Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change | Hacker News Reader

Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change

axios.com

52 pointsmark-ruwt65 comments

If Mark Zuckerberg trademarks "Metaverse", William Gibson should trademark "Mark Zuckerberg".

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/virtual-reality-and-the-pionee...

>Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace: 25 years before Oculus, John Perry Barlow described what it was like “being in nothingness.”

>[...] And they were ready to make a product. They’d made a promo video starring Timothy Leary. Gullichsen had even registered William Gibson’s term “cyberspace” as an Autodesk trademark, prompting an irritated Gibson to apply for trademark registration of the term “Eric Gullichsen.” By June, they had an implementation which, though clearly the Kitty Hawk version of the technology, endowed people with an instantaneous vision of the Concorde level. [...]

moviesCyberspace: The New Explorers: Autodesk Demo Tape on Cyberspace with Timothy Leary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FC4UQDm_mQ

What an odd interview. I got the sense that the interviewer was really looking for Stephenson to lash out with some juicy rant about how awful Facebook is, but he is so mild about the whole thing.

Yeah, it was like a shaggy dog interview.

Here come the punchline!

...

"the book has been out for 30 years and anyone can spin ideas out of it."

It was a plug for the new Stephenson book.

I think if you saw my full questions (had to edit for brevity) you would have gotten a different sense. I really was curious to know what he thought, given no one else had talked to him, which I found strange, but glad I did!

Why did you need to edit an amazing writer for brevity? Can you make the original interview available somewhere? It would be interesting

no I edited my questions, not his answers at all. made that clear in the piece. sure, i'll see where I can post it somehow

Ah, sorry, then it’s all fine, I wasn’t attentive enough :)

Can anybody recommend authors like Stephenson? He is my favourite author by far and it's going to be a sad day when I exhaust his works.

Pat Cadigan's Synners.

William Gibson, Cixin Liu

Nobody's really like Stephenson, but to the extent that he is something of a cyberpunk author, I'd say you might like some of these folks if you're not familiar with them yet:

1. William Gibson - Neuromancer, 'nuff said. The rest of the Sprawl Trilogy is great as well.

2. Rudy Rucker - I haven't read any of his stuff yet, but he is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.

3. Richard K. Morgan - wrote the books that were the basis for the Altered Carbon series on Netflix if you're familiar with that at all.

4. John Brunner - not really "cyberpunk" but some of his work is often described as "proto-cyberpunk". The Shockwave Rider is one of his most famous works, and it is really good IMO. I haven't read Stand on Zanzibar yet, but it is also highly regarded.

5. Pat Cadigan - I haven't read any of her stuff yet, but she is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.

6. Daniel Suarez - Daemon and Freedom were really good.

7. Vernor Vinge - I'm only part of the way through A Fire Upon the Deep now, but so far so good. His works are also usually highly recommended amongst HN'ers.

8. Bruce Sterling - I know of him from his non-fiction work The Hacker Crackdown, but he has also written some well-regarded science fiction.

9. S.L. Huang - The "Cas Russell" series is excellent, as techno-thriller / sci-fi stuff goes. I won't say it's anything real deep but the books are fun to read.

10. K.C. Alexander - The "SINless" series is.. um... well, I enjoyed the first two books (not sure how many there even are, that might be it). They probably aren't for everyone, but if you like them, you'll probably really like them. I'll just try to illustrate with one example line from one of the books: "You haven't lived until you've fisted a nun under the cheap light of a neon Jesus".

11. Charles Stross - fellow HN'er and famous author! https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross Writes radically entertaining stuff, including the Laundry Files series, Halting State, Glasshouse, etc. I'd say Glasshouse is an absolute "must read".

12. Greg Egan - I especially recommend Permutation City.

13. China Miéville - Check out Perdido Street Station

Thank you for all your suggestions and commentary!

Stross's Accelerando might be particularly apt

yes!

I've heard good things about it, but it's one of a few Stross works I haven't gotten to yet, along with Singularity Sky. Both are on "the list" though.

> 4. John Brunner - not really "cyberpunk" but some of his work is often described as "proto-cyberpunk". The Shockwave Rider is one of his most famous works, and it is really good IMO. I haven't read Stand on Zanzibar yet, but it is also highly regarded.

Brunner's work is sometimes a bit of a downer, Stand on Zanzibar is matched or exceeded in that regard by The Sheep Look Up.

However, if that's your thing I can suggest George Turner and Paolo Bacigalupi, and Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room! (which was turned into the movie Soylent Green).

> 5. Pat Cadigan - I haven't read any of her stuff yet, but she is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.

