101 Comments

Martinez gives an interesting perspective on the metaverse vs. reality world. However, Afghanistan's debacle lasted less because the metaverse ignored it, pretending it never happened, Dave Chappelle felt Twitter didn't exist because for him it wasn't an important venue. For the socially inept like Zuckerberg and Dorsey, hiding behind the Metaverse solved the problem of interacting with people on a face to face human level. The Metaverse world makes it too easy for comments and opinions to be made, for lives to be destroyed, as those guilty of it, can stay invisible. I think it's a rather cowardly world, but as real world problems continue to get worse, what real solutions are we getting from the Metaverse World? Too few that would ever make an impact on humankind.

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I think this was a thought provoking article. Calling the author ‘dumbass’, etc. is so Twitter-esque it’s unsettling. Commentators taking hard sides. Just…wow. How about some open minded curiosity and discourse?

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I'm starting to think I was wrong in my initial answer equating the current social media climate to Usenet, which was also addictive enough but easier to shake off. I have to concede that yes, this shit IS real life now and it IS scary and very, very different from what has gone before.

In the past, Usenet newsgroups may have been a thing we all participated in, but WE ALL SAW IT THE SAME WAY. There was no "algorithm." We all saw the same posts, the same nested replies, had exactly the same list of groups available to us.

The thing about modern social media is that everyone who participates is in an individually, hermetically isolated and totally unique cultivated version of it. No wonder we can't agree on anything in a civilized fashion anymore. It's as if every single human being opened the evening newspaper from 1974 and saw a completely different front page. We're not starting from anything like a set of shared concepts much less postulates. We don't even agree on what words even MEAN anymore -- because we hear of people who voted one way or think another and since we haven't been exposed to the information they've been -- uniquely and individually -- exposed to, we cannot fathom how the hell they arrived at their conclusions.

I was very wrong when I compared this to Usenet. As this dude says, this is indeed radically different and much worse. This is phase-transition territory where the changes of degree have become changes in kind.

"Twitter isn't real!" say some of the people down below. Tell that to someone who lost their goddamned health insurance when they lost their job because of a video some asshole with a cellphone blasted all over creation. That unreal thing just fucked them up six ways from Sunday and may have destroyed their lives for the next twenty years. If you have to be retired and on Medicare before you can proclaim it's not real, that's a very small slice of the population that has that luxury.

I bet a lot of people said the same thing about the printing press -- it's "not real" or something -- right up until they got their asses tied to stakes and burnt because people were printing gobs of incredibly popular misinformation about how to tell if someone was a witch or if the Jew down the road had put poison into the town well.

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founding

The hatip the author gives to Neal Stephenson (who is immensely talented as well) belongs to William Gibson....jus sayin'....

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I could not disagree more strongly with the basic premise of this commentary.

And I write that not as some anti-technology gadfly, but as someone who first ventured online in 1977, and have been online consistently since 1989. I've lived through acoustic couplers, where you had to jam the phone receiver into the rubber cups to make a connection; through the free AOL CD-ROMs coming in the mail every week (they made great Christmas tree ornaments, btw); through MyMP3.com and Myspace and AIM, USENet and FidoNet and dial-up Bulletin Board Services. CompuServe and Prodigy and Mercury Online.

One thing hasn't changed: Online is NOT real life.

It's a neat way to stay in touch with geographically distant friends and family. It's a unique opportunity for folks of nonmainstream interests to build virtual communities (hi, there, Atari ST computer enthusiasts!).

But it is neither substitute for, nor replacement for, in person human interactions. Not for the vast majority of us.

And it never will be.

FB is panicked - young people don't use its services so much these days. Of my five children, aged 13-30, only the oldest is on FB or Instragram. None are on Twitter. Neither are their friends (else they would be). Texting, in-game messaging, VOIP - these are the tools they use.

And while these methods of communication use Internet connectivity, they are still either one to one or small-group conversations or notes. NOT the "metaverse."

FB knows this. So does Twitter. Which is why they're panicked.

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From your lips to God's ears. Everything seems to be a science experiment.

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What the world needs now is a healthy dose of Occam's razor... what it needs is a 'cancel culture' for what is important, and what is not. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram would have nothing to offer, should you find yourself stranded on a desert island. Not a cell tower anywhere in sight. Once the batteries on your device run low, where would you plug it in?

