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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

The very term "meat space" or "meat proxy" were terms invented by the terminally online who needed to disconnect a decade ago. Nobody sane talks or thinks like this.

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Hah those terms have been around for a long time. They're tongue in cheek, or they were originally, like calling outdoors the "big room with the blue ceiling."

“Meatspace” was a response to “cyberspace”. If I think about it (and I make no claims to veracity here other than gut feel), I can’t think of anyone who’d use “meatspace” in earnest except those who spend too long in the alternative; but then again I also can’t think of anyone who’d use “cyberspace” in earnest except those who understand close to nothing about it. So they’re opposites but originate from the same place.

Anyway, Merriam-Webster claims the terms were introduced fairly close to each other, only about a decade apart, in the 80’s (cyber) and 90’s (meat).

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-meatspace

> Nobody sane talks or thinks like this

Seems mean to me, to outright dismiss what parent says just because you feel like it's different from how you talk or think.

I'd agree though, most people AFK don't speak or think like that, but to say no one ("sane") does is making you seem more intolerant than "spreading knowledge" or whatever you think you're doing.

Actually, most conversations I have these days are almost entirely removed from the tech space (think discussions around academic works, theology, politics, etc.), and I would still say that 90% of the interactions I have or read are clearly and obviously written by an LLM. It's not just tech spaces that have this problem, and I think that's where my original thought stems from. Nearly every normie IG post description is written by an LLM, and nearly every Threads comment is written by an LLM, just like X has been. It has escalated out of tech space to the normies. Very soon, "meat space" will be the only space where one can interact with others and know that the thoughts flowed from a human brain and aren't simply the result of someone prompting an LLM to "write a rebuttal." If that makes me not "sane," then so be it.

> Very soon, "meat space" will be the only space where one can interact with others and know that the thoughts flowed from a human brain and aren't simply the result of someone prompting an LLM to "write a rebuttal."

And even that’s being optimistic. I lost faith once I heard that there are people honestly using ChatGPT to ask what to order at a restaurant! If large tech companies like Facebook get their way, you’ll soon be having your smart glasses¹ listen to the conversation, transcribe it, write a response, then show it to you on the lens so you can reply. And that’ll be just for the ones who want to fake it by still moving their lips, because the others will have voice (trained on their own) come out of speakers. “Smart” devices will be having conversations with each other while you are served ads.

¹ The royal “you”, not you literally.

I'd rather interact with an LLM than the terminally online.

Do you have proof of the etymology of Meat Space? I mean other than some AI generated slop?

My understanding is that’s a new term, unrelated to the context you’re describing.

This sounded off so I looked into it, apparently 'meatspace' has been around since the early '90s as a derivative of 'cyberspace'.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-meatspace

It's been a term used on the internet for as long as I've been online.

There is no reference within the provided context for how long you have been online, so I am unable to verify whether or not this statement is correct.

It's been used on UseNet since at least the early 1990s [0].

I think it comes from a Perry Barlow-esque feeling that Cyberspace is an improvement on the "merely" meat real world (perhaps even a proxy heaven on earth, cf. Platonism). Sometimes it is tongue-in-cheek, other times earnest (I assume for people who have found the real world (and their real bodies) a disappointment.)

[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-meatspace.

I wonder if the term might have been influenced by Terry Bisson's excellent short story "They're Made Out of Meat"[1], which was published in Omni Magazine in 1991.

Bisson himself credited the idea to the poet Allan Ginsberg[2]:

> “I was thinking about an interview I had read or heard that Allen Ginsberg was doing with some journalist,” he stated, “and he was talking about poetry and the guy was saying that it was like they were two poets talking or something like that and Ginsberg says, ‘No, we’re just meat talking to meat.’ And somehow that got stuck in my head.”

The earliest known online usage of "meatspace" seems to be two years later, in 1993. Then in 1995, it was apparently used in the Seattle Times[3].

[1] Full text: https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

[2] https://thewritingpost.com/2025/01/13/a-look-at-theyre-made-...

[3] Some citations: http://www.wordspy.com/words/meatspace.asp

It's an old term. Here's a reference from the New York Times in 2000.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/...

Your parent comments needless disdain aside, it was just a silly term used to refer to offline.

I've known the phrase "meatspace" for decades now as an "opposite" of "cyberspace" from some of the CyberPunk Sci-Fi of my childhood, though I cannot at this moment name any specific novels it might originate from. It's not a terribly new term, although it may have only recently gained common enough usage as to seem new to those who hadn't heard it before.

That one's ancient, for what it's worth. I'd be amazed if it wasn't coined by one of the first gen cyberpunk authors.

(Although I'm starting to have my doubts. Furthest I can get back is 1993 (usenet post). I'm curious to know if anyone can get further back).

I found the same as you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428664

My chatbot found an unsourced claim that Bruce Sterling used it in 1992.

Google Books gets me back as far as 1990, but I don't trust it (https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Law_and_Business_...) - I think there's a good chance the publication date is wrong.

Earliest reference in British Newspaper Archive is 1997. I wonder if anyone has access to newspapers.com?

But if it first crops up on usenet in 1993, I can't imagine it being coined much earlier than that.

Others have already provided links as proof, but anecdotally I've heard "meatspace" since at least the 1990s (I have been online since the 1980s).

"Meat proxy" OTOH is a newer term for people who when you communicate with them online just run everything through LLMs and respond with voluminous and mostly unedited slop. Hadn't heard that one until about a year ago.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat_puppet#English

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proxy_marriage

I've been using the term meatspace since at least the 90s, and would be semi-shocked if it didn't exist in either 80s sci-fi or posthumanist manifestos or whatever in some form or another.

Here are some concrete examples courtesy of an etymology site: https://wordspy.com/words/meatspace/

The use of "meat" to characterize the physical, analog, arbitrary, biological (as opposed to the logical, digital, formal) pre-dates the 80s/90s deliberate apposition with "cyberspace" afaik, but I don't have time to fish up concrete examples from my library atm.

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