The computers reminded me the basic idea of the what the future would be like. It’s technology would improve by scanning a person. If someone needed to identify a person, they could scan the person. This might useful if someone was a criminal and they would be able to catch the person. Sometimes it could identify a person if has a weapon or not. Some useful technology does that already. Some people go to doctor and get x-rays. Why not use it the future? Some may use it in airports in the future. Or they can useful places.

But i found the comments [mindy &ben] interesting.. as to the height of the avatar that is created in the virtual world. .. and the comment that the laws of physics can be broken… [glenn]

It made me think of the point at which y.t. needs entrance to ‘white columns,’ the white people only.

The idea [with the avatar/second life] that you are creating a virtual world in which you can live out fantasies, or fears, or anything, really…

We can break the laws of physics, we can create a new persona [aside from height, apparently] but we are still constricted by our social standards, prejudices, and practices, whether intentionally or not, because we don’t set the standards alone, they are put in place by a host of people… A society in which we participate.. and answer to, whether virtually or literally.

Could not put it better, Brian.

It seems like we are nearly finished with that path…we’re almost there. I feel that instead of Mafioso and the like, we are nearly a privatized country, controlled by massive corporations with ungodly amounts of dinero.
“Vista Road used to belong to the state of California and is now called Fairlanes, Inc. Rte. CSV-5…Its main competition used to be…Once there had been bitter disputes, the intersection closed by sporadic sniper fire”.

I was literally laughing out loud. It seems so ridiculous. Pure lunacy. But how far are we really away from the money of Google and Big Oil etc. controlling more than just the politicians themselves. Who says you can’t buy a road? If you have all the money you can theoretically buy and sell whatever you fucking want. And the big cats keep collecting that cash. I completely agree with Mindy on the idea that the middle class is fast disappearing. Our culture is disappearing too. It’s morphing into some bastard offspring of technology and capitalism, complete with some brain defects from all the chemicals in the air and water. Cyberspace compounds this even further. How does one determine ownership of information? The original cyberspace, the place between Bell’s early phone, and it’s counterpart over in Watson’s lab, had no owner. It was intangible. It had limits. But it was realized that place could have no limits. And Ma’ Bell was born. AT & T is one of the most powerful companies in the world…and it becomes more powerful every day. We’ve scoffed at limits before, so how far does cyberspace go?

It sounds to me like the metaverse would be a hybrid of the Internet (general browsing, downloading, etc.) and some sort of MMO. As I recall, Hiro does his information gathering via the metaverse, and from the looks of it, Second Life is rather limited in that department. It seems to me like a Sims clone, only it’s on a global scale. It reminds me of Myspace more than anything else, though: a place to socialize within a virtual network, a place you could completely misrepresent yourself and get away with it.

My vision of what the metaverse would be–our metaverse, not entirely the one depicted in Snow Crash–is a place where you can do literally all of the same things you could do in reality. There would be no software limitations. And certainly there wouldn’t be such god awful textures and graphics.

And if you really look at the video games that have been released recently (or are still in development, for that matter), you’ll start to wonder why something remotely similar to the metaverse (and also realistic) hasn’t been in production yet. I understand that people have been trying to make these virtual worlds, but from what I’ve seen, they look terrible. We’ve got a video game console based on motion sensors (the Wii) and others with mind boggling graphics; why aren’t we taking advantage of them to create something that is a true reflection of reality?

How are we beginning to see the intersections between the virtual and the real? And at what point does the line blur?

I have to agree with Brandon—Chapter 1 of this story is amazing and hilarious. I noticed too that the metaphors seem like they should feel over-the-top but they don’t feel that way at all. And I totally know that Futurama episode Glenn—good stuff.

I found it interesting that in Snow Crash, even in the future, it is business as usual. Stephenson talks at length about business—he makes mention of the Invisible Hand, commercialization of the CIA (now the CIC), competition between various security companies, the real estate market in the Metaverse, development in and out of the Metaverse. Advertisements are also mentioned at length, in particular when Stephenson outlines how Y.T. came to purchase her RadiKS Mark IV Smartwheels—she was drawn in by an ad in ‘Thrasher’ magazine. Capitalism is raging in the future…or is it? Large companies seem to be doing well, but individuals…perhaps not so much. Hiro is living in a storage shed, after all. Suburbs still exist, and yet of 6-10 billion people on earth, only perhaps a quarter of “a billion potential computer owners” have access to the Street. The story goes on to describe ‘most’ people, “…most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s (Stephenson 26).” Current trends could suggest this is where we are headed in the year 2007. Elite classes are jumping ahead, and the middle class is disappearing…leading to a whole lotta ‘have-nots.’ Of course, most people in the world today have next to nothing…but that’s a whole other issue. In any case, the future of Snow Crash is a far cry from the utopian future of The Hunter Out of Time, albeit Hunter occurs much further in the future. Even as technology has advanced, the almighty dollar still governs the universe in Snow Crash, in and out of the virtual world—this mirrors our own world. Still, the text treats business as absurd, (as Corey put it, “the pinnacle of human ingenuity basically comes down to getting a pizza in under 30 minutes” haha good job Corey) a perpetual ‘rat race,’ which is an outlook I always enjoy. Trust me—I went to business school, and I found it so mind-numbing I…can’t really find the words.

