Eh, I like some of Neal's books a lot, particularly Diamond Age is likely in any top ten I'd come up with. But this claim is basically only true in the trivial sense that wouldn't have any arbitrary creative work if its author hadn't created it.
So in that sense it's the exact same as Facebook. Without Neal somebody else would invented "post Cyberpunk" and without Mark somebody else would have invented whatever Facebook is - social media for your grandparents maybe?
Neal is "unique" but we're all unique, it's the least unique thing about us. He struggles to write satisfying endings, he leans too heavily on the rape-as-character-development trope, his novels have become flabby as his fame grew and presumably he was able to resist editorial demands more, he doesn't know as much about technology as he thinks he does... Like I said, "Diamond Age" would probably make my top ten, but that's not because it's flawless by any means.
> If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook.
Yes, because multi-trillion dollar companies are completely natural and spawn almost at random to whatever nerd happens to be working on a particular problem at any given time
Note that GP didn’t say Meta, the trillion-dollar company, they said Facebook, the social platform that won its generation of social platforms. One of those platforms was bound to win, just by the interconnected nature of social networks, and I think reasonable people can disagree on whether that success sets you up inevitably to make a trillion dollars or not.
I was really hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in development hell for years. Instead, we got Ready Player One, which is like Snow Crash for dummies. There's a trailer for a low-budget version of Snow Crash.[1] It's awful.
I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.
I love Snow Crash too, for what it is, and I'm sure someone could make a worthwhile movie out of exploring the concepts, but then I'm not really sure it's worthwhile, as it wouldn't need to be strictly based on that work.
But if someone is hoping for a scene accurate depiction I'm equally unsure it's possible, or that anyone would want to see it, between everything from the "radical"(/Rule of Cool) Carmageddon pizza delivery for the mafia and variable rollerskate wheel sizes to the main character literally being named Hiro Protagonist.
It's a great nostalgic time capsule for me, which also spawned a lot of other great works, but I'm fine with leaving it as that.
I would love to see a proper version of Snow Crash get theatrical release or maybe even the high-concept-tv-series-with-ten-episodes treatment the big streamers are cooking up these days.
Ready Player One was terrible. The secret that was hidden for years was discovered by someone just trying to drive backwards on a racing map that tons of people play every day? I get that it's hard to drive the map backwards, but come the fuck on, gamers would discover that in the first week.
I believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic.
Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
I’ve experienced something similar in attempting to report very explicit and outrageously racist posts and comments. Zero action on blatant neo-Nazism (including specific threats of violence), and several lost appeals. However, far more benign posts and comments that don’t really violate the ToS are often flagged. This is quite prevalent on Instagram especially, which is quite worrying as it’s acting as a radicalisation tunnel for large numbers of impressionable young people. It’s almost as if the algorithm attempts to throw you into a far-right rabbithole because they know it boosts engagement.
That's exactly what happens. The algo does not judge how hurtful a rabbithole may be - it optimizes for engagement with some moderation sprinkled on top. I've tried to make my facebook feed palatable for a couple months and eventually passed up on trying. I'd rather IM my family about cat photos than engage with their fringe political views. Same goes for colleagues on LinkedIn.
After I reported a post, nothing happened, then I messaged the mods, and they agreed with me that the post should be taken down and they did.
A day after it was taken down, I got a warning message from Reddit that my report has been rejected, and I should stop falsely reporting content, or else.
I got a week long ban for calling someone out for being a Nazi. The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all. At the time I thought it was mere incompetence, but in hindsight, it seems more like intentional malice.
It's not intentional malice, it's just 2025 - an age where calling someone a fascist or a racist is worse than being one.
If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.
It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.
This was back around 2019 or so, but you're not wrong at all. Back then Zuckerburg et al at least pretended to be against hate speech. It's so much worse now.
>The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all.
Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.
Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."
This is not an anomaly, by the way. I've interviewed many multiple Meta staffers (including senior leaders), and can find little evidence that leadership actually read "Snow Crash" and/or even cared about virtual worlds. Even after spending tens of billions claiming they were building the Metaverse.
