Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

would be considered a little credulous by modern standards, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine is a great slice of cultural/technical history.

Fun chat https://theinsurgents.substack.com/p/ep-159-vcs-to-the-rescue-ft-ed-zitron

holy shit @ that barney frank interview, bro is snappish

BF went on the interview circuit immediately and had the same tone in everything I read.

The guy was on the board of the bank, he comes from the deepest of insiders, and then gets defensive when asked why he didn’t perform his job as expected.

I like his attempt to make a case that regulators don't have to wait until banks have crossed the legal boundary to be advised to increase their liquidity, whatever

sure, that sounds nice. I'm sure the government has the resources to do that, and that banks would totally listen when there's no threat of legal action

c'mon, Barney

VCs are geniuses, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise pic.twitter.com/gAYEvyjrem

— @shitmgmts✧✧✧@ms✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧ (@ShitMgmtSays) March 17, 2023

beautiful

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Frg4wsWXgAM-Jax?format=jpg&name=medium

love to rat out my bank that didn’t comply with banking law

chase apparently is highly algorithmic these days, though. some local lottery winner tried depositing her winnings and not only would they not accept it, they notified her they were closing the account. local bank personnel couldn’t override it!

they should be praising chase for loving the algorithm imo

The only metaverse story that’s worth it about now.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html

thats a great essay

good stuff

the story, not the metaverse

I was binging on The Cutting Room Floor yesterday - it's a fascinating website about cut content from video games - specifically Jet Set Radio, or Jet Grind Radio as it was for the Dreamcast:
https://tcrf.net/Jet_Grind_Radio_(Dreamcast)

That led me to read about Swatch Internet Time, because the game originally had advertising billboards for Swatch, although they were dummied out. Swatch Internet Time was a decimal time system that appeared in a handful of Swatches circa the turn of the millennium two-two. Basically a gimmick. It resulted in a hilarious and also sad incident whereby Swatch paid for a satellite to be thrown out of Mir, but after protests from the amateur radio community the satellite was deactivated, but still thrown out of Mir, so the astronauts basically chucked a non-functional hunk of metal out of their space station for no reason:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_99

"Sputnik 99 was designed to periodically broadcast technical time-synchronization information and trademarked advertising content over amateur radio bands promoting the Swatch Group, the parent company to the popular Swiss watch retailer. Worldwide, this was considered as a flagrant misuse of amateur radio frequencies. Due to a huge backlash by amateur radio enthusiasts and amateur radio organisations over the proposed use of the AR frequencies for advertising purposes, the decision was made to disable the broadcast transmitter prior to its deployment from Mir. This was accomplished by removing the batteries of the broadcast unit from the satellite prior to its release, thus Sputnik 99 immediately upon deployment became just another piece of orbiting space junk."

Is there are a more potent metaphor for the dot.com boom? I can't think of one. The article also led me to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation.1

"Nation.1 was a project to create what was described as an "online country" – a conceptual country based on the Internet. It was to be owned, populated and governed by the children of the world. Its borders were defined by the age of its citizens, as opposed to geography or ethnicity. The central goal of Nation.1 was to empower young people with a voice and representation in world affairs."

It was devised by Nicholas Negroponte, a self-publicist who seems to have a 100% failure rate at everything except enriching himself and his friends. The entire project seems to have amounted to a bunch of press conferences, press releases, and magazine articles from a clique of people who presumably all supported each other. It's very hard to google and the website seems to have gone defunct in late 2000:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000925070418/http://www.2b1.org/nation1/

What was the real goal? I have no idea. Something about the lofty language - "already, Nation1 is a truly global project (with) taskforce members in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Canada, Malaysia, and France" - combined with the total lack of focus, lack of any kind of coherent idea, and the fact that grown adults devised it, made me wonder what was wrong with the world back then. Presumably the long-term plan was to use it to gather advertising data from kids, or use it as a tax haven or something. It put me me in mind of New Earth Time and the Clock of the Long Now, from around the same period.

Here are two of the funniest bits from that NY Mag article on the Metaverse (thanks for sharing!):

"It’s the first time I’ve witnessed any straight-up racism since I came to America. How strange to see it here from a bunch of Playmobil rednecks in a make-believe comedy club."

"It’s kind of like Chuang Tzu and the butterfly, is what VR Bangers is saying here. Is it a dream? Is it reality? We don’t know."

xp banging post!

Amazing work Ashley.

