Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

China Miéville's "The City and the City" 2010 novel and 2018 UK TV adaptation, which popularized the term "unsee", includes a similar theme related to the crime of "breaching" the boundary between two virtual cities that occupy one physical city, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/apr/07/the-cit...

  The City and the City is set up as a straightforward crime novel: in the dilapidated city of Beszél in eastern Europe, Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is trying to solve what initially looks like a routine case. But as he looks deeper into the murder of a mysterious woman, he discovers that she has links to Ul Qoma, a city that exists in the same physical space as Beszél but whose inhabitants studiously ignore any sign of overlap.

Never heard of tha but definitely going to check it out.

I kinda feel like that's how cities are today and will increasingly be so as we get further into the future where people are interacting digitally first and physically second interaction starts to stratify.

I imagine a holo-lens future where it's quite literally possible to have a city to yourself or only see the set of people you want to with all the good and bad. Imagine social media bubbles but in the real world, with all the good bad bad that comes.

I've heard that in "the south" they don't care how close you get when you don't get too rich, but in the north they don't care how rich you get when you don't get too close.

I wish I could parse this

assuming some baseline animosity against a group of people (the "outgroup"), in the south the outgroup are resented for being successful, but if they can just be perceived as lesser the main group doesn't mind having them around. whereas in the north the main group doesn't want the outgroup mingling with them, but as long as they keep to themselves they can be as successful as they like.

My favourite novel.

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