Happy new year everyone and to the first post of 2022. I will continue writing about the metaverse; a project that I started in the fall of 2022 with this post 👇🏾
Embedded post: “M1: The Mauhaus Project” by Rajesh Kasturirangan
If you know someone who’ll appreciate these essays, forward it to them!
This post is public so feel free to share it.
City → Planet. Writing → Code
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;" so started Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities.' Dickens wrote those lines in 1859, but the sentiment remains the same in 2022, except that the city straddles the world.
Embedded post: “M5: The Interverse” by Rajesh Kasturirangan
The Metaverse (or as I am calling it: the Interverse 👆🏾) demonstrates the best and worst of humanity in abundance, for there has never been a technology more capable of bringing us together or tearing us apart. I believe the interverse is the culmination of the two biggest technologies for organizing human collectives in recorded history: cities and writing, with the city → planet (see planetary urbanization) and writing → code. The ongoing pandemic (as of Jan 2022) illustrates the interverse in a nutshell: a global city affected by a global pandemic decoded by a global scientific collective.
As always, the underlying puzzle remains 'what is the human condition in the anthropocene?'
Recap
I started my exploration of the interverse with a series on identity and how it's being reconfigured.
Embedded post: “M7: Formalizing Identity Part I” by Rajesh Kasturirangan
Embedded post: “M8: Formalizing Identity II” by Rajesh Kasturirangan
Embedded post: “M9: Formalizing Identity III” by Rajesh Kasturirangan
If identity is being molded, who is doing the molding? And how & where? That's a question for the next few months. TLDR;
Identity is being molded by flows of data and value (AI, money and other Web3 developments) and digitally enhanced physical locations (the city)
Writing for Reading
What can you expect?
I will be 'writing for reading,' i.e., writing posts as a way of summarizing what I am reading on data/cities/money etc. Here are a few books (in no particular order) that I am reading to get a grip on the interverse:
Reality Media-Augmented and Virtual Reality —Jay David Bolter, Maria Engberg and Blair MacIntyre
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence — Kate Crawford
They are my go-to references for the key topics:
Data ✅
Money ✅
Cities ✅.
What's left? Can’t leave without mentioning the flow of energy, which lurks behind any discussion of data, information and value:
And finally, a couple of perennial favorites:
In reading these books simultaneously, I want to trace a computational line connecting minds-cities-data-digital-physical.... — so that we can ask these questions in parallel:
Is the mind a computer?
Is the city a computer?
Is the world a computer?
No, they are not computers. But they aren't not-computers either. Code isn't a 'model' of the world. Nor is it the world itself. Code is somewhere between map and territory. But what is the spectrum between the thing and its image? There's a concept or two waiting to be discovered on the middle path between reality and its representation.
The Publishing Plan
Short updates twice a week while I'm in book reading mode: emails Monday and Friday evening my time, could be Tuesday/Saturday morning for you.
Next essay: this Friday