If Mark Zuckerberg trademarks "Metaverse", William Gibson should trademark "Mark Zuckerberg".<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/04/virtual-reality-and-the-pioneers-of-cyberspace/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2015/04/virtual-reality-and-the-pionee...</a><p>>Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace: 25 years before Oculus, John Perry Barlow described what it was like “being in nothingness.”<p>>[...] 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. [...]<p>moviesCyberspace: The New Explorers: Autodesk Demo Tape on Cyberspace with Timothy Leary.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FC4UQDm_mQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FC4UQDm_mQ</a>
What 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.
He hinted at the revenue model being a big difference between whatever Facebook is building and the plot of his novel "Snow Crash"<p>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?
Snow 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.
Snowcrash 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.
I 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.