I think anyone who says there is nothing interesting in Rand either didn’t read it or is acting in bad faith. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are uniquely fascinating even if you don’t agree with her stance.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
I don't know how anyone can read her and not feel the overt reader manipulation. Her skill, if any, is to break the 3rd wall without seeming to acknowledge that 3rd wall and constantly tell the reader they are one of these special people that are borne better than others.
Rand is a clear intellectual trap for lazy thinkers. If you like her, you're not thinking.
I think reading philosophical arguments masquerading as novels, or any sort of fiction, is an intellectual trap in general. Anything can be made to work in a fictional work simply by saying that it works. It means nothing.
"Genghis Khan the 73rd, who got high on some really weird drugs in the fifth year of his reign, decided that everybody in his empire should be tortured for at least 73 minutes every day. And everybody loved it and completely voluntarily sang his praises and said it was the best thing that ever happened to society and there were just all sorts of benefits and you should totally organize your society this way too because look how well it is working for this one."
> I think reading philosophical arguments masquerading as novels, or any sort of fiction, is an intellectual trap in general. Anything can be made to work in a fictional work simply by saying that it works. It means nothing.
Only if you take the work as-given. Whenever I read a fiction book I take it as a starting point for thinking about things. The book provides a what-if. It's up to the reader to figure out if that what-if makes any sense, and if the conclusions in the book follow from that.
The parent comment has more nuanced opinion than yours. They also substantiate it by raising a point of value in reviewing contrary viewpoint, whereas your comment is devoid of any arguments.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Literally every person I have any respect for as an intellectual has described Ayn Rand as slop.
I have yet to hear positive things come from anyone who isn’t a libertarian. The sort of person who identifies with the characters because they could also envision themselves doing a monologue that lasts 45 pages.
Both Rand and William McGonagall are widely regarded as are uniquely fascinating.
In a layered complex world both the above statement and the statement that there's little of interest in Rand's books for socialists, for hedge fund traders, or for the majority of people with a background in political science, can be true.
Stephen Fry, well known for his love of the English language and breadth of eclectic interest, when discussing the Scot said:
I am too kind to you and to [McGonagall's] memory to reproduce the entire poem'
(The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within [NY: Gotham, 2007], p. 153), and further:
Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse.
His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it.
It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.
(p. 154, as above)
Regardless of anyone's position on the political stance of Rand, her written works deserve little more than to be the subject of atrocious parody of her robber baron sick o' fantasy, the breathless bodice ripping drama of trains repeatedly entering and being reversed out of tunnels against a soundscape of a geared steampunk stock ticker of yore.
I dunno who you were talking to, but the RL research areas I worked in had some definite Neil Stevenson fans.
but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough
There's precious little value for those types to read stuff like "Snow Crash".
It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.
Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.
Meta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work.
I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
I have recently had a need to create an Instagram account. I logged in from my home IP and it was recognized as coming from Vietnam (my home IP has been the same since 2016, always with the same ISP). Everything was in Vietnamese and I had to spend half an hour figuring out how to switch it back to English. But in the home feed I still got only Vietnamese influencers, and there was nothing in the settings to change that. I got assigned to Vietnam for life.
Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS.
I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.
There's a mid-sized international bus company over here and once I bought a ticket for the wrong day, realized only after payment. I simply called the phone number, the lady spoke my language, reissued the ticket for a different day, that's it.
I was shocked that customer support can work like that.
No, the Instagram account was completely unrelated to my FB account (different email, different browser). Every other tool I have ever used over the last decade showed my IP location correctly, so I don't think there are any mistakes in my ISP's WHOIS.
As a bonus, Facebook Business Manager sometimes shows me messages in Russian.
my best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know
Last time meta blocked my account was because I gave away free framing lumber after demolishing my poorly framed basement. Somehow it got flagged and that was that. Thankfully I don’t give a damn, and now never will.
Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
If they suspend everyones accounts, the Internet will be a better place.
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
I have been locked out of my account for 5+ months -- and customer support has been a Kafkaesque nightmare. I am still locked out. (Oh, and I've spent $1M+ in paid META ads...)
Haha... it's crazy. And I have friends at META who've been trying to help, and they themselves get in a customer support hell as well. It's wild. $1.9T company.
