Tagide

For the most part, activities on the Web are projections of activities that had been going on before it: banking, travel arrangements, publishing, document sharing, news, etc. But in some important ways, the resulting new whole is much more than the sum of the old parts. There is life on the Web that doesn’t exist elsewhere. That new life is fueled by economic incentives that couldn’t possibly exist in platforms bound by physical limitations, and that pertain to the virtual world of information. And so the question arises: are we really ready to cope when the Metaverse calls our home phones?

Here is a real story of this brave new world, one which, with some spices of imagination, could be the basis for a cyperpunk novel `a-la Snow Crash.

Continue reading →

Once a year, during the summer, I get to travel back in time. It’s about 5,600 miles from California to Portugal, and about 60 years from the life style in Irvine (or Lisbon, for that matter) to the life style in my mother’s house in Mangualde. Give or take another 60. Time travel is not evenly distributed. For example, my mother just installed high-speed wireless Internet in the house. Time is also not linear in one’s mind, as every time I come to Mangualde I find myself re-experiencing the feelings of my childhood and teenage years, during which we clearly had a life style that was, in comparison to modern days, quite ancient. Despite those flash-forwards and flashbacks, and because of my mother’s (and others like her) resistance to change, life here happens in a style that is quite different from the life style of the cities we live in, and is more similar to the life style of her ancestors. It’s lovely, and makes me wonder whether the economies of scale in which we live in the future are really sustainable or just a blimp in history that is about to burst… Here is a report from the past.

Continue reading →