Really great Kara Swisher interview with Neal Stephenson, who's now on tour to promote his latest novel, Termination Shock. Unsurprisingly, much of their chat focuses on Snowcrash and the Metaverse's white hot influence on current technology. As I wrote last Summer, Stephenson does not (contrary to common opinion), consider the Metaverse dystopian:
Snowcrash is clearly a dystopian novel, although it's kinda poking fun at dystopian novels... the Metaverse I think is kind of neutral, it's certainly part of this dystopian world, but in and of itself, it's just an entertainment medium, it's not inherently bad.
The dystopian potential, he goes on, lies in how social media companies like Meta make money -- and their plans to do so in similar ways, in the Metaverse:
They came up with a business model that's not really anticipated in Snowcrash, which is that you can give people a free-to-play application and then monetize their eyeballs and personal data... in retrospect that seems kinda like the obvious play, but I didn't see it coming, necessarily.
So I think that's what we need to be focused on when we're talking about the future of Metaverse-type applications: The business model that is making it possible for people to make money off it.
Instead of allowing that to happen, Neal supports the idea of consumers rallying together, to demand a stake in their future on these platforms:
Every time you input data to a social media site, you're giving free IP to whoever runs that site... And AR/VR devices are going to have much more sophisticated ways of extracting information from your usage habits... I just don't think we should let them do that. So I'm onboard with the idea that we need the equivalent of labor unions. Because we're all workers in these factories -- anyone who uses social media. If General Motors opened a car factory and just asked people to show up and build cars for them for free, nobody would take that as a serious proposition, but it's kinda what we're all doing.
So I think a better system is one that would look kinda the way that manufacturing looked after labor unions entered the picture, where the people who've been contributing their free labor have some kind of collective bargaining power and as such, are part of the process, in helping to improve the product. As opposed to just throwing their data over a blank wall.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the companies and evangelists promoting the Neal Stephenson's Metaverse idea also promote his ideas for making it not dystopian?
Oh, and far as Meta's version, he's not super-impressed so far, seeing Meta video of people in virtual meetings, or playing virtual chess from different parts of the world:
That stuff is really old hat so it's hard for me to make out what they're doing that's new, other than implementing those old ideas on a larger scale for a broader audience.
We've had multiplayer online games for a long time... so I don't quite see what the new is, but nobody there at Meta has communicated with me and I don't really have any insight into what they're doing other than glimpsing at clips of the [Meta demo] video and clicking away from them.
In a virtual world with any version of collective bargaining, how many days can a person go without logging in before they are auto-ejected from the collective bargaining group and lose all their rights with no recourse? Same as not showing up to work at your union job. As an example of how people try and leave virtual worlds, SL has had about one-half billion people register for SL with about one-hundred thousand remaining.
Any attempt at collective bargaining in a virtual world will require a massive legal department with huge overhead to administer the quirks of the people and failures of the system. The simple decision for any board of directors of a virtual world company would be the answer of “oh, heck no, we aren’t doing that!”
Posted by: Luther Weymann | Friday, December 17, 2021 at 10:25 PM