The Great Bifurcation
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The Great Bifurcation
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Re: The Great Bifurcation
#2I agree with the thrust of this article, especially this line:
"For a long time I felt somewhat unique in this regard, but COVID has made my longstanding reality the norm for many more people. Their physical world is defined by their family and hometown, which no longer needs to be near their work, which is entirely online; everything from friends to entertainment has followed the same path."
The unbundling of physical and digital reality is certainly happening, but I also think new forms of rebundling are also happening. Before COVID, I would never dream of calling my daughter in the next room, but now I do it all the time - not (only) because I am lazy, but because the call or text is less intrusive than knocking on the door and therefore has better UX.
To see what's happening as only:
1) "the real world is the combination of the digital world and the physical world and that the real world is not just the physical world."
or
2) "the Metaverse is the set of experiences that are completely online, and thus defined by their malleability and scalability"
is to downplay the combinatorial possibilities of dis-aggregating and recombining the digital and the physical. It feels to me that a certain 'computational style' is becoming widespread tacit knowledge and shouldn't be identified only with the digital/online/virtual.
Re: The Great Bifurcation
#3At this stage in development of a new “space” or perhaps I should say “plane of existence” in the case of meta, you need to get as far away from regulation as possible. There will be many casualties, as there always are in pioneering endeavours, but these are just a necessary part of advancement.
Re: The Great Bifurcation
#4At this stage in development of a new “space” or perhaps I should say “plane of existence” in the case of meta, you need to get as far away from regulation as possible. There will be many casualties, as there always are in pioneering endeavours, but these are just a necessary part of advancement.
Which is - of course - easy to say when it is not the sailors themselves who are subject to the suffering.
Re: The Great Bifurcation
#5As the online world socially envelopes our subjective view of reality, is anyone else who grew up predominantly online simply dropping out? I've been spending more time on my meatspace hobbies, watching TV and movies, and generally avoiding interactions with the internet outside of work. I feel better for it and like I had been wasting so much time before on internet arguments and getting dopamine-hits from outrage based media experiences.
Re: The Great Bifurcation
#6At this stage in development of a new “space” or perhaps I should say “plane of existence” in the case of meta, you need to get as far away from regulation as possible. There will be many casualties, as there always are in pioneering endeavours, but these are just a necessary part of advancement.
Are you ready to be the casualty?
Re: The Great Bifurcation
#7I agree with the thrust of this article, especially this line: "For a long time I felt somewhat unique in this regard, but COVID has made my longstanding reality the norm for many more people. Their physical world is defined by their family and hometown, which no longer needs to be near their work, which is entirely online; everything from friends to entertainment has followed the same path." The unbundling of physic…
It wasn't until you mentioned texting your daughter in the next room that I realized that I've been doing the same with my wife. On several occasions I'll be in the living room, she'll be in the bedroom, and we'll text each other about what to eat for dinner. It never occurred to me to ponder about that sudden change in behavior.
Re: The Great Bifurcation
#8I still cannot see any reason I'd want to connect any identifier or avatar across different online worlds apart from gaming. Am I missing something?
For sure Meta wants to connect everything so it has a whole picture of its users so it can serve ads but why would people be compelled to connect their discords/linkedin/facebook or whatever personas when a key part of the web is anonymity, I don't even use the same handles for hn/reddit
Re: The Great Bifurcation
#9I'm glad he addresses Stephen Diehl and his anti-crypto screeds. Nearly all of Diehl's criticism is some form of “None of this digital stuff has any real world value.”
But the thing is, this digital stuff does have value to the people that own them. Diehl's opinion that the value is zero does not make it true.
It's very reminiscent of Clifford Stoll's articles. Stoll was a brilliant engineer and writer, but a terrible predictor of the future. "Why the Internet will fail" is probably Stoll's most famous column.
Re: The Great Bifurcation
#10As the online world socially envelopes our subjective view of reality, is anyone else who grew up predominantly online simply dropping out? I've been spending more time on my meatspace hobbies, watching TV and movies, and generally avoiding interactions with the internet outside of work. I feel better for it and like I had been wasting so much time before on internet arguments and getting dopamine-hits from outrage b…
If I were a betting man, I'd bet that some upcoming generation (maybe the one after Gen Z but who knows) will turn away from the digital world.