This response tweeted by twitter user @coopertom about Zuck’s bizarre Metaverse demonstration on CBS cracks me up every time I watch it. The fox in the three piece suit is pitch perfect. 🤣
If you haven’t seen the full Mark Metaverse thing you can watch the whole metaverse mark segment here.
Facebook’s metaverse pivot has caused a lot of LMAO online recently as it has become an inescapable buzzword. But Facebooks Metaverse strategy has been a long time coming, the obvious direction of travel since Facebook bought Oculus in 2014.
I’ve been talking about the need for an open Metaverse forever as the idea of Zuckerberg owning and controlling ‘reality’ is terrifying.
I can’t belive Facebook showed off the wonders of VR by using a bland cartoon meeting room. Utterly ridiculous.
Watching it unfold reminded me of something that happened in my first proper office job.
It was in 2008. Escaping retail for a confines of a ‘shared service centre’. For 8 hours a day I basically hit Ctrl-C from Salesforce and Ctril-V’d it into a different online platform on behalf of clients. It was mind numbing. But it paid more than running a bookshop that was about to go bust even before the crisis hit.
Sitting down at my computer on my first day at work was a real shock. The computers were locked down XP Machines that only had IE 5/IE 6 installed. Bearing in mind my entire job was copy pasting from one online platform to another I couldn’t belive I didn’t have a web browser that had tabs.
I ended up sneaking Firefox on to the network via memory stick as a colleagues PC didn’t have its USB ports disabled. My first month or so of working in the job I was the top performing copy and paster 🏆. I was literally getting though twice as much work as other people because I was using a web browser that I could tab between tabs. Slowly other people started using FF and productivity in our team went way up.
IT found out and I got a massive fucking bollocking. I was still on probation and for a period I genuinely thought I was going to loose my job over Firefox. lol. (The head of IT really did want to fire me, and preceded to hate me for the next 8 years. Which was a little awkward as I ended up being a project manager working directly with his senior team).
Anyways, a more sensible head prevailed as everyone in the team was doing like twice as much work as we had been before. The win was actually the fact I had shaped my computing environment to meet my expectations and requirements.
I bring this up because the type of experience Mark presented on CBS is the IE6 of the Metaverse
In the Serpentine Gallery’s most recent Future Art Ecosystems report I’m quoted on page 27: For the ‘zoomer’ generation it is common practice to be able to build, change and shape the virtual environment around them.
It’s not in the book but I went on to say something like “As these environments get more complicated, and more and more people enter into them, the idea that you should be able to change ones environment to ones liking will become an expected norm’”.
Just for a moment imagine that realtime engines do actually become a space/place for collaboration and association. I think they will. Trust’s recent Moving Castles essay explains how and why.
Zoomers are already entering the workforce having grown up in configurable virtual worlds like Minecraft. Just like I wouldn’t accept not having tabs in 2007. I very much doubt zoomers are going to accept cartoon corporate meeting rooms as the a default meeting room.
Permanently Moved
10 Years With a Straight Razor
Since I have been old enough to do so, I’ve hidden my face behind a beard. Shaving with a straight razor requires the sacrifice of attention.
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Wrote and gave my talk at The Stoa. It wen’t really well. Check the video at the link.
- Had a fantastic call about 3D resin printing with @justmakesstuff from insta – more on this soon.
- Bashed out 3k words about the near future of DAOs for a client and sent it off.
- Learning more Unreal Engine.
Dipping the Stacks
History of PaaS: How Canon almost became a major cloud provider
The origin of AWS and the story of Zimki, the world’s first Platform as a Service that belonged to Canon.
After all, most people believe that they are their bodies, that they are their minds, or that they are some composite bodyminds.
The Least Interesting Generation | The Art of Manliness
It is very rare to find an individual — whether they’re hugely successful or just an average joe — who has even a modestly interesting background, much less a McQueen-esque one.
The Most Interesting Generation | Applied Divinity Studies
If interestingness is a function of high status people having done low-status things, it is also a function of class mobility. It is also, as I mentioned in the discussion of Ellison, a hole in meritocracy. As our systems for identifying and cultivating talent improve, the life stories of our rich and famous will tend to homogenize.
In Praise of the Info Dump: A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction ‹ Literary Hub
What distinguishes this genre isn’t so much plotting, characters, or concepts, but its special relationship to information.
Reading
A while back Paul Czege tweeted a page from a book about writing for young people called ‘Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail. It was written in the 1970’s and I couldn’t find a copy in the UK anywhere, so I ended up getting a hardback 1st edition from the states on eBay for about £7 including shipping.
I’m just reading a chapter a night before bed. I’d recommend this book to any parent of a child who wants to write/loves writing but hates English class in school
Music
thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist
True Cuckoo – I’m Not a DJ
I’ve been listening to True Cuckoo all week. They make extremely bleepy bloop music. Each song on the album has a hand crafted quality that I really enjoy. The whole album also feels like a wind up mechanical toy or music box unspooling.
True Cuckoo has also released some copyright free tracks. The track below ‘This Is Not Jazz’ is amazing and well worth your time.
Remember Kids:
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