“
Other virtual worlds soon followed suit, from the Metaverse to the Matrix. The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds. Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds.
”
”
Ernest Cline (Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1))
“
What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.
”
”
Robert Charles Wilson (Vortex (Spin, #3))
“
in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech—the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife's fiber-optic network.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
When new things emerge in our world, its best to put some time into researching them and trying to gain an understanding. With that understanding, you're then able to think about and plan for the new business applications for those things and the new ways in which your business may profit from them.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
even when members of Gen Z are not on their devices and appear to be doing something in the real world, such as sitting in class, eating a meal, or talking with you, a substantial portion of their attention is monitoring or worrying (being anxious) about events in the social metaverse. As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, “We are forever elsewhere.”[33] This is a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships,
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness)
“
The average person doesn’t even notice a synchronization issue unless the audio is more than 45 ms early, or over 125 ms late (170 ms total variance).
”
”
Matthew L. Ball (The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
Threads snap.You would lose your way in the labyrinth.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“
The Metaverse is the ideal playground in which the AI can let off steam. The more humans lose themselves in it, the more the AI will take control. That much is certain.
”
”
Murat Durmus (Author of the book "THE AI THOUGHT BOOK")
“
The metaverse is not something to believe in. It’s not a religion; it’s simply a tool. I don’t “believe” in my refrigerator. I use it when I want a cold soda.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm is the anti-Metaverse. Why live in a fake world, when a real one already exists? Bill Gates talks about The Metaverse to obscure the fact that (s)he is now America's largest farm holder. The Fake is for YOU, while (s)he wants The Real.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Duck Quotes For The Ages. Specifically ages 18-81. (A BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm Production))
“
They use metaverse, virtual reality, video game technology to connect remotely to one's brain and body. To create a fake possibility of imitated life for a biased interpretation in favor of it by the inadequate ai detection system of "truth". For fake news and fake justice purposes.
”
”
Maria Karvouni (You Are Always Innocent)
“
Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they’re still nothing more than video games. Hiro’s not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It’s owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deal. But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
There is a constant interaction and overlap between the physical, virtual, augmented, and mixed worlds.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
What Zuckerberg has in mind for Horizon is a dystopian advertising nightmare.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
We must transcend this recent model of a society where endless productivity is the ultimate good, and examine the scientific understanding of the raw motivations of human beings.
”
”
Herman Narula (Virtual Society: The Metaverse and the New Frontiers of Human Experience)
“
In his classic Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel founder Andy Grove describes the moment every leader dreads, when massive change occurs and a company must either transform or fall by the wayside. For Zuckerberg, this “strategic inflection point” came when TikTok overtook Facebook and Instagram in user engagement, forcing him to rename his company and leap into the metaverse.
”
”
Alok Sama (The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble)
“
The next major technological platform for creative expansion of the mind will be cyberspace, or more specifically the Metaverse, a functional successor to today’s 2D Internet, with virtual places instead of Webpages. The Internet and smartphones have enabled the rapid and cheap sharing of information, immersive computing will be able to provide the same for experiences. That means that just as we can read, listen to, and watch videos of anything we want today, soon we’ll be able to experience stunning lifelike simulations in virtual reality indistinguishable from our physical world. We’ll be walking and actively interacting in the Metaverse, not slavishly staring at the flat screens. We would be able to turn our minds inside out and show our dreams to each other in this ecstadelic matrix of our own making.
”
”
Alex M. Vikoulov (The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution)
“
Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Online or offline, virtual reality is an artificial environment that you can enter, and you feel like you’re really there. Virtual Reality involves simulation of any imaginable environment that can be explored and interacted with by a person
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
World of Warcraft was ported over to the OASIS, and copies of Norrath and Azeroth were added to the growing catalog of OASIS planets. Other virtual worlds soon followed suit, from the Metaverse to the Matrix. The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds. Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds.
