New World Notes

Metaverse Viewing: Readers Recommend Wild Palms & The Peripheral

Virtual world experience from Wild Palms starts around 45 minutes in

I asked readers for favorite depictions of the Metaverse/virtual worlds in movies and TV besides Ready Player One, and they delivered -- starting with this oddball post-Twin Peaks TV classic from the 90s recommended by Ariane Barnes:

Back in the 90's when VR was still science fiction, some strange VR TV shows were released. The best was a mini-series called Wild Palms (1993) which I haven't seen in years, but available on You Tube in beautiful 4:3 ratio 480p video. The premise is that in 2007 a technology involving VR goggles and designer drugs would allow a person to travel anywhere experience it in all 5 senses. Virtual sex was the primary motivation of course.

Of course!  Watch episode 1 above. I vaguely remember the show, mostly for Kathryn Bigelow directing a later episode, and William Gibson doing a cameo appearance somewhere in there. Anyway, pretty amazing there was buzz around VR literally 30 years ago.

Speaking of Gibson, Soda Sullivan recommends a much more recent example based on a novel by him:

In Russia, Ukraine News is Censored, But Counter-Strike is Extremely Popular. So Reporters Put the Truth About the Invasion in a Secret Room Players Can Only See When They Die.

Amazing cyberpunk-made-real story of the month, made possible by the fact that Counter-Strike Global Offensive is extremely popular with young gamers in Russia (most of them either in Putin's military or likely to be conscripted into it), but where news of the nation's real invasion of Ukraine is censored.

Here's what Finnish reporters did with a user-made CS:GO map:

When a player’s avatar dies, the game view changes: For a while, the player can go through walls or fly around the map. At this stage, they can also find the secret room hidden underground...

There is a light above the door. This is a hint that taking a closer look at the object may reveal something.

There are stairs leading to an underground room.

First, the player sees a wall with a headline.

Next to the headline, there is a map showing how many civilian targets in Ukraine have been hit by Russians.

Another wall displays a news item on the Bucha massacre. When the player comes close to the images, they hear a Russian voice-over on their radio telling them what the images are about: Ukrainian civilians murdered by Russian soldiers.

Read the English-language story here. The CS:GO map "de-voyna" is available on Steam. Consider giving it a good rating, so that more players will see and experience it.

Watch "The Peripheral" Trailer, Amazon Series Based on William Gibson's Novel

Starting October 21 on Amazon Prime starring Chloë Grace Moretz, this is the teaser trailer to The Peripheral, based on William Gibson's novel of the same name. Premise:

Flynne Fisher lives in the rural American South, working at the local 3D printing shop, while earning much needed extra money playing VR games for rich people. One night she dons a headset and finds herself in futuristic London—a sleek and mysterious world, alluringly different from her own hardscrabble existence. But this isn’t like any game she’s ever played before: Flynne begins to realize it isn’t virtual reality… it’s real. Someone in London, seventy years in the future, has found a way to open a door to Flynne’s world. And as utterly beguiling as London is... it’s also dangerous.

The plot is a perfect example of how Gibson more or less walked away from writing "science fiction" per se, since the present keeps catching up with any future he might imagine. For example: While a poor person "playing VR games for rich people" might seem like a strange, fantastical notion, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey talked with me about that very idea as an actual possibility... 6 years ago.

I also like the "virtual reality" aspect of the series seems to be shot in real life, something Neal Stephenson just talked with me about -- i.e., high-end 3D graphics are so realistic now, you might as well shoot the Metaverse or another virtual world without using CGI:

Viewing Matrix Movie Teaser Requires Accepting Blue Pill of Advertising Cookies

You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed with new ads to view from affiliates of WarnerMedia (a subsidiary of AT&T). You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and, well, pretty much the same thing happens.

