Comment on Looks Like We Can Finally Kiss the Metaverse Goodbye
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks agoIt seems that you understand what the term “metaverse” was even supposed to mean; care to enlighten the rest of us?
Like many crappy things these days, the name and some of the concept were stolen from good sci-fi. Snow Crash, in this case, in which it was as if the entire Internet was VR.
Which, the Web barely existed when that book was written, so wild visions of what the Internet might turn out to be were to be expected. And something like it remains a common cyberpunk trope to this day.
That said, I disagree with the other poster that it will ever happen, let alone is inevitable.
Also, one of the protagonists of that book lives in a storage unit with a roommate works five jobs and uses a pay toilet across the street¹ despite having worked at multiple wildly valuable start-ups.
¹at which he can’t afford the premium subscriotion that has toilet paper
It is not a novel about good things or a good future.
If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson’s short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I’m in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson’s works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.
I don’t recall those novels being explicitly sequels, but maybe?
He’s not a Utopian, but that’s part of the point. They’re doing torment nexuses. Silicon valley is just the torment nexus place.
Think gravatar meets roblox VR web.
we’ll live in pods and have jobs in second life
Read the book ‘snow crash’, he was trying to do an even more dystopian version of… Just that entire book.
Holds on all copies at the library on this 1992 book!
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Not them, but I think I’ve got a bead on it, assuming you treat it as a general concept and not a trademark:
It’s basically the Platonic ideal of a game lobby. Kinda like what Miiverse was supposed to be, or Ready Player One. They were both after my time but I think maybe kinda like Club Penguin or Roblox? Like an overworld with a custom avatar that you can socialize in and sync into other apps or games together.
It does seem basically inevitable, fast forward gaming 10 years and I’d be surprised if something like that wasn’t the norm.