephenson’s depiction of the metaverse.
But the lack of sentimental meaning created conditions where entire NFT collections could be sold in the blink of an eye, he said, contributing to the volatility of digital asset prices. He draws parallels between digital assets and “Tulip Mania”, a historic speculative bubble that took place during the 17th century in Holland.
“People are willing to throw whatever they can get into the market at the slightest sign that the market might go down,” he said. “No amount of sentimental value would make you hesitate in the slightest to sell them if you thought they would lose their value.”
He said digital asset owners should be given a role in shaping the digital assets they own to create that sentimental value and stem speculation, arguing that personal relationships balance people’s incentives to profit.
“The way we get a stable economy in the metaverse is by creating opportunities for people to build unique UGC,” said Stephenson, referring to user-generated content. “They might one day come out and try to sell it, but maybe not.”
For example, Stephenson references the base he built in collaboration with his friends in the survival game Valheim. Even if the building could be sold, he says the experience of creating and living in it would likely keep him and his friends from doing so.
“What happens when we go cyberspace and build something, is we create that kind of scarcity,” he said.
Fundamentally, avenues that allow people to develop a deeper relationship with their digital assets will lead them to prefer less pure investing and more personal goods. It’s the same kind of value that can be ascribed to an item that’s basically worthless, says Stephenson, like a 30-year-old paperback book with signs of wear and tear.
“There are all these intangible connections that are more valuable to me than their cash value,” he says. “I remember buying it; I remember reading it; I have read the pages; I lent it to my friend, and he gave it back to me.”
And it’s that personal experience that makes the book feel truly unique, says Stephenson, even though it was identical to another copy at the time of purchase.
“In a way, it’s not rare at all because it’s there [are] many like it,” he said. “But on another level, it’s priceless and incredibly rare because it’s mine, and it’s the only one of its kind.”
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