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Comment by hvidgaard | Hacker News Reader

Your comment was going pretty well until you wrote

> Even crazier, most of them approvingly point to the execrable "Ready Player One" as an example of a vision to deliver on. No, I'm sorry, a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future.

Is pretty much as far from what actually happens in the book as you can get and completely misses the point on why it's used as a reference point to this metaverse stuff.

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The book is even worse than the movie, IMHO. Shamelessly plugging my own article [1] But the movie had the potential to be a cultural game-changer in the same way as Hackers and surely The Matrix had to the adoption and "coolness" of the Internet at the turn of the century.

[1]https://medium.com/@jsemrau/hackers-vs-ready-player-one-b6ad...

> I was one of these young software engineers that saw Hackers back in 1995 and was totally blown away by the potential shown of network technology.

> … Hackers (1995), which after more than 20 years, holds still up amazingly well.

I’m not sure you’re demonstrating any appreciable sense of objectivity here.

Hackers was an absolute joke of a movie; an exaggerated snapshot of ridiculous, misinformed 1990s pop culture thinking on technology.

Ready Player One is pop culture fan service, played out amidst a dystopian corporate future. It’s not even really trying to discuss technology at all.

Hackers was a joke but it has an enduring cultural cachet with IT nerds at least. I hear "hack the planet" and references to "the gibson" all the time still. I don't think I've ever heard a single IRL reference to anything in RPO

There were plenty of references, but they were to the same '80s pop culture that the book worships. Really, all of the VR tech was just a plot device to create a magic world where that Gen X nostalgia never ends.

Ready Player One tells us about technology about as much as Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 does.

Huh? People refer to corny one liners from Arnie movies too, that doesn't mean they had a philosophical impact on the way those people think about guns, or whatever.

Hackers is a hilarious and fun over the top movie but I don't think it changed the way anyone thinks about technology.

I didn't say it did.

Hacker surely was exaggerated, ridiculous, and misinformed but it made tech "cool".

I believe that Metaverse tech, which is currently at the same stage is isolationistic and enjoyed by a fringe of users. Same as the Internet was seen in the early '90s.

The Matrix, yes. Absolutely iconic even to this day. Hackers was known by no-one I knew. Sneakers was a much better movie and still relatable.

It does completely and utterly miss the metaverse reference point. So wrapped up in regurgitating its reddit style take that it overlooks that the virtual world is all the current metaverse building crowd is taking from it. The characters and even the nostalgia are irrelevant for that purpose.

Did we read a different book? GP's description is how I remember it, too.

nah that’s basically it

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