Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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.

lol cmon

Mark Zuckerberg is really naming all his kids with Roman imperial names. Respect 🫡 https://t.co/OtkWp9rPV9

— Bryan Cheong (@bryancsk) March 24, 2023

things are certain to end well for the imperial line, as they always do

also the first hapsburg was called RADBOT ffs

Literally the conclusion of PALO ALTO is Silicon Valley tech firms becoming prime military contractors after avoiding doing that for 100 years https://t.co/cvFJSxqaDf

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) March 27, 2023

Well, after they've show real promise as grifters they're invited to play in the big leagues of scamming citizens out of their money: defense contracting.

bout how much i keep in my checking too

Gruenberg: The ten largest deposit accounts at SVB held $13.3 billion in the aggregate.

— Nick Timiraos (@NickTimiraos) March 27, 2023

lol

NEW: An internal model at Silicon Valley Bank warned that higher interest rates could have a crushing impact on its finances. So executives changed it: https://t.co/Ru5ZOn6wxF with @tcfrankel @josephmenn

— Daniel Gilbert (@ByDanielGilbert) April 2, 2023

+ Theoretically, if publicly hanging say, 5 fentanyl dealers led to saving the lives of hundreds, is it morally reasonable?
+ Why would most San Francisco residents view my question above as horrifying and immoral?
+ What do other countries do with their fentanyl dealers?

— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) April 9, 2023

Whole thread is nuts obviously but the application of the logic of effective altruism is wild

Timothy @_timothyjm
21m Replying to @michelletandler
Theoretically, if publicly hanging say, 5 venture capitalists led to saving the lives of hundreds, is it morally reasonable?

Timothy gets it.

ha nice

Theoretically, if my granny had two wheels, would she be a bicycle?

xxp hahahahaha yes more of that please

Just drumming up angel investors for her lnchmb startup

someone plz explain ichellemay andlertay’s grift to me… idk how she still has oxygen

People who have always been disappointed the trolley problem is only theoretical.

incredible

Hey Michelle, this you? https://t.co/d6jIJcw6Wa pic.twitter.com/vTXVeKR9Ft

— Czarina (@fishontherun2) April 10, 2023

of course