Tea at Trianon: Who Wants the Metaverse?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Who Wants the Metaverse?

From JSTOR Daily:

Let’s start at the beginning. In her 2010 article “Capsules and Nodes and Ruptures and Flows: Circulating Subjectivity in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash,” Lisa Swanstrom described Stephenson’s metaverse as, “an expansive and seemingly borderless ‘place,’” which “allows for sensory expansion in spite of any bodily or financial limitations.” This is Stephenson’s conception in its most hopeful iteration. Zuckerberg and other advocates including Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speak of the metaverse in similarly rosy terms. Last summer, Zuckerberg called the metaverse an “embodied internet” that would ideally be interoperable.

“It’ll actually feel like we’re in the same place, even if we’re in different states or hundreds of miles apart,” he explained, adding that “when you’re building social systems primarily, you want everyone to be able to be a part of the same systems. So we want to make them as affordable as possible, we want to make them as unified as possible.” And way back in 2016, Sweeney opined optimistically that, “this metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else. If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government and be a god on Earth.” (Read more.)