Nation.1 sounds like the evil version Cyberia - it was an 'online micronation' that I gathered was a pretty even split between teenage politics nerds and adult libertarians who thought it could be Sealand 2.

https://micronations.wiki/wiki/Virtual_Commonwealth_of_Cyberia

https://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/lobby/2673/history.html

Yeah great post Ashley. I'm reminded of Project Xanadu, a supposedly superior version of the web - 'the world wide web is what we were trying to prevent' was one of their mottos - by Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext. It was stuck in development hell for literally decades. When they finally released a demo/prototype in 2014, over 30 years after they started actual development work and over 50 since the idea first originated - and obviously long after the web rendered it irrelevant - I had a look and it took minutes to load, was agonisingly slow to use and quite bewildering. You can see it in action (working faster than I remember) in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIOuRuvQ10c . It's not clear if they're still fighting on, the link to the viewer on their project page https://www.xanadu.net/ is broken - though you can find instructions on how to use it including gems like "Click on blue to follow a xanalink-- but it looks wrong at first."

the beautiful bands of color remind one of yarn on a cork board

Maybe worth noting that Ted Nelson has uploaded a huge number of his (mostly self-published) books to the Internet Archive – the weird details of LITERARY MACHINES almost read as science fiction?

lmao

While some people have experienced harassment in Horizon Worlds, the major problem is kids. Under-13’s aren’t supposed to use the headset, but the app is overrun with children occupying their parents’ avatars, meaning that conversations are constantly interrupted by (1) apparent adults asking you in high-pitched voices if you like poop and (2) polls to decide if the poop person should be removed.

children love screaming about poop

“He said he wanted to eat my penis,” Nutsacksandwich says to me in a high-pitched child’s voice. This is my first conversation in the metaverse.

A panel appears in front of me. Nutsacksandwich has been reported, it says, with a picture of Nutsacksandwich’s avatar. Do you want Nutsacksandwich to be ejected? I give the question some thought. I decide to let Nutsacksandwich stay: I like his energy.

Maybe worth noting that Ted Nelson has uploaded a huge number of his (mostly self-published) books to the Internet Archive – the weird details of LITERARY MACHINES almost read as science fiction?

cheers, i'll definitely have a look at that.

frogbs is that one of your kids?!?

nah it was actually just me

lol

Far be it from me to be Captain Stick Up for Zuck but it does seem like the writer of that article was someone kind of temperamentally allergic to online interaction -- he talks about how his attempts to socialize over Zoom were fundamentally impoverished and empty and depressing, which was definitely not my experience! In other words, I think the question about Metaverse is "does it work well for people who already enjoy socializing online" and honestly I would guess, also no, but that's the article I need to read.

the Clock of the Long Now, from around the same period.

this is still a thing and they have a charitable foundation

yeah that stuck out as a glaring error to me as well

the main difference with zoom is that you're socializing with people you know or at least have some affinity with, and with the exception of the metaverse "comedy club" and some other built spaces, it's just randos wandering around

yeah otherwise it's chatroulette. i don't think anybody misses chatroulette

Lots of people jacked off to Chatroulette they probably miss it

it kind of makes me think of Club Penguin. except there was actually stuff to do there

there were some cuet cat memes about chatroulette

xp Longplayer is still running, too.

I guess one thing I'll mention is that I've been online since like 1998 and back then I remember it seemed like everyone who was into social hangout-type places was either a teenager or a weird adult. that was true on most message boards too. on SomethingAwful if you were over like 23 people would mock you relentlessly. hell go look at some old ILX posts. but now these places have become a lot more open to everybody, for better or worse. I guess there's a chance the Metaverse is something like that. Who knows if Nutsacksandwich is just gonna grow out of it some day or if this is just the way the world is to his generation.

like my 8 year old son figured out that if you say "Hey Siri" into my watch you can ask it any question you want, which is obviously NOT something you could do when I was 8, and if you could it probably would have changed a lot about my life. you know, having all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips and all that. AI seems primed to do that sort of thing too, I feel like it'll fundamentally alter the way kids think about stuff which they'll keep as adults. I still think VR headsets and the Metaverse are fucking stupid, but I thought (and still do think) the same about crypto currency, and that kinda took off as well

The Metaverse pretty much confirms what we've all known for years, which is that one of the biggest social media companies in the world succeeded despite its founders complete lack of grasp of how and why humans interact. (I mean, I guess the original idea for Facebook was all built around a "Hot or not" concept, which even he could understand.)