”
”
Ernest Cline (Ready Player One)
“
The metaverse is, par excellence, the ultimate ANTI-travel dystopia. Well, at least on paper. Cambridge Dictionary defines travel as "to make a journey, usually over a long distance." In the metaverse, au contraire, there are no distances at all. The central concept of space is nonsensical in a virtual environment. That's why most people in our industry are still skeptical of its practical applications: if you erase one essential part (the distance) from the travel equation, only the journey remains. And so does the question: is traveling without moving, still traveling? Or is it something else?
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
As the bandwidth revolution unfolds, it will draw people more and more into the borderless virtual world of online communities and cybercommerce, a world with enough graphic density to become the “metaverse,” the kind of alternative, cyberspace reality imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s “metaverse” is a virtual community with its own laws, princes, and villains.41 As ever more economic activity is drawn into cyberspace, the value of the state’s monopoly power within borders will shrink, giving states a growing incentive to franchise and fragment their sovereignty. Just
”
”
James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
“
A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.
”
”
Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
For the first two or so years following the release of the iPad, it was common to see press reports and viral YouTube videos of infants and young children who would pick up an “analogue” magazine or book and try to “swipe” its nonexistent touchscreen. Today, those one-year-olds are eleven to twelve. A four-year-old in 2011 is now well on her way to adulthood.
”
”
Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
Currently, the Metaverse has become real. Millions of people are waiting anxiously for this digital world to materialize so they can move in and stay. If we aren’t already distracted, exhausted, and disembodied, this major disruption to a physical world could be yet another violent piece to the traumatizing culture of grinding. As a person totally focused on our Spirits, souls, minds, and bodies, I am worried about the role the Metaverse will play in an already sleep-deprived and disconnected world. There are too many ways to ignore the deep inner knowing, intuition, and divine wisdom that exists in us from birth already. To exist daily over time in a space of increased virtual experiences will have a lasting effect on our
”
”
Tricia Hersey (Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto)
“
Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?"
A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You
ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.
Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting
that information. It's probably nothing.
The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal
in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can't sell drugs
in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at something.
The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash
before. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and
each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.
But a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at
such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls
the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen,
turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen
it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug.
The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has an
utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which would
be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense.
Hiro's trying to read some clues in the guy's face, but the closer he looks, the
more his shifty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into jittering, hardedged
pixels. It's like putting his nose against the glass of a busted TV. It
makes his teeth hurt.
"Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
"He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are
both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had
essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
"But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists
think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the
pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits."
"Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a
language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret."
"The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro
says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only
once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the
information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into
hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out,
but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the
newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and
that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself
accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent
part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it."
"Yes. This was his interpretation."
"Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers,
what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language
and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing
the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?"
"Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language
and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave
him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the
functioning of the brain and of the body."
"Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs
in English?"
"Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are
better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend
themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine
had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of
the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may
have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and
transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an
extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand
years ago."
"A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking."
"Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language
called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to
understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the
language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word.
In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote
Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like
a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a
light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second
Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom
Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and
all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine
Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem,
meaning 'master of the divine name.'"
"The machine language of the world," Hiro says.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white
avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something
close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did
most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised
or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita -
- the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes it hard to forget.
Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took off.
And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up
the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the
realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance
algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita's
faces. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to
talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as good
as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being said -- a lot gets
lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions
and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's how they know
what's going on inside a person's head-by condensing fact from the vapor of
nuance.
Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something
ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical, rosary-toting
Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the bitheads didn't
like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and took a job with
some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism
as long as it makes money.
But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed at Da5id
and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided
that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is
distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion
in her relationships.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
How is it, then, that Infinite Jest still feels so transcendently, electrically alive? Theory one: as a novel about an “entertainment” weaponized to enslave and destroy all who look upon it, Infinite Jest is the first great Internet novel. Yes, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson may have gotten there first with Neuromancer and Snow Crash, whose Matrix and Metaverse, respectively, more accurately surmised what the Internet would look and feel like. (Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc-based entertainment.) But Infinite Jest warned against the insidious virality of popular entertainment long before anyone but the most Delphic philosophers of technology. Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram—Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and it gave him (as the man himself might have put it) the howling fantods.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
Take the 2013 film Monsters University. Even when using an industrial grade computing processor, it would have taken an average of 29 hours for each of the film’s 120,000-plus frames to be rendered. In total, that would have meant more than two years just to render the entire movie once, assuming not a single render was ever replaced or scene changed. With this challenge in mind, Pixar built a data center of 2,000 conjoined industrial-grade computers with a combined 24,000 cores that, when fully assigned, could render a frame in roughly seven seconds.
