Cobb: Fuilletons of the Metaverse

December 08, 2003

Fuilletons of the Metaverse

A good friend told me, as I was to embark on my blog-journey (approximately 1000 posts ago) that my style of writing most resembled feuilletons. As with many things from this gent, I had to look the word up in the dictionary.

feuilleton

\Feu`ille*ton"\ (? or ?), n. [F., from feulle leaf.] A part of a French newspaper (usually the bottom of the page), devoted to light literature, criticism, etc.; also, the article or tale itself, thus printed.

Fair enough. Much of what I write is light, but represents an evolutionary method of investigation. Anyway what brings this to mind is the work of Stephenson, Dick and Doctorow and the evolution of thought.

I am constantly aware of the difference that a massively literate population makes on intellectual production. I'm not sure that we grasp the various effects on what we think of knowledge and learning that millions of relatively intelligent people communication with each other creates. I often raise this backstory in the context of my continuing gripe with academics and the respect I have for religious traditions vis a vis pedagogical effectiveness. This time, however I am thinking of how my (own?) idea is or is not exactly what Neal Stephenson called the Metaverse in his novel Snow Crash.

I have not yet read Snow Crash, and while that seems incredible to some given my adoration of Cryptnomicon and patience with Quicksilver, I am willing to concede that my idea is not original and it is indeed the Metaverse. The man who taught me to program computers, a Jesuit priest by the name of Seliga who cannot be found on the web, once said to me that originality is the art of concealing your sources. But I think things have come around backwards. Originality is the art of proving your sources, the more lawyers the better.

I'm skeptical that ideas matter most as property. But it's clear to me that there is value in expression. So what I see as the idea of the Metaverse or any such brilliant concept of limited utility has more to do with the way in which it is presented and made accessible to people. It may seem counterintuitive to the ideas surrounding intellectual property today, but I am confident that this way of seeing things will win out. Distribution is, in this manner of thinking, more important than content. It sounds almost anti-intellectual but it not. The value of an idea is not found simply in its accuracy as a concept, but in its social reality as a practical part of humanity.

Clearly this is a rich vein for discussion, and we'll pick it up from time to time. But to circle back to the three authors and fuilletons, I am brought to mind of how valuable filmmakers are in the melioration of originality and the implication behind the educational impetus for filmmaking itself. As I think of the Metaverse, it appears as the natural heir to visual explication. The book, the blog, the journal, the written word is the intense, detailed and exploratory form. Through the medium of film with music and sound, emotional experiences are formed around narrative. In online game-space active experiences are created with other live people. It's even more impressive.

Folks complain that games are mind numbing. Games are just the first use of the technology. Ultimately all we want to do is communicate with each other. Thus the Metaverse and online game-spaces will always be interesting. They'll evolve into complex realms, no doubt. The interesting people will be those who bring the obscure fuilletons into the new medium.

I wonder if our regimes of intellectual property will prevent the contemporary from being exploited in this manner. What if only things like the Bible and the Koran remain in the public domain? What kind of Metaverse will we have then? I could live quite nicely in a Dickensian Metaverse for a while. If some publishing concern doesn't own Melville, I'll be happy sailing with Ahab in the interactive version of the future. It would probably be more fun to do Master and Commander, but the film is making too much money. It'll be locked up for a while despite the fact that very few of us knew of the book before the filmmakers did their deals.

Of course there will be bootleg Metaverses run by the Palestinians of the future. There's a thought. Moreover that's a regime of thought. What will be more powerful than the documentary Metaverse, the radical pamphlet with an entire room of virtual actors instantiating the themes of policy? This is where the real action will be. After WarTV jump into a virtual parliament, visit the virtual favellas of the disposessed of Oceania with whom we have always been at war.

Can't wait.

Posted by mbowen at December 8, 2003 08:07 PM

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