Anyhoo, on the point Ben made about the limitations on an avatar’s height…I’ve seen headlines that some research suggests taller people make more money on average than people of shorter stature. I always sniff at that because I’m 5’5” and while that may be tall for an Asian person in some countries, I live in the States people! And I don’t want to see my height as a limitation, especially because I have no control over that aspect of my body. I don’t mind having to ask someone to get that dress down for me while I’m shopping, but I certainly don’t want my height to determine how much dough I’m making lol.

But as far as intersections between the virtual and the real…the avatar’s height is one place where the two intersect in the story. I also like how ‘Reality’ is capitalized and treated as a proper noun, as if it is becoming more and more a separate idea from objective reality. ‘Reality’ here is just the tedium that is the physical world…while objective reality has changed because for those like Hiro, the Metaverse is becoming increasingly ‘real.’ In Snow Crash, the Metaverse is challenging objective reality because it creates such a strong sensory illusion…however it doesn’t quite cross the line because that pesky ‘Reality’ is still there as an anchor. The story clearly divides the Metaverse and the physical world: “…since the Street does not really exist—it’s just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere—none of these things is being physically built (Stephenson 25).”

The Matrix was released in 1999…here the virtual has usurped objective reality, and so reality being experienced by everyone is completely virtual and at the same time looked at as objective reality. But where they f’ed up as far as crossing the line of virtual and real is that they ventured into objective reality (Zion) and focused on that for the last two movies (boo, Wachowski brothers, booooo…).

The only work I have ever experienced where the line between the virtual and the real is completely blurred is in the anime Serial Experiments Lain (so if anyone knows of any others please let me know!). Here, the main character Lain is a hacker-type, and many times in the story it is never quite clear, well, what the hell is going on. Is this the real Lain or the virtual Lain? Is this virtual reality or objective reality? Consequently, many times it is up to the viewer to piece together the plot. Lain is totally non-linear and confusing, and I kind of disliked it the first time I watched it. But after taking this class and re-watching some of the series, I am beginning to understand it more.

The line between the virtual and the real hasn’t begun to blur so much (yet) in our boring ole’ lives of the year 2007. While the internet has begun to change our perceptions of virtual reality…we are still very much grounded in the real world. I don’t know of anything that is totally immersive. Although I did just read in a back issue of EGM about a device that changes the real world into virtual Pac-man—pretty sweet. A person just straps the device on their head (it looks ridiculous) and sees virtual pellets to chomp up in the real world—there are virtual ghosts too!

–Mindy

Second Life does a lot of things the metaverse does, though admittedly falling very short. The key things are that users can create their own content, and good coders/programmers can even make their content fully interactive. Laws of physics can be bent. And the content usually considered the absolute best are the most realistic things. There are zones for combat and zones that prohibit it. Of course, there are problems. All communication is still visual, facial expressions are weak at best, and Linden Labs included their own programming language which is a little easier to learn, but lacks the true power of things like C++. It’s a very small step. It does require real money in order to do much of anything, though, and that is like the metaverse in a very key way. Other MMOGs require monthly subscription payments, but don’t restrict what you can do based on real money. Second Life won’t even let you upload imagery without some real money (albeit something like a penny, but real none-the-less).

Other MMOGs are now exploring the more interactive components of the metaverse. The most notable, which is not specifically pointed out in Snow Crash but is clearly present when the pusher is talking to Hiro, is VOIP, or basically voice communication over the internet. The MMO I currently know of to utilize VOIP is Lord of the Rings Online, which allows you to use a headset to communicate with other members of you fellowship (adventuring group). Pirates of the Burning Sea, not due out until 2008, has been allowing users to upload their own content for a long time, such as ship flags and sail decorations. However, these uploads can be vetoed by the developers due to their attempts to keep the game realistic in content. And, of course, the Nintendo Wii has online capabilities now, though to my knowledge no MMO. However, this means, in a very rudimentary way, user motion is transferred to online worlds. It’s slow in coming, but we’re definitely on our way to the metaverse.

Also, I can’t help but think of the episode of Futurama where they enter the internet, get attacked by pop-ups, travel through a virtual city representing modern websites, and do all sorts of things mataverse-y. But that’s neither here nor there nor that other place.

As far as entrusting the guys at Google to be our “overlords,” I’m a bit skeptical. I understand that Brandon was purposefully exaggerating and half-joking, but there really are people who take this view, which I consider very dangerous. First of all, it’s not like they’re entirely benevolent. Their collusion with China in allowing government censorship is just one example. I mean, they’re an advertising company essentially. I’d rank advertising pretty high on my list of dangerous industries, right behind weapons manufacturers and Coca Cola. And, while I think that the guys who run Google are infinitely more decent than their competitors at Microsoft, AT&T, etc., they now work for the stockholders. By law, they are beholden to those who own Google stock. Which could be anybody (with enough cash for $600 a share). And what happens if the founders die in a plane crash? We have no guarantees that their successors will have the same philosophies.