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I hate to be the one to bang on about standards, but the cyberpunk vision of the Metaverse -- and I am aiming at kind of a bog-standard middle ground of it -- w
by at_a_remove 5y ago
I hate to be the one to bang on about standards, but the cyberpunk vision of the Metaverse -- and I am aiming at kind of a bog-standard middle ground of it -- will depend on some very open standards that are decentralized at the core, starting at Snow Crash and ending in the John C. Wright "The Golden Oecumene" sense of things.
Anything but an open and radically-decentralized interoperable set of standards and you're Running On Someone's Specific Hardware. That means that they and the country (or other municipal structures) might have opinions on what you can run on their hardware, and thus the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse will be invoked at the start.
As you slide toward less interoperability and more corporate/government control, you're going toward the Johnny Mnemonic territory (maybe without the cyberdolphin). You'll have to hack your way around the place, and that means that the ordinary folks are left out. They might not have the smarts, the hardware, the wetware, and so on.
Further levels of control and you're into Second Life -- one platform, one company, but perhaps some local rules/anarchy. And if you're still thinking of the children, the Metaverse eventually looks like Club Penguin. You can finally rest assured that the concept is functionally dead when we are all sending each other only various emojis of unrealistic skin tones.
So, the question then becomes, does anything in the Facebook/Zuckerberg history suggest where on that spectrum we will land?
As a side note, I believe that pretty much any version of this Metaverse means targeted ads. On the controlled side, the people running the hardware will want money, and that means ads. On the uncontrolled ads, randos will want money, and that means that they'll do whatever they can to sniff your activity and monitor you, and then send you ads.
- akeck 5y agoCould I trouble you (or anyone) for a "metaverse"-related fiction reading list? It's been awhile since I dug into some classic cyberpunk.
- pbadg3r 5y agoYou may enjoy http://www.technovelgy.com/ http://www.technovelgy.com/
- at_a_remove 5y agoAside from what I mentioned, you're looking at Bruce Sterling, maybe a little Stross. I hesitate to recommend Doctorow -- he is faddishly distracted and senselessly optimistic. Vinge's "True Names" stands out. Maybe When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One for the AI side of things. The amusing Headcrash, writings by Pat Cadigan, Jeter's deliciously dystopian Noir is a favorite if you want to see how bad it might get. Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams, but that one has been a while.
- TRcontrarian 5y agoVernor Vinge is usually fantastic.
- TRcontrarian 5y agoThe founding text is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992). It's short, funny, entertaining, and full of new ideas in a freewheeling early 90's spirit. The list in the comment you are replying to is not bad, since most interactions you will ever have with someone about a metaverse will hinge on shared descriptions you have with them of a metaverse, so whichever books you hear about the most are by definition the most useful ones to read. Almost everyone has read or heard of Ready Player One (2011), which contains extensive descriptions of its own corporate dystopic metaverse, albeit one that I find insufferably cliche and unoriginal. Metaverse descriptions are descended from the first cyberspace descriptions in Neuromancer (1984) which is a beautiful book worth a read.
- Apocryphon 5y agoReally just watch the Spielberg film for Ready Player One and to get the gist of it.
- Animats 5y agowill depend on some very open standards that are decentralized at the core There's a performance problem. The open Web only works because we have enough compute power to tie up multiprocessor computers with a few gigaflops per CPU and gigabytes of RAM to display 2D text with a few pictures on the screen. A good 3D game world pushes the limits of what current hardware can do. The level of inefficiency associated with Javascript/HTML/CSS won't work for an interesting 3D world. It was tried. See X3D.
- at_a_remove 5y agoOh, I have no illusions about how well the radically decentralized business works out. It is wildly inefficient, the content could be anything, and so on. Think Freenet. And I have watched the VR promise die enough deaths to make a cat envious.
- fnord77 5y agosooner or later hardware will be sufficient
- ericflo 5y agoOpen standards don't equate to slow. Vulkan is an open standard, for example. The standard just has to allow for performant use.