Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
As far as I know, the origin of the 'meme' is Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) though you could make strong representations for the online world Second Life (2004) to be a more contemporary origin - in as much as it 'exists', unlike the world of Snow Crash [the Metaverse] which was only ever on paper.
Full answer by Tetsujin: https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/92579 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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