Cadigan is great, but her ouvre isn't all that large. Linda Nagata is a similar author well worth reading.

BTW, from my perspective Stephenson's real contribution in Snow Crash wasn't the Metaverse per-se but the huge dose of irony and insider humor, which reinvigorated a subgenre that was starting to take itself and it's RainyGrimDarkness a bit too seriously.

Then again, others have since explored similar territory (Tad Williams' Otherland series, Diane Duane's Omnitopia Dawn, etc.), but Stephenson's return to these stomping grounds in Reamde was a bit... turgid, by comparison.

Iain Banks. His "Culture" novels are maybe the smartest space opera ever written.

start with Player of Games. The various books have no common plot thread, can be read completely out of order; Player is by far the most accessible.

I second this, and raise one Peter F Hamilton.

Here’s some I’ve really enjoyed recently:

- Octavia Butler (Everything)

- Becky Chambers (Wayfarers)

- Martha Wells (Murderbot)

- Liu Cixin (3 body problem/ dark forest)

- N.K. Jemisin (Broken Earth & and cities we became)

- Dennis E. Taylor (Bobiverse)

Thank you for your suggestions! I have read some of N.K Jemisin and enjoyed what I read, the others I have not heard of except for Liu Cixin. I've read the three-body problem but I found it a bit jarring how 'magical' the resolution was - it was speculative but in a bizarre/surreal way rather than in a 'plausible extension of reality' way. Is it worth pushing through to the later books?

I picked up the Three-Body Problem due to the hype, and similarly found myself put off by the wildly fantastic photon magic.

Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth series[0] and Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought[1] both scratch a similar itch to Stephenson novels for me

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

Check out Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos.

Iain M. Banks is also a lot of fun.

I would recommend Vernor Vinge. A Fire Upon the Deep / A Deepness in the Sky are both excellent.

Also relevant to this particular thread, his book Rainbow's End features AR/wearable technology.

Hrm... some... other suggestions are... not like him at all.

Look to Alastair Reynolds.

Look to 'Mote in God's Eye.'

He hinted at the revenue model being a big difference between whatever Facebook is building and the plot of his novel "Snow Crash"

Can someone fill in the specifics? I guess the trouble is that for Facebook, you're the product, and advertisers are the clients - but, what is the revenue model of the metaverse from Snow Crash?

It’s been a few years but I vaguely remember a discussion of address-space in the metaverse, so could be a matter of essentially paying for a “static address” on a particular server. Isn’t the metaverse operated solely by Black Sun? I don’t remember any description of a decentralization/interoperability

From what I loosely remember, snowcrash depict a interoperable layer where actors build marketplaces.

In snowcrash, p2p network IO is cheap, compute is expensive. This sets up a metaverse where users render themselves and their content for others. The renders are streamed. No one controls the metaverse itself as it's more of a self hosted, federated affair.

I think there is some sort of main street with some reserved space but it's akin to a url.

There's a "real estate" model, similar to "ownership" of domain names and address space. Developing on the "Street" is licensed by the ACM, and the compute to run it comes from income from a trust fund.

There's also an IP licensing model going on too-- selling avatars, video games, amusement parks.

When I first read Snow Crash, I thought (perhaps wrongly) that there was also an advertising model to supplement the real estate business - and one that went hand-in-hand with it.

I love the passage that introduces "the Street", and it's the last sentence of it that gave me the impression of an advertising business model.

In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City.

That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.

Well in Snow Crash the metaverse is controlled by a crazy billionaire who controls the brains of his employees by infecting them with memetic viruses .... in Zuckerberg's case ....

Snow crash and Neuromancer are two well known must reads. I remember once hearing someone compare the 2 authors styles in that Neal Stephenson sounds like a hacker trying to be a great writer, and William Gibson sounds like a great writer trying to write like a hacker.

Attempted to get through Neuromancer, but (minor spoiler) when they started to switch persons around it got too confusing and I realized that it might have worked for a movie, but not a book. I also realized that I was only reading it because it was such a famous book, not because I was getting anything out of it, so I stopped.

Just putting this out in case anybody else feels the same pressure.

Gibson's writing style is quite... disorienting.

It took me a few read-throughs of Neuromancer until I felt like I got everything.

(We asked X some questions about Y) ≠ (X reacts to Y)

I'd have expected Axios to be a bit more bland about it.

Maybe it's just me, but Facebook seems to have more in common with the Snow Crash virus than with the Metaverse.

Metastasis: The spread of cancer cells from the place where they first formed to another part of the body. In metastasis, cancer cells break away from the original (primary) tumor, travel through the blood or lymph system, and form a new tumor in other organs or tissues of the body.

