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Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
- durovo 5y agoI don't get why the interviewer suggests that the author deserves some compensation. Did metaverse as an idea did not exist before Snow Crash?
- CamperBob2 5y agoI'm reminded of the master-class hissy fit Harlan Ellison threw when The Terminator came out. He sued, claiming ownership of the general concept of robots from the future. I'm not sure how it shook out, legally, but to this day the T1 film credits include the producers' "grateful acknowledgement to the works of Harlan Ellison." So there's certainly precedent for Stephenson to claim the moral rights to a "metaverse," whatever that is.
- DonHopkins 5y agoI Have No Trademark But I Must Sue!
- NetHaven 5y agoOddly, I went to a talk by him once and he mentioned he briefly thought about suing when the Matrix came out based on this story.
- wanderingstan 5y agoMore important is the name itself. A billion dollar company just renamed itself based on a name Stephenson coined. He’s right that compensation isn’t legally due—but he should be proud!
- wmf 5y agoVaguely similar ideas existed in True Names and Neuromancer, but no, the metaverse as we imagine it today did not exist before Snow Crash.
- ootsootsoots 5y agoI’d consider human spiritual realms the precursor to meta verses we can actually implement. Tons of visualization through art, and ways and means defined through story. Of course tend to need to be very literal about these things. Frankly a computer meta verse isn’t that interesting I’d rather figure out how to grow neuron structures that let me believe or have skills in anything and just babysit this stupid fleshy husk literally
- rel2thr 5y agoAlso Tron, Tron is basically a metaverse I would say
- spenczar5 5y agoWhat an odd interview. I got the sense that the interviewer was really looking for Stephenson to lash out with some juicy rant about how awful Facebook is, but he is so mild about the whole thing.
- Igelau 5y agoYeah, it was like a shaggy dog interview. Here come the punchline! ... "the book has been out for 30 years and anyone can spin ideas out of it."
- smitty1e 5y agoIt was a plug for the new Stephenson book.
- lhk2021 5y agoI think if you saw my full questions (had to edit for brevity) you would have gotten a different sense. I really was curious to know what he thought, given no one else had talked to him, which I found strange, but glad I did!
- xiphias2 5y agoWhy did you need to edit an amazing writer for brevity? Can you make the original interview available somewhere? It would be interesting
- woqjl 5y agoSnowcrash was forgettable. Vernor Vinges Rainbows End and stutf in Orson Scott Cards books left a much bigger mark. Esp the way the chimp troupe gets manipulated by the network. We see Vinges "belief circles" all around us.
- jdlshore 5y agoYou know, you can express enthusiasm without tearing something else down. There was no need for your first sentence. Personally, I loved Vinge’s “True Names” short story, which I believe may be the first “virtual reality” story. I also loved Snow Crash for its in-your-face gonzo attitude.
- tomjen3 5y agoWhen the talk is about Snow Crash, it is reasonable to say it is poor, if you believe that to be the case.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hgibbs 5y agoI thought a lot of the ideas in snowcrash were very interesting - particularly when you consider that the book was published in 1992 and so a lot of the elements that were cutting-edge on release have had time to diffuse into scifi culture. For example, the potential for 'ideas' to be viruses of the mind, or the degree to which thought is shaped by language.
- nextaccountic 5y agoHe hinted at the revenue model being a big difference between whatever Facebook is building and the plot of his novel "Snow Crash" Can someone fill in the specifics? I guess the trouble is that for Facebook, you're the product, and advertisers are the clients - but, what is the revenue model of the metaverse from Snow Crash?
- dopidopHN 5y agoFrom what I loosely remember, snowcrash depict a interoperable layer where actors build marketplaces.
- jayd16 5y agoIn snowcrash, p2p network IO is cheap, compute is expensive. This sets up a metaverse where users render themselves and their content for others. The renders are streamed. No one controls the metaverse itself as it's more of a self hosted, federated affair. I think there is some sort of main street with some reserved space but it's akin to a url.
- EvanAnderson 5y agoThere's a "real estate" model, similar to "ownership" of domain names and address space. Developing on the "Street" is licensed by the ACM, and the compute to run it comes from income from a trust fund. There's also an IP licensing model going on too-- selling avatars, video games, amusement parks.
- samizdis 5y agoWhen I first read Snow Crash, I thought (perhaps wrongly) that there was also an advertising model to supplement the real estate business - and one that went hand-in-hand with it. I love the passage that introduces "the Street", and it's the last sentence of it that gave me the impression of an advertising business model. In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City. That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.
- arrakis2021 5y agoSnow crash and Neuromancer are two well known must reads. I remember once hearing someone compare the 2 authors styles in that Neal Stephenson sounds like a hacker trying to be a great writer, and William Gibson sounds like a great writer trying to write like a hacker.
- tomjen3 5y agoAttempted to get through Neuromancer, but (minor spoiler) when they started to switch persons around it got too confusing and I realized that it might have worked for a movie, but not a book. I also realized that I was only reading it because it was such a famous book, not because I was getting anything out of it, so I stopped. Just putting this out in case anybody else feels the same pressure.
