[Cyberpunk] Nexus, The Birth of the Net, And How I Was Wrong about the Metaverse
My snide comment at the beginning of the previous post was wrong. "Metaverse" is a buzzword in VR circles, among industry professionals at least, and has been since at least 2018. And it's basically a vision for the VR future of the internet that sounds pretty much EXACTLY like the Net from Cyberpunk 2013 (pub. 1988) or the Matrix from Shadowrun (1989) or, well, the Matrix from Neuromancer (1984) that inspired them both. An early version of them to be sure, since we don't have commercially-available direct neural interface yet―but that exists in the lab and is futher along than you might realize.
I failed to realize the implications at the time, narrow-focused as I was on the VR headset, but at their Frontier event Pimax also announced they were inventing the cyberdeck. They didn't use that word of course, and they presented it as an accessory to their VR headset, but aside from using goggles rather than interface jacks―and being wireless―that's basically what it is. A portable computer with no monitor for running the net jacking into the matrix accessing the internet via VR (and eventually AR) from anywhere you go instead of just at home.
Valve is working on one too, which they've named the Deckard, just in case anyone needed reminding we're living the cyberpunk future.
(Man, terms like "cyberdeck" and "cybermodem" are going to seem really dated to the kids who will actually be using this tech, aren't they? I'm old. The current term seems to be "standalone PCVR". I wonder what they'll end up being called when they're in common use? Standalones? 'Lones? Standers? Maybe "Deckard" will get xeroxed and shorted to "deck" and Shadowrun will have sorta gotten it right after all?)
Then a few days after Pimax Frontier (and my previous post), Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook announced he'd like to literally become the villain from Ready Player One, and to stake his ownership claim on the future he's changing Facebook's name to Meta®. I mean, jesus fuckign christ he wants to literally COPYRIGHT THE INTERNET. If a god came down from Valhalla and offered to let me have just one single person in all the world killed with no repercussions (for me), well, for the first time in over a decade Mitch Fucking McConnell has some competition. The central conflict of Ready Player One is really happening, for real, RIGHT THE FUCK NOW, with Facebook standing in for IOI and Mark Zuckerberg as Nolan Sorrento. I fucking can't even.
In 1988 in the text of the Cyberpunk 2013 roleplaying game, I was first introduced to the concept of "future shock". I vividly remember the two times I've actually experienced it. This is the third. I am shocked and awed and honestly a little frightened.
And I'm too old to become a shadowrunner goddammit.
Since That Zuck is trying to steal the future of the internet by stealing the name for it, there's been a lot of talk about coming up with a new name for the concept. Thrillseeker, a youtube personality who runs a VR news channel I've been following for the past year, has proposed "the Nexus". I somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggested "the Matrix" in the comments of his video, not realizing until a couple days later that most of the folks in the VR social space today would probably take it as a reference to the 1999 movie, rather than Gibson and Shadowrun. Personally I'd prefer "the Net", since we seem to be actually living out almost exactly the future history of Cyberpunk 2013/2020 (just pushed up 30 years), but alas even with the recent video game spinoff RTG CP is too niche for that to catch on. If it's going to be anything else Nexus will probably win out, since (so far at least) he's the most prominent person to suggest an alternative term. If that (or anything else) does catch on, I hope some public-spirited person trademarks it before The Zuck can steal it too.