Some background: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizo...
I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.".
Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
In a layered complex world both the above statement and the statement that there's little of interest in Rand's books for socialists, for hedge fund traders, or for the majority of people with a background in political science, can be true.
Stephen Fry, well known for his love of the English language and breadth of eclectic interest, when discussing the Scot said:
I am too kind to you and to [McGonagall's] memory to reproduce the entire poem'
Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse.
His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it.
It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.
Regardless of anyone's position on the political stance of Rand, her written works deserve little more than to be the subject of atrocious parody of her robber baron sick o' fantasy, the breathless bodice ripping drama of trains repeatedly entering and being reversed out of tunnels against a soundscape of a geared steampunk stock ticker of yore.
I was... astounded. Here, truly, was the Florence Foster Jenkins of poetry writing, destined to fame for all the wrong reasons.
I have yet to hear positive things come from anyone who isn’t a libertarian. The sort of person who identifies with the characters because they could also envision themselves doing a monologue that lasts 45 pages.
Oh and even back then Atlas Shrugged was too damn preachy.
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Rand is a clear intellectual trap for lazy thinkers. If you like her, you're not thinking.
"Genghis Khan the 73rd, who got high on some really weird drugs in the fifth year of his reign, decided that everybody in his empire should be tortured for at least 73 minutes every day. And everybody loved it and completely voluntarily sang his praises and said it was the best thing that ever happened to society and there were just all sorts of benefits and you should totally organize your society this way too because look how well it is working for this one."
It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.
Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.
but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough
What a world we live in.
Normie design and hyper distribution always win.
Gamma World was really neat and timely given how fearful we all were of nuclear war. I remember watching Road Warrior at the time and thinking that Gamma World could actually be the world we live in.
Dragon Magazine would occasionally have articles on Gamma World too. So much food for the young imagination.
It seems like the best of the worst.
But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.
(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)
Headdesk.
That domain has been registered since 2000, it's probably real.
It links to a google plus account, it's probably not updated promptly.
He also has (had?) a personal one he used that just got suspended.
In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.
I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.
Don't give up hope.
I would love to see a proper version of Snow Crash get theatrical release or maybe even the high-concept-tv-series-with-ten-episodes treatment the big streamers are cooking up these days.
I think it may be a high school student project.
But if someone is hoping for a scene accurate depiction I'm equally unsure it's possible, or that anyone would want to see it, between everything from the "radical"(/Rule of Cool) Carmageddon pizza delivery for the mafia and variable rollerskate wheel sizes to the main character literally being named Hiro Protagonist.
It's a great nostalgic time capsule for me, which also spawned a lot of other great works, but I'm fine with leaving it as that.
But if Neal Stephenson didn't exist, we'd not necessarily have what he created. That's how unique his ideas are.
And Meta, billions of dollars later, is still no Metaverse...
So in that sense it's the exact same as Facebook. Without Neal somebody else would invented "post Cyberpunk" and without Mark somebody else would have invented whatever Facebook is - social media for your grandparents maybe?
Neal is "unique" but we're all unique, it's the least unique thing about us. He struggles to write satisfying endings, he leans too heavily on the rape-as-character-development trope, his novels have become flabby as his fame grew and presumably he was able to resist editorial demands more, he doesn't know as much about technology as he thinks he does... Like I said, "Diamond Age" would probably make my top ten, but that's not because it's flawless by any means.
Yes, because multi-trillion dollar companies are completely natural and spawn almost at random to whatever nerd happens to be working on a particular problem at any given time
Who knows, it could've been MySpace Tom?
I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop.
Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
That was the only "help" he could provide.
For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
I’ve got a proxy on random machine in a OVH DC in Oregon. Always properly geo-located to Oregon - until a few months ago.
Now YouTube insists I’m in France. Which is quite entertaining, ads wise.
Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS.
I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.
I was shocked that customer support can work like that.
Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
I'd had it for 5 years, no excess returns, no issues. I click add and go to checkout... banned.
Some reasons about religious icons flashed on my screen. It was red cross bandages ffs!
And why ban me, and not the seller?!?
Calls, emails resulted in confused but unhelpful people.
Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/facebook-deleted-my-account...
If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.
It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.
Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.
Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."
Yeah, OK. Gross.
Your policies help to enable one genocide in Myanmar and suddenly people expect you to have standards.
Because to do otherwise would just be too much of an assault on free speech apparently.
In other news the president signed an executive order that acknowledges flag burning is protected speech even as it promises to find a reason to prosecute people for it. Also trying to force the Smithsonian to stop talking about slavery,
After I reported a post, nothing happened, then I messaged the mods, and they agreed with me that the post should be taken down and they did.
A day after it was taken down, I got a warning message from Reddit that my report has been rejected, and I should stop falsely reporting content, or else.
Some heckler I guess.
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” - Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Stephenson's Facebook account has been restored within the last 1-2 hours. (I've been checking since the morning.)
But the irony goes on forever.
Way too many only post content on Facebook on Goodreads. Or even worse, the only notification comes from Amazon.
I really, really don't understand why you have to make a facebook account in order to get access to the developer area, and now I get to watch my advertising spending tick up with no way of accessing anything about it.
SLHamlet•1d ago
michaelbuckbee•1d ago