Expanding reality
“The cyberpunk concept of“ mirror glasses “positioned virtuality as something opposite to reality. In part, it was. In the early 90s, the network was the lot of geeks who turned on technology, who were well versed in network protocols, but had little understanding in life. Over the next ten to fifteen years, the network became closer to the average consumer and the element of escapism gradually decreased. Today, the virtual nature of the Cybernetic Globe in equal parts contains both the concept of virtuality detached from the material world, and the concept of “expanded reality”. The first zone of Cyberglob - Reflect - a digital copy of reality. The second and third are fictional worlds in which ... "
The screen goes blank for exactly a second to explode with a clip of the old Gorilazz. That's always the case. There was a good lecture. I drink two small sips of still hot coffee. A paper cup with the Shvidko logo looks like an anachronism. For three years now, at Mack, we switched to glasses with “moving pictures”. Then it was fun for children, now contextual advertising for adults is being played.
However, this television screen with a diagonal of 60 also looks like an anachronism. E-ink technology has fallen in price completely, “electronic” wallpapers can be bought at a reasonable price in any large store. And the programmer, if you yourself cannot connect the broadcast through the “smart home” system. Full wall tv. If desired, all the walls of this shopping center could be sealed with screens and advertisements. The question is different - why do it in reality, if all this can be done in virtuality?
Half past ten, Saturday. The mall is still empty. I take out the inside left pocket of a Palm Qaudro 750i jacket, the Classic form factor, expanded by a “scroll”. I carry “Glasses” in another pocket, in an old-fashioned case with velvet. It looks like ordinary glasses, only a slightly expanded handle gives them a gadget for access to Cyberglob. Communication with the "palm" - through the radio channel. I put on “glass”. Light dizziness. The data stream from Reflect blurs the contours of the world, superimposing information layers on matter. Near the glass doors of stores, menus, technical and marketing information are beginning to appear. The user-friendly interface of the Decada operating system unobtrusively pops up in the lower left corner. I would not wear them here, but, Lena asked me to break through the prices of some clothes. Shopping too lazy it’s easier to spend some traffic and drink some more hot coffee. The list of goods is displayed in the lower right corner and its development begins. The list moves smoothly from one outlet to another, goes around the corner, returns, descends to the first floor and returns to the right corner with specific prices in specific stores. Smooth, eye-pleasing animation. The result of the long technological chain of data processing and the imposition of a virtual image of the interior of the building. Reflect downloads information from everywhere, from the streams of internal cameras of the full wave spectrum, the open information systems of the mall to the microchips sewn into clothing labels from fashion boutiques. Through satellite trunks, radio channels and cables, this powerful stream goes somewhere to the processing “platforms” of Sayberglob, where a multilayer cake from the “Dice” is baked from them, "Cast of reality." From there, a thin stream of data descends from heaven at the call of some end-user like me. A couple more clicks on the "palm" and the list flies away on Lenki's e-soap.
Sometimes I think it would be nice not to know about the mechanics that pull these ghostly images onto objectively existing matter. Maybe you should think about changing your profession? ..
From the coffee remains a black viscous residue. Time to go. The Gorilazz clip ends, I go down the stairs to the September morning on the other side of the glass doors and catch the continuation of the “lecture” with the edge of my ear.
“The network of the 90s melted geographical distances and destroyed the administrative boundaries of space. The virtuality of today is realized in the multidimensionality of space, an infinite variational series of expanding realities ... ”
***
The “palm” operating screen is extinguished, I read from the “scroll” - a flexible 8-inch screen that extends from the PDA. The option for left-handed people is the “scroll” is stretched to the right side, the left hand remains on the qwerty-clave of the gadget.
