The future still isn't what it used to be: Cyberspace

 In the previous post, I said 

Telecommuting and remote work exist, but they don't dominate, they only really make sense for some professions and they don't mean jacking into a Snow Crash or Neuromancer virtual world, even though one of the largest corporations in the world has rebranded itself around exactly that vision.

This very morning, I decided to add David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to my reading list. In the preface to the 20th anniversary edition (in 2015), Tom Bissell writes

Yes, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson may have gotten there first with Neuromancer and Snow Crash, whose Matrix and Metaverse, respectively, more accurately surmised what the internet would look and feel like.

Um, did they? Bissell goes on to say

(Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc- based entertainment)

Fair, but ...

Yes, there is a major difference between on-demand streaming and broadcast streaming, where a broadcaster puts out content according to its schedule. There is also a difference, though it seems like a smaller one, between obtaining a physical object that allows you to view something when you want to and being able to view something more or less instantly via an always-on connection (using "view" in a fairly general sense here that would include listening to audio).

Having the combination of "what you want" and "when you want it" without the friction of obtaining a physical artifact like a book, record, tape or disk does seem like something new and significant (more musings on that here), so in that sense, to the extent Wallace's world is limited to physical media, it's farther from our reality than one with data flowing freely over networks.

With one exception, though (which I'll get to) the modern web/internet that I'm familiar with has little to do with Neuromancer's matrix or Snow Crash's metaverse.

Let's start with how you get there (one small disclaimer: While I finally got around to reading Snow Crash a couple of years ago, the last time I read Neuromancer was, um, closer to when it came out, so I'm relying on fairly old memories plus secondary sources for that one; for reference, Neuromancer was published in 1984, Snow Crash nearly a decade later in 1992, Infinite Jest in 1995). 

You get to Gibson's cyberspace by jacking in, that is, connecting your central nervous system to a computer interface that delivers a completely immersive experience. To access Stephenson's metaverse, you need a terminal and googles, either a high-quality private terminal or a free public one which provides only a grainy, black-and-white experience. In either case, the experience in Snow Crash is immersive in that you are generally not aware of the outside world, but it's not the full-sensory experience of Neuromancer.

Back in our world, of course, people generally access the web through their own computing devices, whether a phone, a tablet, a TV set, a laptop or even a desktop computer. There is no scarcity of devices. If you have access to any at all, you probably have easy access to several. You can even visit a public library and use a computer there. You do need an internet connection, but those are nearly everywhere, too. You can get on the internet in a cafe, for example, by connecting to their WiFi (as far as I can tell, actual internet cafes are nearly extinct).

In most cases, you're aware of the world around you, or at least, the internet experience doesn't take over your entire sensorium. The semi-exception is gaming, which in some cases makes an effort to be truly immersive, more or less along the lines of Snow Crash. VR headsets have been around  in some form since the 80s (if not before), and they're a natural fit for applications like FPS games, so this is not exactly a surprise.

Long story short, in much of the world the internet is easy to access with readily available equipment. Going online often means using your phone or watching TV, that is, using something that's recognizably derived from a technology that existed before the internet. Immersive experiences are only a bit harder to get to, but in any case they're not the norm.

In Neuromancer, jacking in requires special equipment on both the human and computer end (though Gibson does speak elsewhere of billions of people having access). The bar is lower in Snow Crash, but it's not something that most people spend much time on. It's interesting that the 1992 version is a bit more mundane than the 1984 version, almost as though computing in the real world had become more commonplace. It's also telling, I think, that access to the virtual worlds of the novels is difficult enough to hang a plot point on, particularly in Gibson's earlier version, almost as though stories were written by writers.

OK, once you're in the virtual world, how do you get around? I'll focus more on Snow Crash here, mainly because memories are fresher. The key point about Cyberspace is that it's a space. In particular, it's a three-dimensional construct centered around a 100-meter-wide road 2¹⁶ (65,536) kilometers long following a great circle on a  virtual sphere.

If you want to meet with someone else online, you arrange to go to the same space by moving your avatars. You can move your avatar around by walking or running, or use a vehicle, or take the transit system, which has 256 express ports, with 256 local ports in between each, at one kilometer intervals. There are special spaces within the metaverse, many with restricted access.

From an immersive gaming perspective, this makes perfect sense. From the perspective of the web, it makes no sense at all. If you chase a link from here to the Wikipedia article on Snow Crash, you just go. This page goes away and you see the Wikipedia page. Or it opens in a separate tab and you can flip back and forth, or whatever. You don't do anything even metaphorically like moving from this page to that. There's no concept of distance. At worst, one or the other of the pages might load slowly, but you don't have a sense of motion while that's happening (well, I don't, at least).

In other words, the key feature of Cyberspace, that it's a space, is at best completely irrelevant to the modern web, and at worst it's actually in the way. As I recall, Gibson's matrix is similar. For example, if you encounter ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) you see an actual wall of ice or some other material that you have to get through.

Gibson's matrix, at least, is also spatial in another way: its contents are tied to physical computers in the real world. In particular, the two AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer are physically located in Bern and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. That is, they are presumably running on hardware located in those cities. Wintermute would like to be able to join with Neuromancer, its other half (Neuromancer is less concerned about this).

Data in today's internet is much more distributed. Not everything is in the cloud in the sense that there's no single well-defined physical location for data or the processors that process it, but a lot is, and even when a service or database is single-homed in a particular place, it usually doesn't matter exactly where that is. Even if two servers are located on different continents, they can still communicate easily because of the internet.

In the end, the technology of Neuromancer and Snow Crash isn't particularly prescient. The parts that are still around, such as a data-carrying network that's accessible across the world, or an immersive VR, were already under development in the 1980s. Gibson and Stephenson were drawing on cool and experimental, but real, technology as a jumping-off point for fiction. Moreover, they also copied some of the limitations of the technology of the time, particularly the need for specialized access terminals and on services being hosted on particular equipment located in particular places.

But in the end, Neuromancer and Snow Crash are not really about the technology. Snow Crash is more an exploration of Anarcho-Capitalism in a world where the official government has collapsed and ceded power to a collection of private entities. Neuromancer is in large part a conventional thriller, even including a physical ROM module as a MacGuffin (not withstanding what Bissell says about breaking away from physical media).

But for my money the computing technology and its relation -- or lack thereof -- to today's web isn't the interesting part of either book. Neuromancer is a ripping yarn set in a magical world whose magic happens to be presented narratively as a computerized virtual world. Snow Crash is a philosophical novel that uses an array of inventions, including but very much not limited to the metaverse, to frame its investigations. 

In both cases, the strange but also familiar technology is telling us that the novel's world is a different world from ours. The authors, particularly Stephenson, use those differences to explore our own world. As such, there's no particular need for them to have predicted the actual world of a generation later.