I don't get why the interviewer suggests that the author deserves some compensation. Did metaverse as an idea did not exist before Snow Crash?

Vaguely similar ideas existed in True Names and Neuromancer, but no, the metaverse as we imagine it today did not exist before Snow Crash.

I’d consider human spiritual realms the precursor to meta verses we can actually implement.

Tons of visualization through art, and ways and means defined through story.

Of course tend to need to be very literal about these things.

Frankly a computer meta verse isn’t that interesting

I’d rather figure out how to grow neuron structures that let me believe or have skills in anything and just babysit this stupid fleshy husk literally

Also Tron, Tron is basically a metaverse I would say

I'm reminded of the master-class hissy fit Harlan Ellison threw when The Terminator came out. He sued, claiming ownership of the general concept of robots from the future. I'm not sure how it shook out, legally, but to this day the T1 film credits include the producers' "grateful acknowledgement to the works of Harlan Ellison."

So there's certainly precedent for Stephenson to claim the moral rights to a "metaverse," whatever that is.

I Have No Trademark But I Must Sue!

Oddly, I went to a talk by him once and he mentioned he briefly thought about suing when the Matrix came out based on this story.

More important is the name itself. A billion dollar company just renamed itself based on a name Stephenson coined.

He’s right that compensation isn’t legally due—but he should be proud!

Snowcrash was forgettable. Vernor Vinges Rainbows End and stutf in Orson Scott Cards books left a much bigger mark. Esp the way the chimp troupe gets manipulated by the network. We see Vinges "belief circles" all around us.

You know, you can express enthusiasm without tearing something else down. There was no need for your first sentence.

Personally, I loved Vinge’s “True Names” short story, which I believe may be the first “virtual reality” story. I also loved Snow Crash for its in-your-face gonzo attitude.

When the talk is about Snow Crash, it is reasonable to say it is poor, if you believe that to be the case.

I thought a lot of the ideas in snowcrash were very interesting - particularly when you consider that the book was published in 1992 and so a lot of the elements that were cutting-edge on release have had time to diffuse into scifi culture. For example, the potential for 'ideas' to be viruses of the mind, or the degree to which thought is shaped by language.

Snow Crash is really a gread book, a lot of philosophy intertwined with technology and religion in one compact package.

Well, he didn't do a William Sherman:

"If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve."

I actually want to see Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, but I also kind of want to see Neal Stephenson come at him with a team of fancy lawyers and walk away with a large pile of money.

We've decided we're going to call them MetaFace. :)

Obligatory Stephenson vs Gibson battle.

https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...

My all-time favourite slashdot post, worth a re-read a long time later.

He should auction an NFT and Zuck/FB/MVRS should buy it for a decent amount

or MVRS could just make the NFT and own it for free

What reason is there to even use NFTs?

How about he does exactly the same thing, with exactly the same outcome in the real world, just without making any NFTs, burning any coal, or shilling any get rich quick pyramid schemes?

What tangible difference would there be?

None whatsoever.

...Except for no bullshit, no proof of wasted energy, no precious GPUs buried in landfills, no contribution to climate change, no carcinogenic smoke, no lung disease, no cancer, etc...

Did you know: rocks used to be perfectly good companions and construction materials aeons before and decades after the Pet Rock craze came and went.

The cardboard box and the $4 price tag were just a gimmick. So are NFTs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock

By making it an NFT I think he creates something bigger than himself, something that could last generations. If he just gets a donation from FB, that would be some random amount of money…who cares.

While it's true that all that wasted energy and squandered precious rare earth elements and belching coal smoke and CO2 greenhouse gasses and climate change and cancer and lung disease you create by making NFTs are something bigger than yourself, they're not necessarily what you want to be remembered by.

And any person receiving some random amount of money donation from Facebook in exchange for NOT making an NFT probably cares.

Or is your whole point "who cares about the environment"?

Let’s see who will be proven right. I am fully committed to saving the climate etc but in my mind NFTs have absolutely nothing to do with that. NFTs are real and however we prevent climate change will not prevent the continued existence and rise of NFTs. I’m saying that with 0 skin in the NFT game in terms of investment. So take that as you will. Just don’t be such a dick on the internet. It’s not conducive to you or anyone learning anything and that’s what we’re all here for. Thanks.

You think misinformation in the News Feed is bad enough? Wait till they figure out neurolinguistic hacking in the Metaverse.

Oh but they already did.

Did you you really think the former president's manner of speech was just him acting retarded?

He was casting memetic spells across all channels. They're still zapping around as we speak.

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