• mindbleach
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    2 days ago

    People don’t even agree on what the word means. They just insert their own definition, and assume that’s what everyone else must mean.

    And it’s literally a joke.

    The metaverse from Snow Crash is a rude joke about whizz-bang flying-through-numbers virtual reality. Neal Stephenson took that realm of mindbending impossibilities and turned it into a mall. And it’s such a capitalist capture of the concept that low-end users appear in black and white.

    The engineer-y part of it, the Torment Nexus you could actually implement, is even sillier. You want your website… to have a storefront? Even in Second Life, shops were mostly full of low-prim kiosks you could browse from a mile away. And reinventing the limitations of objective three-dimensional space means your neighbors can be dicks. You’d have to ask what forum is south of Lemmy. And then hope they don’t block out your imaginary sunlight with a giant golden phallus.