You'd think that what he and the company have learned from Facebook would be that people cluster with people they know and/or have shared interests with. They don't just wander around having random small talk with people they don't know or share anything with. Also, the idea that you have to be online at the same time as someone else to interact is limiting. Also, of course, that you have to wear a dang bucket on your head and mark out personal safe space so you don't hurt yourself — that completely takes it away from the procrastinating/"Yes boss I'm working hard at my station" use people make of FB, Twitter, etc. People spend a lot of time on social media, but it's in quick bits and bursts between other things, they're not setting aside an hour a night to be on Facebook or whatever. (I mean, they may be, but that's not what most of the usage is.)

"wander around having random small talk with people they don't know or share anything with"

New board description.

a funny thing about facebook going meta is that it was to some extent in response to the fact that wall street wants constant rapid growth and facebook was starting to look like a slow mature company so they just threw some techno bullshit at the wall to goose the stock price but then the idea was so bad that no believed it lmao a tech vision has to be genuinely awful for wall street to not get stoked on it at all

they had the requisite media rollout many will this change the world think pieces and just nothing no one wanted it

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FrquSP4aEAE3xIK?format=jpg&name=medium

where do I cop that t-shirt though

a funny thing about facebook going meta is that it was to some extent in response to the fact that wall street wants constant rapid growth and facebook was starting to look like a slow mature company so they just threw some techno bullshit at the wall to goose the stock price but then the idea was so bad that no believed it lmao a tech vision has to be genuinely awful for wall street to not get stoked on it at all

― lag∞n, Monday, March 20, 2023 2:34 PM (two hours ago)

yeah it's like a very, very basic law of finance/economics that growth is not infinite. your product can be growing at 50%, 100%, 200% or w/e but sooner or later you will saturate the market, growth will begin to slow down, will settle down to a steady 3-5% a year like an IBM or proctor and gamble. facebook basically is over the hump, reached peak user growth, they've got what 2 billion users or w/e? that's almost 1/3 of the global population, pretty good, even though all your younger users are fleeing the platform!

apple's facing the same situation with their iphones - they've probably reached peak iphones, sales right now probably represent replacement more than growth, they are needing to target lower, more price sensitive markets like india since the good getting's been got.

i think the other big factor in zuck's decision is apple pulling the rug out from under them with their privacy settings that took away all of fb's ad-tracking abilities, it really hammered fb at the time. zuck realized that his entire empire was subject to tim apple, because zuck didn't control the hardware that his product was being consumed on. meta is a reaction to that - i can certainly see the beautiful, robot logic of throwing $36 billion at meta from zuck's perspective - a hardware/software stack that he controls from top to bottom, once he gets it going, tim apple will never be able to take it away from him. problem is nobody wants a second life that costs $2000 to play. also you don't will a market into existence. if the original iphone had not been a success i am sure steve jobs would have let it go the way of the newton. you don't throw good money after bad. but it's OK, because facebook the website itself is still a money printer even tho tiktok is hoovering its young users, i applaud the effort because it's sort of like corporate communism, full maximum employment for anybody who has "VR" on their resume. it almost resembles us defense department spending in a way, just billions and billions thrown after perverted objects that are utterly useless, meta a modern day fitzcarraldo.

There was an arcade here that had similar VR setups to that + the Mechwarrior game where you sat in a cockpit that moved on hydraulics. So expensive I only got to go once but it really did feel like the Future of Gaming in 1994... then the next summer I got a job watching over a play by hour LAN that had twelve spaces networked for Duke Nukem, Doom and Command & Conquer and $50 a match Mechwarrior did not seem quite so likely.

tech people who claim they are into "atoms not bits" are the absolute worst

Today is the 50th anniversary of one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history: the ban on supersonic flight over the US.

It's why we're not flying NY-LA in 90 minutes.

Congress can end the ban this year. Make America boom again.https://t.co/BrpbCBCXfT

— Eli Dourado (@elidourado) March 23, 2023

the funny thing is theres just no demand for supersonic commercial flights its too expensive

lmao

I’m struck by the fact that American economic growth went off the rails in 1973, the same year the overland ban on supersonic flight came into force. The speed limit cannot be responsible for the entirety of the Great Stagnation, of course. The cumulative amount of missing growth is comparable to the entire economy, not to the size of the aviation industry. The numbers don’t add up.

Yet, the ban is not unrelated to economic stagnation. To borrow a term from Ross Douthat

I used to hear sonic booms fairly often growing up, because we lived near a Navy base where supersonic jets would sometimes fly.