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Past visions of cyberspace, cont'd.
Jul. 18th, 2003 07:30 pmIt's interesting to ponder how fictional cyberspaces evolved as computer interfaces and the real Internet did. After Neuromancer, which of course inspired an army of imitators, there were two later books (and probably many more) that sprung up during the early-1990s cyberpunk revival, which actually took into account subsequent technological developments.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: As usual, Mark Rosenfelder says it best. Much about Stephenson's story is tongue-in-cheek, but the Metaverse (his cyberspace) seems a sincere attempt at futurism. Good: The Metaverse is fundamentally not a hard-wired world, but a set of protocols for software and human interaction, inspired by the hallowed Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. Bad: The Metaverse is just too spatial. Like Gibson's matrix, everything in it is confined to the same Cartesian grid, and is addressed by spatial position-- not only that, everything's sitting on the surface of a spherical planet. The planet is somewhat larger than Earth in equivalent distance units, so there's plenty of room; but, still, this seems like a needless constraint. Furthermore, there's a strange etiquette rule that confines travel to physicalistic metaphors aside from certain rigidly defined entry points. If I want to go to some virtual store, I have to pop into the Metaverse somewhere else, and ride the monorail or my cool virtual motorcycle. From the hindsight of a Web-covered world, this seems pointless. At least Stephenson acknowledges that hackers will drop to a 2D desktop world to do serious work.
The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker: Here, just about everything is accessible in a 3D cyberspace (though, again, serious hackers will often prefer to use a command line), and it's the full Metaverse-ish deal with full-body avatars (called "tuxedos"), VR headsets (when desired), and fluid notions of identity. But Rucker didn't nail everyone to the same coordinate grid. Travel is primarily by the cyberspace equivalent of hyperlinks, which behave sort of like idealized wormholes (indulging Rucker's love of non-Euclidean geometry) and are all over the place. What Rucker didn't foresee was that hyperlinks would be as dynamic as they are, generated on the spur of the moment by search engines and the yammering of bloggers and such. He imagines people jumping around via static link-clusters like the "Bay Area Netport", basically what a 1990s dot-com type would call portals. Of the books about immersive cyberspaces that I've read, I do think it's closest to describing a usable virtual world in which things could actually be accomplished.
Stephenson started working on Snow Crash in the late 1980s, when computer user interfaces had gotten pretty sophisticated, and it was clear to any technically savvy person that the Internet was the coming thing, but before the World Wide Web became its dominant interface. Rucker wrote The Hacker and the Ants just a few years later (1993-94?), when the World Wide Web had burst on the scene, but before the coming of the first wave of half-decent Web search engines. In both cases, the vision of the future turns out to tell us a lot about how people thought about cyberspace at the time of writing.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: As usual, Mark Rosenfelder says it best. Much about Stephenson's story is tongue-in-cheek, but the Metaverse (his cyberspace) seems a sincere attempt at futurism. Good: The Metaverse is fundamentally not a hard-wired world, but a set of protocols for software and human interaction, inspired by the hallowed Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. Bad: The Metaverse is just too spatial. Like Gibson's matrix, everything in it is confined to the same Cartesian grid, and is addressed by spatial position-- not only that, everything's sitting on the surface of a spherical planet. The planet is somewhat larger than Earth in equivalent distance units, so there's plenty of room; but, still, this seems like a needless constraint. Furthermore, there's a strange etiquette rule that confines travel to physicalistic metaphors aside from certain rigidly defined entry points. If I want to go to some virtual store, I have to pop into the Metaverse somewhere else, and ride the monorail or my cool virtual motorcycle. From the hindsight of a Web-covered world, this seems pointless. At least Stephenson acknowledges that hackers will drop to a 2D desktop world to do serious work.
The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker: Here, just about everything is accessible in a 3D cyberspace (though, again, serious hackers will often prefer to use a command line), and it's the full Metaverse-ish deal with full-body avatars (called "tuxedos"), VR headsets (when desired), and fluid notions of identity. But Rucker didn't nail everyone to the same coordinate grid. Travel is primarily by the cyberspace equivalent of hyperlinks, which behave sort of like idealized wormholes (indulging Rucker's love of non-Euclidean geometry) and are all over the place. What Rucker didn't foresee was that hyperlinks would be as dynamic as they are, generated on the spur of the moment by search engines and the yammering of bloggers and such. He imagines people jumping around via static link-clusters like the "Bay Area Netport", basically what a 1990s dot-com type would call portals. Of the books about immersive cyberspaces that I've read, I do think it's closest to describing a usable virtual world in which things could actually be accomplished.
Stephenson started working on Snow Crash in the late 1980s, when computer user interfaces had gotten pretty sophisticated, and it was clear to any technically savvy person that the Internet was the coming thing, but before the World Wide Web became its dominant interface. Rucker wrote The Hacker and the Ants just a few years later (1993-94?), when the World Wide Web had burst on the scene, but before the coming of the first wave of half-decent Web search engines. In both cases, the vision of the future turns out to tell us a lot about how people thought about cyberspace at the time of writing.