Big Tech wants you to live in a virtual world. Prepare for real problems.

Have you heard of “Metaverse” recently? It was hard not to do so.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the latest buzzwords in technology 16 times in his latest earnings announcement last month. According to him, the future of Facebook is the metaverse, a virtual environment that physically exists and allows you to hang out, play games, work, and create.

But he didn’t coin the term. Last year, Intel Corp. Technology companies from to Unity Software talked about the Metaverse. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also talked about the “enterprise metaverse” in his company’s earnings announcement the day before Facebook’s phone call last month.

Nvidia has been particularly loud in favor of this idea. Last year, the company launched a platform called Omniverse, “to connect the 3D world to a shared virtual world.” CEO Jen Sung Huang took advantage of the company’s largest annual conference in October to take Neil Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash into the concept of virtual reality, the successor to the Internet. Publicly acknowledged as the original inspiration.

Don’t worry, Stevenson told Vanity Fair that he was “just chatting” in an interview with a 2017 article about his novel. Decades after the book was published, tech leaders take his ideas more seriously than ever before.