'Real life' is having to do deal with the intricacies of the electronic prison we have built for ourselves. In lieu of a cardboard ticket, I now need a smart phone to be admitted into a football game. Major League Baseball franchises wouldn't tell me what their ticket hours were. (Sorry, I'm not going to drive to Pittsburgh to find out.) Rather than walk up and pay cash admission, I now need on online account and electronic reservation to visit the grounds of the local petting zoo... three days in advance, if you please. The local petting zoo? I kid you not.

The irony of a smart phone is that nobody answers the phone anymore. Answering machine or robo-voice is all you get. Not even the phone company answers the phone, once you find the number you have to wrestle your way through forty minutes of robo-hell to get a service rep. (Yes, I tried online. Tried their website beforehand, but the rather simple option I required wasn't anywhere to be found. Go figure)

Then, there are the "negative check-off" scams...

This is progress?

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“Techies will literally invent an entirely new plane of human existence rather than offering to fix the pressing problems of the ‘meatspace’ world.”

Ah, yes, ‘if you're so smart why aren't you working on a cure for cancer?’, how I've missed you.

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Techies? Assuming, of course, they remember to order fuel oil or stop by the grocery store on their way home. Their 'new plane of human existence' probably doesn't have room for any of that. (Too 'three dimensional, I suspect.)

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Twitter sucks by design. It's value to society has never exceed its cost to society.

Facebook was designed not to suck, but it sucks biggly now.

But both of them continue to thrive because of user's connections to their friends and followers. These "platforms" brilliantly exploit the real connections made by people to feed them all monetized virtual crap.

But I don't think they are the real problem. The real problem is our corporate media failing to uphold strong journalistic principles. I think the solution to this problem will only start when Kyle Rittenhouse wins his multi-billion dollar civil lawsuits against CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. And he donates much of those winnings to the GOP party and Trump campaign.

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Interesting, indeed

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I've never touched Twitter. Now I'm a 60 year old lady, so I guess nobody cares. I guess this is where the followers of YouTwitFace will live.

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Sorry, Mr. Martinez, the notion that life is merely a screen is just digital gas. I have a real life, rich and robust. I love social media, but I use it like I do conversations and books--to tell stories to friends and to learn things I didn't know. I don't confuse the two, and most people I know don't either.

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"This week, happily, we are focusing entirely on what comes next. Yesterday, we announced the founding of a new university in Austin, Texas. Up tomorrow: Andrew Yang on how we can eject from the “doom loop” of politics."

Thank you. I am grateful, and encourage much more of this going forward. It may be the same voices preaching somewhat stale ideas, but it's more hopeful, and I, for one, am tired of wallowing in our present cesspool. I'm ready to find solutions, to move on, to build something better. Forget building back. Build forward. I ready for an explosion of ideas for parallel structures that aren't just copies of the existing ones with a different face. I can fight that fight.

Our Substack comment metaverse is beginning to be an echo chamber. We could use some fresh blood, some out-loud thinking, some whazoo ideas, some of which just might have a grain of truth.

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Great article....while I'd like to argue how wrong you are....all I have to do is look around. Never ever do I see anyone "not with their heads in their phones"....even hikers, runners, beach & gym goers are on their phones constantly. So yep we're already one foot in the metaverse and I don't see people putting their phones down. I don't see people returning to malls or the movies! We've all watched the Blade-Runner movies it's where we are headed. I'd love to go back...I'd love for kids to grow up like I did....the scary thing is the political nightmare we're in....the propaganda, the indoctrination is real and happening. When I get my VR headset not sure what metaverse I'll chose to live in...

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I do love Antonio García Martínez's writing style--lively, funny, intelligent, and well-read.

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"China works on hypersonic missiles while our government, incapable of defeating a medieval religious insurgency in Afghanistan, launches a 'National Gender Strategy.'"

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The gender critical (think anti-trans) author Abigail Shrier, who has appeared on Bari's substack, ,recently interviewed Sen. Tom Cotton on her own substack. Abigail asked him whether the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party was in any way aiding the woke authoritarian left to increase political divisions within the US.

Sen. Cotton said the Chinese have a derogatory term called Baizuo (pronounced"bye-tswaw") which means "Stupid White Leftist." Baizuo refers to SJWs who care only about immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment and have no sense about real problems in the real world such as missiles and ships. The word Baizuo tells us everything we need to know about the attitudes, aspirations and actions of the CCP

https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/could-the-gop-become-the-party-of

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As we continue to "evolve," what role will flesh and blood humans play? I recently watched the movie "Finch" with Tom Hanks and started to wonder at what point AI, VR etc etc will "fundamentally transform" our various notions of living ( or we already there?) . This article made me return to those thoughts and questions especially as I looked at the pictures of youngsters transfixed with their gadgets.

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