Much has changed since The Matrix movies premiered: Now, instead of Philip Rosedale leaving the theater in 1999 and telling his colleagues at RealNetworks, "But that's what I wanted to make!", making alternate realities has become a booming business. And taking the Red Pill is no longer just associated with wanting to fight the machines, but also, wanting to fight women (?).

And finally, in a keen irony (as @Lenophie notes), the Internet now comes with automatic ad cookie notification pop-ups -- effectively requiring us all to first click the Blue Pill of capitalism.

All that said, this is still a pretty fun teaser site for the upcoming Matrix movie. I'm curious how they accomplished the augmented reality aspect of the experience:

Twitter Usage Back Up to 2020 Levels Despite (Because of?) Trump Ban

Twitter usage last month hit 6.42 billion total visits, according to SimilarWeb, with US-based traffic up 4.18% from February. This after traffic had dipped somewhat from January's  6.3 billion visits. March 2021 traffic is about on par to Twitter's traffic in November-December 2020 and actually a touch higher than traffic in October 2020 (6.3B), right before the last US Presidential election.

Which is more or less a definitive answer to the following question that frequently came up, especially after the January 6th insurrection, when Twitter finally banned Donald Trump from the platform for inciting violence: Won't Twitter traffic collapse with Trump and all his roiling, news-grabbing tweets, not to mention all the bots amplifying those tweets, are gone?

So far, looking at the data, that doesn't seem to be the case. 

Why Second Life's Most Famous Cyberpunk City Now Has a Homeless Camp

A descendant of migrants and anti-fascist resistors brings their memory to the metaverse

You can have a virtual home in Hangars Liquides, the massive and awesome cyberpunk city in Second Life which boasts a skyline of skyscrapers before which Oprah Winfrey once gave a speech, and William Gibson himself once praised. But why pay to live in a well-appointed penthouse of a dystopian future, when you can live in a tent from our near-dystopian present?

Click here to visit, and if you like, find a free place for your avatar to squat, in Hangars Liquides’ new homeless encampment.

“I know there are quite a few wanderers in SL that like to go around, so they could have a little spot in a place that is community-oriented to get together and talk and just have simple good times,” Hangars creator Djehan Kidd tells me.  “And of course I hope people will reflect on the subjects of current homelessness and migration crisis.”

Djehan spent many days creating the camp, not only making sure it worked as an immersive space, but that it evoked the homeless camps that have sprouted up across the real world in recent years:

Philip Rosedale Proposes Clever Tweak to Yang-Style UBI: Payments in Cryptocurrency that Quickly Decays in Value If Not Spent

Virtual economy pioneer Philip Rosedale recently unveiled a simulation which suggests that a universal basic income -- the kind recently popularized by Andrew Yang -- cannot ultimately prevent widening divides between rich and poor. 

However, that’s not the end of the story.

In a new simulation just posted on his newsletter, Rosedale proposes a pretty ingenious tweak to the UBI concept -- basically, fund the UBI with a transaction tax, and then pay out the UBI itself in a cryptocurrency that decays over time:

To simulate an ideal wealth tax in this simulation (which would have the appealing property of being easy to actually enact and impossible to avoid), you simply make money decay and fund a uniform dividend to everyone...

Using transaction taxes to fund a basic income is supported by real economists as well. This proposal from Economist William Gale at the Brookings institute is to use a 10% VAT tax to fund a basic income, for example. This Cato Institute Study agrees with the idea that consumption taxes are a better way to manage equity than wealth taxes. And political candidate Andrew Yang’s proposed ‘Freedom Dividend’ is funded by a combination of a 10% VAT and a carbon tax.

Creating a cryptocurrency for UBI that decays in value -- let’s call it “UBI Coin” for short -- incentivizes everyone to spend their UBI on goods and services as quickly as possible. This in turn plows more money into the economy, and prevents growing the rich/poor divide that a standard UBI model can cause. 