Yeah, I've been locked out of Meta for a couple of years, just stopped VR altogether because getting the account back turned into a new hobby that I never asked for. Just moved on.
On one level this is amusing. But what if both accounts are owned by the same person impersonating Neal Stephenson? My understanding was that he was not on any social media. Did that change at some point?
More cyberpunk than this would be for the official author side to be a `.onion`, with a vanity subdomain that took a borrowed farm of GPUs a week to compute, and an RSS/Atom reader feed from that, plus a Fediverse/Mastodon account for the normies that you host yourself from an offshore data haven, paid for with mixed BTC, and a Reddit account just to keep some twerp from grabbing your name, all of which you access exclusively through Tor Browser, from a dedicated/compartmentalized immutable device. :)
But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.
(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)
That's designed for nerds. Like Matrix and the other platforms that will never see mainstream adoption because they lack product management and crazy distribution.
I loved this game! I still have the original rulebook. That my AD&D 2nd ed. books, Star Frontiers and Gamma World boxed sets may be my most prized possessions.
Cool! I had to look "Uncle Al catalogs" up. I remember seeing ads for Car Wars, but never played it myself. There were so many neat games back then.
Gamma World was really neat and timely given how fearful we all were of nuclear war. I remember watching Road Warrior at the time and thinking that Gamma World could actually be the world we live in.
Dragon Magazine would occasionally have articles on Gamma World too. So much food for the young imagination.
Twitter is "lenient" with ban evasion because it runs on cognitive load and they have no time to deal with it themselves. It's just completely beyond cognitive capacity of its controlling parties(including financial owners) that it could appear that they are chill with speeches it hosts as well as unilateral cultural influencing capabilities it has.
Had a similar experience with meta. Extremely opaque decision making, terrible UX. Account permanently disabled ... did not follow community standards, literally on sign up to get a dx account.
It's difficult after an experience like that to see how they are so successful. Is it because their users are so addicted and ad sellers will do anything to get onboard ? It's probably just a few dark patterns here and there to bump up impressions at will.
I made a whatsapp business account yesterday, started a test advertising campaign. Went to log in to the developer area, "Your account is banned, there is no appeal". And whatsapp customer services says "Your account is fine and there are no issues and this ticket is closed"
I really, really don't understand why you have to make a facebook account in order to get access to the developer area, and now I get to watch my advertising spending tick up with no way of accessing anything about it.
As someone in the burbs + middle america, Facebook still has a frustrating grip on many of the community social communications which tend to take place in private Facebook groups (Girl Scouts, community HOA, etc.)
There is a whole world out there, full of people who call Wi-Fi the internet. Nearly all of them do many things better than you, and most of them wouldn't treat you with contempt just because you find small talk difficult, can't swim or can't dress well on a tight budget.
Think about what kind of image your present to them and if it's really how you would like them to see you. Just honestly.
I've opened a ticket with Microsoft regarding a M365 Business account and an actual person called me within an hour and fixed my issue right away, and I am not even exaggerating here. It was a trivial issue and I am not claiming it's always like this, but it CAN be like this.
Business account though. Everyone else is just a waste of time to provide support to.
I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop.
Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.
I called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
The Microsoft family/organisation situation is fucking ridiculous. If you somehow get enrolled in either, good luck ever ridding your device of it.
For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
can't wait for ai juries, 12 different ai models by different companies & they all have to reach the same conclusion, but one of them is a 300m parameter 2 bit quantized model and keeps hallucinating, causing an eternal hung jury
You would start by reading the complete terms and conditions of service. Somewhere in there is a paragraph that states that your account can be suspended and/or terminated at any time for any reason, or no reason. Then you find the paragraph that limits you to mandatory arbitration. You conclude that you're wasting your time if you attempt to sue anyone over this. Eventually you realize that you're better off without a FB account.
For any legal action you should find a lawyer. Many lawyers will be happy to meet briefly with someone to figure out what they can do for you or if they should point you to somebody else. In this case such a meeting is likely to be very brief indeed, the chance of success is negligible and the likely costs are sky high.
In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.