”
”
Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
All of the top Roblox games, such as Adopt Me!, Tower of Hell, and Meep City, come from independent developers with little to no prior experience and staffs of 10 to 30 (having started with one or two). To date, these titles have been played 15 to 30 billion times each. In a single day, they’ll reach half as many players as Fortnite or Call of Duty—and half as many as titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or The Last of Us do in their lifetimes. And as for populating the platform with a wide range of virtual objects? 25 million items were made in 2021 alone, with 5.8 billion being earned or bought.
”
”
Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
He pokes his katana through the
side of the cube and follows it through the wall and out the other side.
This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that he found
years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing
Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall
-- this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building --
but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power.
That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that
does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the
Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different
computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice,
it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very
precisely, at high speed, and at just the right times. And when you are
connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the
Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down.
That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back.
Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating
katana.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be able to
reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system that
operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of
the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each
other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On
the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.
So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really is
cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the computer
simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you
can see where you're going. Hiro appears solid to himself, but everyone else
looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as if it's a fogbank, clearly
seeing The Black Sun in front of him.
He steps over the property line, and he's in the doorway. And in that instant
he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As one, they
all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he is -- Hiro is
just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the airport. But in
the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over
the line into The Black Sun.
He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that he's all
by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of avatars, he can see
all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity. They are
all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars, hoping that Da5id -- The
Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief -- will invite them inside. They flick
and merge together into a hysterical wall. Stunningly beautiful women,
computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two frames a second, like Playboy
pinups turned three-dimensional -- these are would-be actresses hoping to be
discovered. Wild-looking abstracts, tornadoes of gyrating light-hackers who are
hoping that Da5id will notice their talent, invite them inside, give them a job.
A liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people -- persons who are accessing the
Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy
black and white. A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans, devoted to the
fantasy of stabbing some particular actress to death; they can't even get close
in Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. There are
would-be rock stars done up in laser light, as though they just stepped off the
concert stage, and the avatars of Nipponese businessmen, exquisitely rendered by
their fancy equipment, but utterly reserved and boring in their suits.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who
"interviews" him. He's sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than
normal. "All television going out to Consumers throughout the world goes
through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database
passes through my networks. The Metaverse -- -the entire Street -- exists by
virtue of a network that I own and control.
"But that means, if you'll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have
a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is
wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it's staying
there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up
into his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks to his wife about it. And,
goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that information. If I was running a
car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But
that's what I do at five o'clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers
go home from work.
"When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do
is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost
control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it's the first
function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even
doing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we
can control that information no matter where it is -- on our hard disks or even
inside the programmers' heads. Now, I can't say more because I got competition
to worry about. But it is my fervent hope that in five or ten years, this kind
of thing won't even be an issue.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small.
He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking
could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain
possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers.
Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea.
"Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more
powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he
started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small
church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime
preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the
Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over
the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens
of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began
converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand.
L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the
creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed
Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that
they use his name. It's a postrational religion.
"He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the
cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult
prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major
functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and
vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles.
"Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let
religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of
drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood
serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they don't want to talk to a
solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's packing a couple of swords.
Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just
gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a
giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.
Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know that it takes a
lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can appreciate the fine details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an expensive hand-tailored gray wool
suit.
You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere (or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street. Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can
build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build
buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as
vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of
three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can
go to hunt and kill each other.
The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it's just
a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- none
of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of
software, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network.
