If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook. Someone else would have done it.

But if Neal Stephenson didn't exist, we'd not necessarily have what he created. That's how unique his ideas are.

And Meta, billions of dollars later, is still no Metaverse...

Eh, I like some of Neal's books a lot, particularly Diamond Age is likely in any top ten I'd come up with. But this claim is basically only true in the trivial sense that wouldn't have any arbitrary creative work if its author hadn't created it.

So in that sense it's the exact same as Facebook. Without Neal somebody else would invented "post Cyberpunk" and without Mark somebody else would have invented whatever Facebook is - social media for your grandparents maybe?

Neal is "unique" but we're all unique, it's the least unique thing about us. He struggles to write satisfying endings, he leans too heavily on the rape-as-character-development trope, his novels have become flabby as his fame grew and presumably he was able to resist editorial demands more, he doesn't know as much about technology as he thinks he does... Like I said, "Diamond Age" would probably make my top ten, but that's not because it's flawless by any means.

> If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook.

Yes, because multi-trillion dollar companies are completely natural and spawn almost at random to whatever nerd happens to be working on a particular problem at any given time