Neal Stephenson, author of "Snow Crash" which prompted Zuck's metaverse speaks about "My Prodigal Brainchild"

[usonian]

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/my-prodigal-brainchild

It feels incumbent upon me to write something about last week’s big news in which the company formerly known as Facebook decided to shut down its Metaverse project on which it has, according to various reports, spent eighty billion dollars.

I spelled that figure out because it’s more zeroes and commas than I can type in before blowing through my attention span and losing track.

snip

In the following weeks I had to make a few Tweets trying to convince incredulous strangers that I had no connection with what Meta was up to; that they hadn’t communicated with me in any way; that they hadn’t paid me off; and that, no, I wasn’t going to sue them. All of these things remain true.

So there wouldn’t have been any upside for me if Meta’s Metaverse had succeeded. What remains to be seen is whether there’s a downside for me now that it has failed. I think I’m standing clear of the blast radius, but seeing the front page of the New York Times’s business page dominated by the inevitable Metaverse tombstone image does give one pause.

A visionary idea, in the hands of a sociopathic dork. NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

And now a word from Mark Zuckerberg:

[al bupp]

1. The whole article is worth a read

Neal is one of my favorite SciPhi authors. Not as pithy as Ursala K Leguin, and more techy than Robert Anton Wilson, but he sure can spin a tale.

[Johnny2X2X]

2. Snowcrash was a great book

I read it right after I discovered William Gibson's Neuromancer. Cyberpunk as a genre was extremely creative and predictive of a lot of technologies. I think it was William Gibson who coined the term cyberspace in 1982.

I do think we'll end up in those spaces Gibson and Stephenson wrote about, but it might not be until humans can truly be digitized that is happens.