When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings
and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve
of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations -- the user
interfaces -- of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineered
by major corporations. In order to place these things on the Street, they have
had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy
frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors,
the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street
all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for
developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the Street. it
is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years ago, when the
Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his buddies pooled their
money and bought one of the first development licenses, created a little
neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little patchwork of light
amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a necklace of
streetlights around a black ball in space.
Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has. By
getting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole business.
Some of them even got very rich off of it.
That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by-
30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished
glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine,
this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the
computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface.
Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in
several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in
Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back
from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when
he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as
they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And
once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so
powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling
through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made
him feel naked and weak and brave.
The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer,
which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where
Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue
one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to
burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals,
lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors
of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that
Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the
computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of
electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and
forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron
beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The
resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be
made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it
can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a
resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive,
and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D
pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack.
So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that
his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the
lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of
time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Stephenson’s “metaverse” is a dense virtual community with its own laws.
”
”
James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
“
the Communist Party of China (CCP) began its biggest-ever crackdown of its domestic gaming industry. Among several new policies was a prohibition on minors playing video games Monday through Thursday that also limited their play from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights (in other words, it was impossible for a minor to play a video game for more than three hours per week). In addition, companies such as Tencent would use their facial recognition software and a player’s national ID to periodically ensure that these rules were not being skirted by a gamer borrowing an older user’s device.
”
”
Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
In the metaverse, the truth will be the existential challenge.
”
”
Sayem Sarkar
“
Homebuilding, for one, will benefit from AI in terms of design and marketing, but an actual physical home won’t go away anytime soon. Even if we start spending a lot of time in the metaverse, as long as we have physical bodies, we’re still going to sleep in a real bed, brush our teeth over a real sink, take a real shower, and use a real toilet. At the moment, AI appears to be more of a friend than foe to the homebuilding industry, along with staple sectors of the economy, such as clothing and food.
”
”
Brad Jacobs (How to Make a Few Billion Dollars)
“
In time, it will become clear that many of the leaders in the Metaverse weren’t even mentioned in this book—perhaps because they were too small to be of note, or unknown to its author. Some hadn’t even been created let alone thought up. An entire generation of Roblox-natives is only now on the cusp on adulthood, and it’s likely they, not Silicon Valley, will create the first great game that has thousands (or tens of thousands) of concurrent users, or blockchain-based IVWP. Whether motivated by Web3 principles, emboldened by the trillion-dollar opportunity the Metaverse provides, or simply unable to sell to GAFAM due to regulatory scrutiny, these founders will ultimately displace at least one member of the GAFAM five.
”
”
Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash popularized the term metaverse, envisioning a collective virtual and shared space. David Gelernter wrote Mirror Worlds, foreseeing software that would revolutionize computing and transform society by replacing reality with a digital imitation.
”
”
Satya Nadella (Hit Refresh)
“
The fact that the word “metaverse” was drawn from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson—a 1992 sci-fi novel in which people don virtual reality headsets to escape a societal collapse so profound that corporate franchises are the main source of authority—was no deterrent.
”
”
Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
“
This may be surprising if you regularly use Chrome on your iPhone or iPad. However, these are really just the “iOS system version of [Apple’s Safari] WebKit wrapped around Google’s own browser UI,” according to the Apple expert John Gruber, and the iOS Chrome app [cannot] “use the Chrome rendering or JavaScript engines.” What we think of as Chrome on iOS is simply a variant of Apple’s own Safari browser, but one that logs into Google’s account system.§10
”
”
Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
It is common today to hear techno-futurists and billionaire trans-humanists muse about the potential of technology to help mankind—or least the extremely wealthy—slip the surly bonds of aging and even death by “uploading” memories to a digital cloud and using AI to recreate consciousness. Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, who sees “the vector of our civilization” in terms of a choice between “anarcho-primitivism or optimalism/transhumanism,” has talked about “life extension” technologies that could make possible what he calls “genomic reincarnation,” in which a person’s sequenced DNA could in theory be synthesized and printed out into a new body, “like a clone, but it is you in a different time.”23 And of course there are the billionaire enthusiasts like Elon Musk who see a future in which technology is fused with human biology in some kind of brain-machine interface, or Mark Zuckerberg, who dreams of replacing physical society with a virtual “Metaverse.
