I'm Working on My Metaverse Blog While Returning on a High-Speed Train to Shanghai from My Virtual Goods Job Because the Future

Yesterday I was on a train bound from Beijing planning out New World Notes posts by e-mail with Iris Ophelia, and the outside seen at 150 miles per hour largely looked like this:

We passed at least three nuclear power plants along the way, and several construction sites where whole high-rise city blocks were being built in the flat and barren Chinese countryside, seemingly for no one. I was coming back from Beijing where I consult for a mobile game publisher, and then it hit me all at once:

I'm on a high-speed train returning to Shanghai from my job working for a company that sells virtual goods, writing a blog about the metaverse where I also sometimes work, collaborating in near real time on my smartphone with someone I mostly know through her avatar and who lives on the other side of the world, passing nuclear reactors every now and again, and something like this is just the kind of thing which happens nowadays.

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Comments

[Silly Rabbit]

You appear to be living sometime in the future, Hamlet.

[Orca Flotta]

For the untrained eye the world outside your train compartment could be the USA. Vast barren flat prairie, every now and then a faceless town with lots of skyscrapers springs out of nowhere.

We're all just travellers speeding across the globe and thru our lifes as if we can't wait to reach the finish line.

[A.J.]

Wow Orca, you really made me long to be a little kid again. Just for a moment.

It made me think of my neighbors, and the endless days that we spent just playing outside. We had a wonderful little world to explore filled with woods, dirt piles. bugs, critters, and nature.

Now so much passes in front of me, but I touch very little.

[Wagner James Au]

"We had a wonderful little world to explore filled with woods, dirt piles. bugs, critters, and nature."

I read about that time on the Internet. Sounds itchy!

[Drew956]

Yeah, and I am on a train in Asia reading the words of another person whose whole existence is only known to me through intermediary means, responding on a thread of others responses, through a name that is a form of an avatar for me.
The internet experience is a series of 2-D and 3-D metaverses, and our interactions are both profound and at times disturbing.
It is hard to grasp the profundity of what technology and advancements have done to our world and whole socio-economic interactions.

[olé]

"...whole high-rise city blocks were being built in the flat and barren Chinese countryside, seemingly for no one." now that just reminded me of the potemkin villages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village would fit nicely into modern socialist china and this was not the first time i did read about their empty cities that never find any residents. well, at least the numbers in economic growth look good then ^^

[Arcadia Codesmith]

The future: it's sneaky.

[Stone Semyorka]

Where are my waders when I need them?