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Comment by LordFast | Hacker News Reader

"In the end, the most important connection between the Metaverse and the physical world will be you: right now you are in the Metaverse, reading this Article; perhaps you will linger on Twitter or get started with your remote work. And then you’ll stand up from your computer, or take off your headset, eat dinner and tuck in your kids, aware that their bifurcated future will be fundamentally different from your unitary past."

How is this different than me in 2001 using ICQ to chat with my friends/classmates about life/schoolwork, using Yahoo to read news, using forums to consume content and learn new things, and going out to dinner with my family/girlfriend IRL?

How is any of this actually a new paradigm?

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It's not, really, but it is more pervasive. In 2001 the internet was a thing, and one with great potential even if massively economically overvalued at the time (dot-com bust), but primarily relegated to those with a baseline interest in technology. Dial up was still used in a very large way. But in 2001 we were on the precipice of the explosion of web 2.0 and better hardware, namely smartphones, and that's when things really took off.

I think the difference here is the overall human approach to digital and physical lives. In 2001 the line between the two was clear and distinct. Now, for many, those lines blurred, and have blurred hard. Almost to the point to where their online manifestation has become their physical manifestation. Look at the language carryover from online to meatspace. More than once have I heard someone say "el oh el". And not in a sarcastic way. It's only a matter of time before desired physical characteristics bleed over. (Pretty sure it would be pretty easy to make an argument that it already has.)

It opened to a wider and wider audience. If you were a telephone operator in the early 1920s-1940s, you would have been messaging other operators over lines already. If you were on ARPANet you could have done it in the '60s-'70s. In the '80s you could have done it with acoustic couplers, modems, and BBSes. Then came the internet. Then came the web on desktop computers. Then the web on mobile.

I can tell you where I grew up (a poorer area), always-on internet access was very much seen as a luxury until the late 2000s. Many of my classmates used the internet at school rather than at home. Now kids in the same (still poor) area couldn't think of not having internet on their phones.

He made the case that the connection to the blockchain would be only as a unique individual identifier, rather than like you use your phone for signal/whatsapp. Not sure if it's sad (all the hype for that) or funny

Perhaps the new part is that it's now accessible to everyone and not just tech-savvy/nerd-types/households with enough income to blow on a PC.

Which of the things the parent listed are for "tech-savvy/nerd-types"?

I was only aware of a few households that owned a computer in the late 90s/early 00s. And only one had reliable dialup.

My closest friend got DSL in 2000-ish. But again, it was because his dad worked from home occasionally. No one else in my large extended family or friendgroup was online in any significant way.

Among my peers at school, I think most of them had heard of AIM by that point, but most didn't have screennames.

Personally, we couldn't afford a PC at that time.

Ok, fair point, 2001 is early. But you only need to give it a few years for that to change, and didn't need some fundamental new thing from there, it "just" became more widely accessible.

To be fair, late 90s/early 2000s Internet was pretty much run for tech-savvy/nerd-types. Kind of hard to imagine now, but it was considered quite eccentric to have an Internet-habit back then.

It's not. It's the same thing, now with a headset and better graphics!

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