”
”
John Daniel Davidson (Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come)
“
Metaverse is a social virtual reality platform powered by blockchain. It is based on the premise of decentralizing all human digital data so that each person can own and create their virtual world to live in while interacting with others. Metaverse ETP is a token used to engage in this virtual world and the real world.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
The Metaverse is the concept of a persistent, online 3D universe that combines several virtual spaces.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
The Metaverse doesn’t exist yet, but some platforms contain elements that come very close to this concept. Video games currently offer the closest Metaverse experience to this idea. Developers have pushed their limits concerning what a game can be by organizing in-game events and creating virtual economies within them.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
What Is Metaverse’s Mission? Metaverse’s blockchain-based virtual reality platform seeks to revolutionize the gaming industry by allowing players the ability to create and develop their projects, guilds, and games. The platform utilizes blockchain technology to connect gamers and create new virtual realities. It also allows gamers to participate in these games with other players globally.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
Using virtual reality dates back as far as 1947 with the work of Morton Hailing. He developed the Sensorama Simulator, which produced an immersive experience featuring a goggle-based interface, stereoscopic 3D and stereo sound.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
Augmented Reality (AR) is a mixture of the real and virtual worlds. Not to be confused with Virtual Reality, AR has no real-life counterparts, such as the Oculus Rift or Vive. AR overlays virtual objects on live video, sound, or graphics.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
Augmented Reality (AR) is a mixture of the real and virtual worlds. Not to be confused with Virtual Reality, AR has no real-life counterparts, such as the Oculus Rift or Vive. AR overlays virtual objects on live video, sound, or graphics. For example, you could overlay a virtual T-Rex on top of a video game screen to make it seem like the creature is in the room with you.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
Augmented Reality (AR) is different from Virtual Reality (VR) in that users typically interact with real-world objects and environments while wearing AR headsets or AR-enabled glasses. With VR, users don’t see real-world objects and environments instead of interacting with a virtual environment presented on a screen.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
Virtual Reality is also an important facet of this technology as well. For example, suppose you are trying to find some new restaurants on Yelp or OpenTable for a restaurant recommendation. In that case, you can search for a specific dish on the menu, and a graphical representation of the food will appear in front of your face. If you have another app such as Snapchat or Instagram open, that app can bring up a 360-degree picture of the restaurant in front of you.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
NFTs are a key component in the Metaverse project. They combine to create a system for generating, distributing, and digital trading assets.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
The metaverse can bring many life changing applications into our daily lives that will benefit us. However, our digital lives becoming more important than our physical lives is not the sort of life any of us should want to lead.
”
”
Arian Adeli Koodehi
“
Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that creates the illusion of real-life conditions. It does this using computer games, movies, and other programs where fluid images are displayed on a video screen or headset. A virtual reality video game or movie can provide fully immersive experiences for users with full interactivity and 360-degree views. Virtual Reality headsets are used to create the illusion of a virtual environment by using a computer known as an HMD (head-mounted display) that connects to a computer and/or gaming console.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
The field of digital collectibles is rapidly growing, and it could potentially benefit from the high demand for a new type of asset—NFTs. NFTs are not necessarily bad, but their growth should be well-analyzed and reconsidered.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
The word “non-fungible” refers to uniqueness; every token is not equal to any other token of its kind. Although these tokens are used in a variety of ways, they all have one thing in common: they link the physical world and the digital world by transforming information about a physical object into an electronic asset. In other words, NFTs are digitized information of physical objects.
”
”
Manuel Robins (The Metaverse: Unpacking The Hype: Understand What The Future Is Going To Look Like. Discover How To Invest In Cryptocurrency, NFT & Blockchain Gaming. ... Guide To The New Digital Revolution)
“
The distorted reality created by humans on earth has misled so many of us for God created the earth as reality and we created virtual reality. A world within a world that distorts the truth, misleads people and corrupts souls.
