Given all the recent discussion of the metaverse as a potential future media model, I forced myself to read Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One, which is sometimes cited as one of its inspirations. Many have pointed out that the future depicted in the novel is pretty dystopian: a world where Earth is barely inhabitable and most people choose to spend as much time as possible in simulations drawn from nostalgic cultural detritus. But that description makes the book sound coherent as a critique, when it is not at all interested in criticality at all. It's not even especially interested in world building: The occasional passages that explain the technology behind the novel's metaverse-like simulations feel ad hoc, invented as needed to try to resolve some obvious objections at the level of the story, though that too is extremely thin — the cut scenes from
We have assumed control
We have assumed control
We have assumed control
Given all the recent discussion of the metaverse as a potential future media model, I forced myself to read Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One, which is sometimes cited as one of its inspirations. Many have pointed out that the future depicted in the novel is pretty dystopian: a world where Earth is barely inhabitable and most people choose to spend as much time as possible in simulations drawn from nostalgic cultural detritus. But that description makes the book sound coherent as a critique, when it is not at all interested in criticality at all. It's not even especially interested in world building: The occasional passages that explain the technology behind the novel's metaverse-like simulations feel ad hoc, invented as needed to try to resolve some obvious objections at the level of the story, though that too is extremely thin — the cut scenes from