You can see this in Rosedale’s latest simulation of economic transactions which factors in UBI Coin, where the wealth of each economic player is represented by size and color (Green = rich, Blue = middle, Red = poor). Look:

Compare that to Philip's previous simulation of traditional UBI, where with every transaction, a handful of Greens rapidly become gargantuan, as most everyone else is impoverished. Watch below:

Rosedale, who supported Yang during the primacy race, tells me he’d love to present his proposal to UBI/cryptocurrency advocates like him -- especially as Philip's approach doesn’t necessarily require government approval or resources:

Two New Movies Explore Whether Reality Itself is a Virtual World. One Stars Selma Hayek & Owen Wilson. The Other Features a Furry.

For Metaverse movie night, two new movies are available for streaming. The first above, A Glitch in the Matrix, is a documentary that explores the concept dramatized by the Wachowski siblings' movies and raised decades ago by Philip K. Dick:

We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs. We would have the overwhelming impression that we were re-living the present - déjà vu - perhaps in precisely the same way: hearing the same words, saying the same words. I submit that these impressions are valid and significant, and I will even say this: such an impression is a clue, that in some past time-point, a variable was changed - re-programmed as it were - and that because of this, an alternative world branched off.

An idea more recently raised by Elon Musk, but here's my take to Elon's musky version of that theory. Still the movie itself looks pretty eerie and thought-provoking. Also notable and unsurprising for Second Life and VRChat players, it features a furry.

Coincidentally (or not!), there's a new narrative movie on the same topic starring Selma Hayek and Owen Wilson -- this is Bliss:

For Auction: Art Created by Artificial Intelligence from Artists Also Created by Artificial Intelligence

This striking abstract painting is by an up-and-coming artist named Taylor; you can bid on it for $200 or more soon, in hopes it becomes a rare collectors’ item that symbolizes the start of a new art movement.

Because the thing is, “Taylor” is not an artist and this is not a “painting” as we typically understand those terms. The painting was generated by artificial intelligence… as was the painter herself. 

You can see more works by “Taylor” here, part of a fascinating project by rising technologist August Rosedale, whose development I’ve been casually following since the early 2000s.

Starting soon, Rosedale’s Mirage Gallery will auction off AI paintings like this to the highest bidder, and confirm their authenticity by registering them on a blockchain.

“I think that people will bid on AI-made paintings for the same reason people bid on human-made paintings,” August tells me. “People enjoy having beautiful art pieces around them and also can be invested in the idea of the artist's work increasing in value over time.”

The painting, to be sure, is not actually painted, and will come with a blockchain token.

“For the physical pieces, it will be a 24x24 inch canvas print. Each buyer can choose to sell the token and canvas print separately but the value will come from keeping them together.”

To create Taylor’s work, August compiled ten thousand or so abstract art paintings in a wide variety of styles, then fed them into a generative adversarial network, or GAN:

“The GAN works by having something called a discriminator whose job is to determine if an input image was from the original dataset or not. What this means is that the model that is training will create an image, and then feed it into the discriminator and see if it can convince the discriminator that the inputted image was from the original dataset. Over time, the model is able to create more convincing outputs that start to trick the discriminator.”

The only human input in their creation happened at the beginning, when August curated the datasets the AI then worked from:

“It is important for the datasets to have similarities in the images or else the outputs will be much more difficult to interpret,” as he explains. “Once the dataset has been made, the GAN plays a sort of game with itself to try to trick itself into believing that its own creations were from the original dataset. With powerful GPUs and lots of computing time, this process can result in amazing pieces of art. The Mirage Gallery artists will continue to refine their art with more hours of training as time goes on.”

Same goes for the personae and appearance of Taylor and “Alejandro”, the Mirage Gallery’s current representational artist:

Watch: Dwight from The Office Considers Entering the Matrix

You know that Dwight from The Office has such a perfect life, he literally wanted a Second Life. But did you know he was also invited to go even deeper? (Wait, wrong movie.) NBC recently out out this fairly funny unseen scene where Dwight has a chance to take the red pill or the blue pill, and chooses as only Dwight can.