”
”
Aiyaz Uddin
“
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic sound track. So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Apple’s mobile ecosystem has 60% of smartphone share in the United States and 80% share among teenagers, and over two-thirds of mobile gaming revenues globally.
”
”
Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
“
It is very often, that after a great deal of effort expended in our investigative endeavours, we find no plausibility or connection at all. That is a perfectly acceptable outcome in our line of work.
”
”
Tz'en Long Goh (VR reality)
“
the problem of conservatism: it conserves nothing, it defends nothing, it stops nothing, and it is not a solution.228
”
”
Douglas Haugen (In Pursuit of the Metaverse: Millennial Dreams, Political Religion, and Techno-Utopia)
“
Andrew Willard Jones writes, Within the metanarrative of progress that underwrites liberalism, Christians are cast as the losing side and, I am afraid, there is no amount of maneuvering that can change that. In fact, our role in the drama is precisely this maneuvering. We are cast to fight a rearguard action: we steadily lose ground, but nonetheless put up a stubborn resistance. In the liberal march to freedom, we are the ever-retreating but completely necessary tyrants, the enemies of human rights against whom the freedom fighters heroically contend, the defenders of dogma against whom the courageous scientists struggle, the stuffy prudes against whom the free-spirited youth must battle. We have all seen multiple versions of this movie—in fact, this is the plot of nearly all our cultural productions. If this is indeed our role in the cultural narrative, new tactics will not save us. Devising new ways to “turn back the clock” or new arguments within the dominant discourse of freedom and rights, of religion and the State, is simply to continue to play the part of the loser in a liberal script acted out on a set constructed of modern concepts. To view ourselves as the retreating good guys is simply our role.
”
”
Douglas Haugen (In Pursuit of the Metaverse: Millennial Dreams, Political Religion, and Techno-Utopia)
“
We must develop a new narrative that supports an alternate set of categories that do not cast Christianity as a merely religious actor, but rather presupposes Christianity as the stage on which history itself is performed. We must come to understand our world through a larger narrative within which the liberal epoch is a diverting subplot. If we do so, Christians can come to view ourselves not as an embattled minority on the losing side of history, but as protagonists in a missionary insurgency.
”
”
Douglas Haugen (In Pursuit of the Metaverse: Millennial Dreams, Political Religion, and Techno-Utopia)
“
Real #AI isn't about giving the right answers to our questions, its about answering the questions we don't know to ask.
”
”
Tom Golway
“
Mussolini was eager to paint his administration as a technocratic ally of Fiat, Olivetti, and the other Italian business powers. He stated, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
”
”
Jonathan Taplin (The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto)
“
Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overlord, founding father of the Metaverse protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just suffered a system crash. He’s been thrown out of his own bar by his own daemons.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
you live in a shithole, there's always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
I didn't think you talked to people in the Metaverse."
"I do if I want to get through to someone in a hurry," she says. "And I'll
always talk to you."
"Why me?"
"You know. Because of us. Remember? Because of our relationship -- when I was
writing this thing -- you and I are the only two people who can ever have an
honest conversation in the Metaverse."
"You're just the same mystical crank you always were," he says, smiling so as to
make this a charming statement.
"You can't imagine how mystical and cranky l am now, Hiro."
"How mystical and cranky are you?
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too."
"Deep structures?"
"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned
binary code?"
"Sure."
"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow
new connections as you use them -- the axons split and push their way between
the dividing glial cells -- your bioware selfmodifies -- the software becomes
part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable -- all hackers are vulnerable --
to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
"What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"
"Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap lately?
Like, in the Metaverse?"
