Metaverse Lawyers

Metaverse Lawyers is a series of posts about lawyers and the metaverse.

Snow Crash

The term “metaverse” has its origins in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson as a portmanteau of “meta” and “universe.”

Thus the term is over 30 years old.

Metaverse Lawyers and Second Life

Second Life was launched 20 years ago in 2003 and still today has a small, loyal and potentially growing community of “residents“. Lawyers even got on board way back then but they didn’t know to call themselves ‘Metaverse Lawyers’ then.

Earlier Metaverses

Ethan Zuckerman and Daniel Beck made a metaverse 27 years ago (at the time of the writing the article linked to – now in reality 29 years ago).

Facebook did not invent the Metaverse

Keanu Reeves pointed this little fact out in an interview in 2021, to promote The Matrix Resurrections, when he said:-

Can we just not have metaverse be like invented like by Facebook… The concept of metaverse is like way older than that… It’s like way older… So for that moment to get to… I’m just like, come on man.

But for some it appeared that, when Facebook changed its parent company name to Meta in 2021, that this was in fact a brave new world we were suddenly entering for the first time.

Metaverse Lawyers join the Bandwagon

Lawyers started to jump on the bandwagon in 2021 not realising that this had been done already by lawyers when Second Life launched 20 years ago. It was a blockable offence to mention this fact to ‘metaverse lawyers’ on social media.

So far in my series there are six posts:-

Since my last post the metaverse has pretty much died. No big surprise there then for anyone who followed my posts and viewpoints on it. The hype surrounding the metaverse has been replaced by the hype surrounding ChatGPT/GenAI as if the metaverse never happened. Not surprisingly those peddling the latest AI hype are more often than not those that thought the metaverse would be the best thing since sliced bread! They were blockchain, Web3 and Clubhouse enthusiasts before that!

I’ll leave you with a comment by Agent Smith from The Matrix:-

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program.