>In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerate effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS. Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.
from Johnny Mnemonic
What can we do to make it more utopian?
Is it?
It's basically forums & avatars brought in the medium of audio and video communication.
OMG CYBERPUNK DYSTOPIA PHILIP K DICK
Just unevenly distributed.
Anyway it's pretty fair to confuse the two I think, there can't be any way Johnny Mnemonic wasn't influenced by Blade Runner (I'm guessing it's true of both the movies and of the books). Very similar themes and protagonists at a certain level of abstraction.
Blade Runner, the movie, was released in 1982.
And PKD's DADoES was published in 1968.
Honestly, IMHO, Blade Runner in movie form shares more DNA with Alien than proto-cyberpunk. They're both character studies rather than world-building exercises, albeit with massive credit to Ridley Scott and the design team that their "background" world is more lifelike than many world-centric films.
But Blade Runner fundamentally lacks the multi-level cutthroat competitive aspect of cyberpunk. Oddly enough, a quirk that frequently recurs in British scifi, in contrast to the more free market American themes.
I don't think someone sharing their craft through a virtual avatar is any more responsible for these things than the flying cars from Blade Runner would be.
> What can we do to make it more utopian?
If you stream without a face camera at all it generally hurts your ability to grow an audience, and unfortunately our society is still pretty focused on appearance so if you don't look great you're going to potentially get a lot of toxicity in your chat. A vtuber avatar acts as an equalizer in this sense and also lets people express their personality and aesthetics visually in a way that might not otherwise be easy - they can pick eye and hair colors they think represent them without having to use colored contacts or hair dyes, etc.
A few different people I know found that having a vtuber avatar made it much easier for them to get into streaming regularly and it did grow their audience, so I'm happy to see the technology catch on and improve.
That's not the reason most of the popular ones do it. (Ironmouse, sure, but not anyone else.)
Most of the bigger ones are corporate characters, so they're actually forced to hide themselves and it's more like they're uncredited actors. Besides that, it gives you privacy, avoids stalkers, means you don't have to do your makeup or get dressed (up or at all), things like that. Appearance still definitely matters though, but now it's your voice carrying you and not your face.
Move to Mars and start over.
I have no hope that would work or is what Elon wants. I know he wants to set up the world’s most exclusive gated community there.
What would really push it into cyberpunk territory is if it turns out this is not an actual human but an AI-controlled virtual person.
Damn, I hope someone gets this into a script soon.
A persistent avatar/alias as an internet persona seems to match the real-life to internet-life relationship better. IE, for many, they’re different and rather separable aspects of life.
There was a talent agency that had three-four performers who took shifts streaming games through a shared vtuber persona who had build up some popularity. At some point the agency fired the performers and replaced them with a new performer who didn't have the same performance.
The fans weren't told but it was immediately apparent, so they started demanding the changes to be reverted. The fans were ignored and both the vtuber's popularity and the agency fell back into obscurity.
I guess the lesson here is that personas are personal.
It’s not fooling anyone to pretend like this is normal self expression.
edit: clarify
Number two: this person's goal CLEARLY isn't to fool anyone, it's not a deep fake video, and it's frankly none of your business or concern that they enjoy using an animated avatar.
However Hector Martin is not a woman living in Japan and they look perfectly fine/average.
I don't have the impression that in Marcan's case it was ever about anonymity, it is more about a creative expression.
Up until Lina's introduction on April 1st, I had never seen a vTuber stream, and I must say it is quite fun to watch. Though personally I wish Lina's voice is tweaked a bit, because it can be hard to understand what she is saying.
Simple things like Lina en Marcan using the same hostname for the development machine (Raider), using the same IDE (Kate), using the same bash aliases (the one I like most if 'stfu' that appears to suppress terminal output), and a huge overlap of knowledge. Then there is also the same fast-paced speaking style that Marcan has.
I did notice Lina always (rather jokingly) denying being Marcan, especially during the April 1 debut, but I always assumed that that was just part of the joke.
Again, I might be wrong here, maybe they are not the same person after all, but as far as I can tell it's just Hector Martin having fun.
> Isn't it the opposite, though?
You mean Lina being first, and Marcan being an alter-ego? Marcan (Hector Martin) is a real person, he has done quite a few interviews on camera. https://youtu.be/dF2YQ92WKpM?t=496
As your get more low level, less visual and more niche, there's less and less diversity of software developers. And everyone should feel welcomed into hacking the kernel.
It is the ham-fisted attempts to increase diversity for its own sake have ended up being discriminatory. [1]
If there are barriers stopping people contributing, these should be removed. I expect these to be economic barriers, rather than those based on particular characteristics.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/03/llvm_contributor_resi...
There's nothing forced about people getting into programming and becoming relevant for it, that just by chance it turns out they are not cis+heterosexual.
Nobody in the Asahi crew was "a ham fisted attempt to increase diversity".
The only forced thing here is the "forced inclusion" topic. That, for whatever kind of reason, people stubbornly keep trying to bring to the front.
You answered your own question; it’s a technical community. Centering political activism is counterproductive to the fundamental telos of being a technical community.
Existing members, unsurprisingly, push back against colonization of their community by those more interested in gender ideology or identity politics than technology.
It is obvious that there's terrific engineers and professionals regardless of sexual orientation and we have countless proofs behind it, last but not least the linked article and many of the other asahi contributors.
But when the likes or Google or Facebook are obviously hiring because you are a minority it's when the solution to gender or sexual discrimination is simply...reversed.
That was ruined by games trying to appeal to more mainstream people (with less hardcore Features like losing all your possessions upon death) and the micromonetization strategies that everyone hates.
I wonder if VR will even have games like early Everquest, WoW, EVE, etc but in VR.
Which is sizable, but not amazing.
58.8 million DAUs in Q3 https://ir.roblox.com/news/news-details/2022/Roblox-Reports-...
Also it didn't require billions in investment. Facebook could have literally burned $900 million on hookers and cocaine, and then thrown $100 million to buy VR chat, and be better off than they are now.
They currently have the most popular VR hardware platform. And it's the only piece of hardware that Meta really has, everything else they make is software. If Meta wants to keep growing, being the leading producer of "the next big thing" in hardware would certainly help. Zuckerburg is betting on VR/AR being that next big thing. Only time will tell I guess. But I find it a little weird when I see people commenting on Meta's investment as if all they did was create a basic second life clone. They're building some of the most innovative consumer hardware at the moment. I'm not hugely into it because Meta doesn't really seem like the company I'd like to entrust with cameras pointing at my eyeballs, but you can't deny that the hardware they've built so far is quite impressive.
Well, yes. Who does something matters. I could totally see Facebook's metaverse failing a la Stadia or Diem.
All of those other things you mentioned fit into specific niches and have built communities around themselves over time.
Although some of them are designing “virtual worlds” as an excuse to get around YouTube moderation and taking 30% of superchats.
VR/AR just hasn't been done right as of now, but its getting close. Demand is there. Imagine virtual schooling during time like Covid, but instead of Zoom, kids actually see each other in VR and can interact with each other.