>it really looked like the visions of virtual worlds that cyberpunk fiction loved might show up in your Netscape browser. It was exactly that. I participated on one SGI demo around 1995. It included tehnology demo and the grand vision from some guy I don't remember. They had few the these bad boys (bigger refrigerator sized models) and very fast internet running Netscape browser. They wanted us to start to develope for this to this new thing called Java that would allow code run everywhere. They demoed what they thought internet would look like after 3-5 years: * 3d browsers with VRML.…
The metaverse has a consistent definition - at least, if you read Snow Crash. It's just not what any company would actually want to bring to the market. 3D game worlds have value, open systems have value, but in completely opposite and contradictory ways. The value is in the entertainment of playing a well-built one, which means there has to be monetization and centralization. In other words, they have "production value". Open systems are outright allergic to that: while you can monetize, say, a webpage; there's no central WWW server, so there's no technical protection (DRM) against you just…
Both Kurt Vonnegut and Neal Stephenson seek to plumb the intersection between technology and religion, between science and popular culture - but where Vonnegut adheres to the literary traditions of the Western Satirical Canon, Stephenson choose to plough a far more meta-referential narrative path that is weighted by all the detrimental issues associated with Young Adult fiction without representing any of the strengths of the genre. This is fairly understandable when you look at their respective backgrounds. Vonnegut was a Combat Infantry veteran, earning a Purple Heart in World War 2. He…
I think the framing around these sorts of discussions always annoys me because few sci-fi books (and certainly no Neil Stephenson books) are primarily written as predictions. They are written as stories, with technology serving narrative above all else. Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes. Fantastically fun in my opinion! But that motivates all kinds of choices (making the Internet a literal place with a street grid and real estate, where people can get chopped up by swords) that real XR tech has no…
> Too much snark and Reddit-style humor for me. Neal Stephenson is decidedly not a good prose stylist. But I guess he doesn't aim to be. "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" and "Anathem" are piles of really mediocre, ungainly sentences. What he has are many interesting ideas and he is a fun conveyor of those ideas, for the most part. But he's not a Nabokov nor a Cormac McCarthy nor a Samuel Delany. But we love him for he's "one of us". He wrote that excellent essay that placed a geek at the beginning of the Creation myth: "In the Beginning was the Command Line"…
It starts with the almost pornographic display of advanced weaponry and logistics deployed to deliver a pizza The opening chapter takes on a whole different meaning when you consider it as a heavily embellished self-narrative by a guy who lives in a storage unit and doesn't really have a career and doesn't have any prospects, delivering pizzas for a massive chain in difficult to navigate suburban sprawl and how he fucks up his job while sticking his neck out for his employer. He's driving a noisy, used and abused, yet tricked out, vehicle in risky situations, and they give him the cheapest,…
But the concerns expressed in those works were the same as the ones expressed forty years ago; that's the point the original article is making. Bethke himself used the phrase “self-referential metafiction” in describing sci-fi authors in the late 70s. I think a lot of the current cyberpunk work is the same, commoditizing an art movement into a fashion dressing to tell the same kind of stories we always get. Vast corporations doing what they want to the helpless working class started as an 80s fear in opposition to a largely hopeful view of companies from the 50s and 60s. Just because it's…
To me the metaverse in general is approaching bullshit for the same reasons 3D TVs largely failed: Not everyone's going to want to use it. It doesn't create new novel things you couldn't do before, it just makes existing things much less convenient. It doesn't solve a real problem. Why on earth would I want to have a meeting as my 3D avatar? Meetings are broken in a lot of ways but having to strap on a headset is not the solution to any of those issues. And no matter how cool you make doing eCommerce in the meta verse, a majority of people are going to want to do it via a web browser. Why?…
> Are you looking to be delighted by words rather than ideas? Perhaps I'm extrapolating a bit here, Possibly! Prose style is pretty important to me. On the other hand, that's not something I generally complain about with Stephenson. Even when he misfires, the result is usually entertaining. Being bland is a bigger sin, IMO, and not one he commits often. I think the two go hand-in-hand for me. Having both is best, but I'll take either. > but you seem you like your complex language constructs, so to speak? Hah, my writing style owes to more to me not taking the time to edit that I should.…
There's no "almost" about it. It's a very self-conscious parody of a cyberpunk dystopia (among other things) and it makes that very blunt. Far as I can tell, the point of that whole pizza delivery scene at the beginning is to firmly establish in the reader's mind that this is not "serious business". I mean, cmon: "The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its…