Interesting. "Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this Brandy
came up to my friend --"
"A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is
synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the
Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill
health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
It is better to be surprised by a simulation, rather than blindsided by reality
”
”
Stuart Candy
“
Smart Contracts What Is A Smart Contract? Complete Guide To Tech And Code That Is About To Transform The Economy-Blockchain, Web3.0, DApps, DAOs, DEFI, Crypto, IoTs, FinTech, Digital Assets Trading By Patrick Ejeke You also might be interested in my BEST SELLER, “METAVERSE” Click the links below… Grab A Free PDF Version OR Get it on Amazon © Text Copyright Patrick Ejeke 2022 - All Rights Reserved
All rights reserved. No part of this guide may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the
”
”
Patrick Ejeke (Smart Contracts: What Is A Smart Contract? Complete Guide To Tech And Code That Is About To Transform The Economy-Blockchain, Web3.0, DApps, DAOs, DEFI, Crypto, IoTs, FinTech, Digital Assets Trading)
“
In advanced economies, the average citizen is often resistant to the concept of alternative worlds because they value the in-person relationships, locations, and experiences already available to them, labeled as “reality privilege” by some observers.
”
”
Terry Winters (The Metaverse: Buying Virtual Land, NFTs, VR, Web3 & Preparing For the Next Big Thing! (Web 3: The Metaverse and DAOs))
“
I confini tra materiale e immateriale sono un retaggio del XX secolo. La realtà, ormai, è mista.
Perché la gente paga migliaia se non milioni di euro per comprare un jpg di una scimmietta? Perché la distinzione tra reale e irreale è un consenso comune.
Ricordi quel quadro di Magritte? Questa non è una pipa. Puoi provare il contrario? No!
E da prima di Aristotele che ci facciamo domande su cosa sia la realtà. Io sono un costruttivista in questo senso.
La realtà è un costrutto sociale, non è oggettiva. E se socialmente raggiungiamo il consenso che il Pikachu che vedo dentro Pokémon GO è reale, allora lo è.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
Nel travel, perlopiù il metaverso è strumentale e non autoreferenziale, come nel gaming.
È solo uno strumento.
Non prenoto su Booking ma prenoto su Decentraland. Che differenza fa? Comunque in hotel devo andarci. Cambia solo il mezzo.
È come dire che da quando siamo passati da prenotare dal telefono alla email abbiamo dematerializzato il travel.
È puro nonsense.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
La nozione centrale di "viaggio" potrebbe trasformarsi in modi che possiamo solo intravedere oggi.
Pensa a come è cambiata negli anni la connotazione della parola “amico”. Fino al 2004, un amico era una persona fisica con cui uscivi nella vita reale. Dopo Facebook, il termine è diventato anche sinonimo di “connessione virtuale”, qualcuno con cui potresti non aver mai scambiato una singola parola.
Quindi chissà cosa significherà viaggiare tra 10-15 anni. Possiamo solo speculare, ma, almeno in teoria, le applicazioni del metaverso sono illimitate: vuoi visitare Atlantide, l’Antica Roma o Marte? Puoi viaggiare nel tempo e nello spazio e sperimentare qualcosa che non esiste nel mondo fisico.
Il travel ha un impatto catastrofico sull'ambiente. Il nostro settore, se continua così, farà alzare la temperatura di un grado e mezzo nel giro di 25 anni. Non lo dico io, ma i dati. Solo le emissioni di carbonio causate del volo civile sono cresciute del 75% dagli anni '90.
Trovare alternative praticabili a un settore talmente dannoso per l'ambiente come il nostro non è solo auspicabile.
