Re: <nettime> ?Meta?

[Ryan Griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com>]

Favorite line from this weekend’s On the Media, regarding the reading comprehension skills of tech bros:

“You can lead a techie mogul to a book, but you can’t make him think."

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/science-fiction-origins-metaverse-on-the-media

"When Facebook changed its name to Meta, after the Metaverse, many were quick to identify the term's origin: Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash. But the novel hardly paints an optimistic future—runway inflation, collapsed governments, and a maniacal media magnate who uses the Metaverse to, get this, destroy people's minds. It begs the question: did Zuckerberg misread it?

This week, Brooke speaks with Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, Annalee Newitz, former Editor-in-Chief of Gizmodo and science fiction author, and Gene Seymour, longtime cultural critic, to unpack the literary world  behind the social media giant's new name. They discuss why the tech moguls love science fiction so much, the perils of reading these "world-building" novels too literally, and how new forms of the genre today are already making the Metaverse look obsolete.”

Take care all,
Ryan
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