- WalterGR 5y agoGibson's writing style is quite... disorienting. It took me a few read-throughs of Neuromancer until I felt like I got everything.
- divbzero 5y agoYou think misinformation in the News Feed is bad enough? Wait till they figure out neurolinguistic hacking in the Metaverse.
- speed_spread 5y agoOh but they already did. Did you you really think the former president's manner of speech was just him acting retarded? He was casting memetic spells across all channels. They're still zapping around as we speak.
- jdkee 5y agoObligatory Stephenson vs Gibson battle. https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...
- davros 5y agoMy all-time favourite slashdot post, worth a re-read a long time later.
- AlbertCory 5y agoWell, he didn't do a William Sherman: "If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve."
- heckerhut 5y agoHe should auction an NFT and Zuck/FB/MVRS should buy it for a decent amount
- charcircuit 5y agoor MVRS could just make the NFT and own it for free
- DonHopkins 5y agoWhat reason is there to even use NFTs? How about he does exactly the same thing, with exactly the same outcome in the real world, just without making any NFTs, burning any coal, or shilling any get rich quick pyramid schemes? What tangible difference would there be? None whatsoever. ...Except for no bullshit, no proof of wasted energy, no precious GPUs buried in landfills, no contribution to climate change, no carcinogenic smoke, no lung disease, no cancer, etc... Did you know: rocks used to be perfectly good companions and construction materials aeons before and decades after the Pet Rock craze came and went. The cardboard box and the $4 price tag were just a gimmick. So are NFTs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
- heckerhut 5y agoBy making it an NFT I think he creates something bigger than himself, something that could last generations. If he just gets a donation from FB, that would be some random amount of money…who cares.
- DonHopkins 5y agoWhile it's true that all that wasted energy and squandered precious rare earth elements and belching coal smoke and CO2 greenhouse gasses and climate change and cancer and lung disease you create by making NFTs are something bigger than yourself, they're not necessarily what you want to be remembered by. And any person receiving some random amount of money donation from Facebook in exchange for NOT making an NFT probably cares. Or is your whole point "who cares about the environment"?
- hgibbs 5y agoCan anybody recommend authors like Stephenson? He is my favourite author by far and it's going to be a sad day when I exhaust his works.
- tvalentius 5y agoWilliam Gibson, Cixin Liu
- Eric_WVGG 5y agoIain Banks. His "Culture" novels are maybe the smartest space opera ever written. start with Player of Games. The various books have no common plot thread, can be read completely out of order; Player is by far the most accessible.
- MrDresden 5y agoI second this, and raise one Peter F Hamilton.
- schneems 5y agoHere’s some I’ve really enjoyed recently: - Octavia Butler (Everything) - Becky Chambers (Wayfarers) - Martha Wells (Murderbot) - Liu Cixin (3 body problem/ dark forest) - N.K. Jemisin (Broken Earth & and cities we became) - Dennis E. Taylor (Bobiverse)
- hgibbs 5y agoThank you for your suggestions! I have read some of N.K Jemisin and enjoyed what I read, the others I have not heard of except for Liu Cixin. I've read the three-body problem but I found it a bit jarring how 'magical' the resolution was - it was speculative but in a bizarre/surreal way rather than in a 'plausible extension of reality' way. Is it worth pushing through to the later books?
- joe-collins 5y agoI picked up the Three-Body Problem due to the hype, and similarly found myself put off by the wildly fantastic photon magic.
- kesor 5y agoSnow Crash is really a gread book, a lot of philosophy intertwined with technology and religion in one compact package.
- DonHopkins 5y agoIf Mark Zuckerberg trademarks "Metaverse", William Gibson should trademark "Mark Zuckerberg". https://www.wired.com/2015/04/virtual-reality-and-the-pioneers-of-cyberspace/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/virtual-reality-and-the-pionee... >Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace: 25 years before Oculus, John Perry Barlow described what it was like “being in nothingness.” >[...] And they were ready to make a product. They’d made a promo video starring Timothy Leary. Gullichsen had even registered William Gibson’s term “cyberspace” as an Autodesk trademark, prompting an irritated Gibson to apply for trademark registration of the term “Eric Gullichsen.” By June, they had an implementation which, though clearly the Kitty Hawk version of the technology, endowed people with an instantaneous vision of the Concorde level. [...] moviesCyberspace: The New Explorers: Autodesk Demo Tape on Cyberspace with Timothy Leary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FC4UQDm_mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FC4UQDm_mQ
- Igelau 5y ago(We asked X some questions about Y) ≠ (X reacts to Y) I'd have expected Axios to be a bit more bland about it.
- Ankaios 5y agoMaybe it's just me, but Facebook seems to have more in common with the Snow Crash virus than with the Metaverse.
- DonHopkins 5y agoMetastasis: The spread of cancer cells from the place where they first formed to another part of the body. In metastasis, cancer cells break away from the original (primary) tumor, travel through the blood or lymph system, and form a new tumor in other organs or tissues of the body.
- grangerg 5y agoWe've decided we're going to call them MetaFace. :)
- regimeoftruth 5y agoI actually want to see Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, but I also kind of want to see Neal Stephenson come at him with a team of fancy lawyers and walk away with a large pile of money.