È, a questo punto, obbligatorio.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
Idee per innovare un sistema turistico e dell’ospitalità così tradizionale come quello italiano? Nessuna. Non c’è speranza. Ora abbiamo pure resuscitato Italia.it. Siamo al nonsense! Venti milioni di euro buttati nel 2007 per un progetto che era già obsoleto 15 anni fa. Se li avessero investiti in bitcoin ora avremmo nove trilioni di euro da destinare al settore. Il ministero del turismo crede davvero che una tecnologia creata nel ‘91 abbia ancora una qualche rilevanza nel 2022? Se si, ve la mostro in prospettiva: quando veniva pubblicato il primo sito web, Riccardo Cocciante vinceva Sanremo con “Se stiamo insieme.” Ecco, puntare su Italia.it oggi è l’equivalente di mandare Cocciante all’Eurovision al posto dei Maneskin.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
Non credo si debba lavorare con le istituzioni, ma sabotarle. La mia visione è cryptoanarchica. Non mi fido delle istituzioni, ma mi fido del consenso crittografico e della sua trasparenza. Quando realizzeranno il loro pieno potenziale, le DAO porteranno a un processo di decentralizzazione che ridurrà/annullerà il potere delle istituzioni. “Proprio come la tecnologia di stampa ha alterato e ridotto il potere delle corporazioni medievali e la struttura del potere sociale,” scriveva Timothy May già nell’88, “così i metodi crittografici altereranno la natura delle corporazioni e dell’interferenza del governo.”Bisognerebbe creare una specie di “Progetto Mayhem” in stile Fight Club.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
Dopo un quarto di secolo passato nel settore dell’Hospitality e del Travel, io non punto a diventare Ministro del Turismo. Punto a diventarne il Tyler Durden…
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
Tutta la tecnologia che semplifica o migliora la vita degli esseri umani viene adottata dalla massa, non vi sono eccezioni. Che si tratti del fuoco, della ruota, dell’iPhone o del metaverso.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
Ci sono centinaia di aziende metaversiche che operano oggi. Senza standard condivisi e comuni, possono diventare rapidamente silos chiusi, limitando la navigazione degli utenti a un’unica piattaforma invece di consentirgli di navigare liberamente attraverso più mondi virtuali. Potresti avere un hotel in Spatial, ma lo stesso hotel potrebbe non essere accessibile su Horizon, per esempio. Ecco perché non mi piace parlare di Metaverso, perché non esiste una cosa del genere. Ci sono più Metaversi. Se e come interagiranno tra loro, in questa fase, non è altro che speculazione e la mancanza di interoperabilità crea sicuramente delle sfide complesse per l’adozione di massa del Metaverso.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
L’idea originaria di un metaverso unico e interoperabile, una specie di internet immersivo, sebbene suggestiva, è difficilmente attuabile. Più facile è prevedere che avremo 5/6 metaversi mainstream così come oggi abbiamo 5/6 social network mainstream. Ecco se dovessi fare un paragone i metaversi sono più simili ai social che al world wide web. Ce ne sarà uno per lavorare, uno per incontrare gli amici, uno per gli incontri galanti e così via. La vera sfida oggi è capire quali e quante di queste startup metaversiche sopravviverà alla prima bolla.
”
”
Simone Puorto
“
I confini tra reale e virtuale sono un retaggio del XX secolo. La realtà, ormai, è mista.
”
”
Simone Puorto
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Il concetto di innovazione è una leggenda metropolitana, come gli alligatori nelle fogne di New York o le figurine all’LSD. Non esiste l’innovazione. Esiste l’evoluzione. È semplice techno-Darwinismo: se un imprenditore pensa di poter rimanere nel business per i prossimi vent’anni con carta e penna o è un tecnoluddista o è imprenditorialmente cieco.
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Simone Puorto
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The metaverse creates a new reality that blurs the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds. The metaverse will come when we no longer need AR & VR glasses, but just XR devices (glasses, contact lenses, implants, etc.)
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The purchase in the metaverses is instantaneous. You don't need to open an app or touch your smartphone. Goods / services can be purchased and prices compared through a single account linked to a single wallet.
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VR headsets can collect more and richer data about users than traditional screens. Companies, therefore, can better profile and provide personalized advertising.
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Most headsets can track hand movements, the space around you and the movements. They collect data on what surrounds you, the objects in the house, the people around you, etc. 20 minutes in VR collect 2 million data.
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On Booking.com or Amazon, we can add a room or an item to our cart and buy it later, while the metaverse creates a sense of urgency and scarcity.
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Metaverse Hype? Not sure. From the ashes of the dot-com bubble, the global e-commerce market has risen, worth five trillion dollars (as of 2021).
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Mio figlio può giocare a Roblox con un amico che si trova in Australia e, il giorno dopo, tirare due tiri al pallone con il vicino di casa. Per lui, sul piano della realtà, le due esperienze hanno lo stesso valore
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Simone Puorto