Treating an idea as if it’s a reality

On November 14, 1994, Microsoft’s Bill Gates dedicated his keynote to “this next era that we’re moving into.” The buzzword was “information superhighway”—the national high-speed computing network that would revolutionize how consumers shopped, informed and entertained themselves. Gates showed in his on-stage presentation how he saw the futuristic year of 2005.

In October 2021, Zuckerberg showed a spectacular experience the metaverse would unlock, similar to what Gates had done with the information superhighway 27 years earlier.