Snow Crash (by Neal Stephenson)
I picked up Snow Crash because of an excerpt we read during a Scenario Club Meetup at the Urgent Optimists, and honestly, that one excerpt was enough to make me want the whole thing. The book is set in a near-future America where the physical world and a virtual one called the Metaverse exist side by side, and people move between them almost without thinking. Reading it, I kept pausing not because the story was slow, but because it felt uncomfortably familiar. Like Stephenson had written a […]https://jessa.blog/2026/03/22/snow-crash-by-neal-stephenson-2/
I love that this article talks about how we traded the metaverse for the AISlopiverse (I’m totally stealing that). Rather than what actually happened of having tech giants continually try and force things on people who just don’t want it.
Take away the metaverse, AI, and all the other crap, and I’m sure most of us would be a whole lot happier
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-metaverse-dying-horizon-worlds-ai-2026-3?op=1
Meta’s Director of Games Chris Pruett revealed that Quest usage hit an all-time high in 2025, which helped over 100 games to generate more than $1 million in gross revenue last year. Pruett announced in his ‘State of VR’ talk at Game Developers Conference (GDC) that not only has Quest usage grown year-over-year, but that …
Metaverse is dead and I'm mad. It actually never lived, it was just an old idea resuscitated by Zuckerberg for survival reasons as a CEO, after Facebook failed to return the expected profits to stockholders. A huge diversion that demonstrates how big money has the power to steer society, including academia. But it wasn't victimless. It hurt the investments of many people, companies, and public money. It hurt students who did theses about it. It burned academic time, money, attention and reputation. We are not blameless. We saw it coming. There are hypes and then there are hypes. My bubble saw it coming from the start. But many are not in a position to have the same insights. I regret not trusting myself more to be more vocal about it. In a time of great technological development, it is the jurists' duty to be critical, not only spectators or hype surfers.
«It is not the jurist’s job to be the herald of what happens, but rather to be a builder of a balance of factors that truly serves the society in which he or she is inserted. By merely explaining what happens, the jurist is a “prophet of the present”. He betrays the true prophetic function or the construction of the future, which it is his duty to perform». (Oliveira Ascensão*)
Michael Martine
Metaverse 💞 beyond.pictures
jessa
dazfuller 
Gürhan Uzun
SquaredTech
Eduardo 