A selection of information was uploaded by the gatekeeper operator three minutes ago when I got into the Pozdnyaki carriage. Gatekeepers fellows, when ten years ago people were talking about uweb-two-three-zero, they prepared their breakthrough and made it clear to everyone that the human factor in the fight against information chaos is a key topic. Gated to work with dense data arrays and armed with tools for searching for information, gatekeepers have long become a real alternative to the "traditional" media, giving the end consumer the information that he needs. Five years since I signed up for the daily extended newsletter of what I need and since then I have not bothered with surfing the net. However, gatekeepers do not do real grandmas on what they filter information arrays. They created Cyberglob and now have the Main Contract on hand,
"Europe has jaundice." That’s for sure, the Arabs and Chinese slender ranks entered the Old World, settled there and began to actively multiply. "The process has begun." No need for crusades and other bloody events. It is enough to come here with your family, to consolidate with fellow countrymen and slowly crush with your fence on the Europeans, softened by the benefits of civilization.
"In Little Shanghai, two stores are crushed." This is local news. About what is happening there, on the other side of the city.
The Chinese came here ten years ago when the construction of real skyscrapers began in Kiev. The crisis with local staff, local snickering general contractors with unrealistic prices and lack of experience in high-rise construction provoked a massive landing of Shanghai brigades building half-kilometer candles in their city. After a couple of years, they rebuilt their quarter in Troeschina, thereby organizing another chinatown. Kiev has become even closer to the civilized world.
The train breaks out onto the South Bridge. A bright September day is striking, forcing a squint and to take your eyes off the screen. Every day I cross the Bridge at least twice a day, but still love to look at the landscape outside the window. Lower Telichka on the right side of the Dnieper - in the palisade of completed and under construction skyscrapers. Ten years ago, the remnants of equipment were taken out of a dilapidated industrial zone, demolished Soviet-era workshops and warehouses, leaving only tangled deposits of utility networks under poor asphalt untouched and re-zoned the territory. The core of the new business center has grown here in less than five years and continues to grow further, competing with Podol City of the Fishing Peninsula. Under the pressure of billions of dollars and the “wishes” of private investors, the “blue lines” of the right and left banks have changed forever.
Whistling cars go into the tunnel. Passengers return to reading newspapers, sticking into communicators, PDAs and simple phones, listening to mp31 and the latest albums of emo artists. Three boys on the contrary are dying from some podcast on the screen of the gadget. The young lady on the left is watching a transmission from the fashion channel on the stylish Nokia FF7575. A neatly dressed pensioner is carefully typing SMS.
"New York. Waiting for a new attack. " Yeshkin cat ... When will they already understand that the Third World War has already begun and is in full swing?
It must be tied to political news.
“Closing QuakeCon-2017.” The first Quaker convention held in Singapore’s sixty-thousandth Crater, the largest center for cyber games in Southeast Asia. Nothing special, but the last paragraph of the news makes you smile. This year, the amount of transfers for cyber fighters for the first time exceeded that in baseball. Esports is gaining momentum. But it all started with local brawls in DOOM. “Smart clothes have become smarter.” Columbia has launched a new line of winter jackets for the 2017-18 season. The slogan of the advertising company is It's Wired. Ponte for visitors. Jackets stitched with heating-cooling systems, diagnostics of the owner’s condition and translators of this data into the network have been riveted by the Chinese for about five years now. “Biocomputers enter the market of individual users. Silicon will finally be a thing of the past. "...
I read this news to the transfer station at the Sports Palace. The screen goes blank, collapses and neatly hides in the side panel.
***
I am walking along the crowded front row of Old Petrovka, the media market that grew out of the “gully”, where speculators sold books and magazines in the early 1990s. Now they sell everything that can carry information. Including pirated products.
Pirates were driven as much as this market existed. Waves of demonstration cleansing passed through these rows several times a year, but cofact dealers again raised their point rolettes and laid out multi-colored boxes with software, games, music and films on the shelves. The situation could not be changed even by a specialized shopping center planted near the market where they sold exclusively media products. It’s a paradox, but hi-tech media sold better at a flea market format flea market than in the galleries of a media mall shining with a supernew design.
Life to the pirates could spoil only the new Minister of Culture, a young, progressive and, most importantly, owning a significant part of the production capacity for the replication of disks. Underground factories quickly covered up. We were also able to agree with customs. True, this did not solve the problem anyway.
Minimization of the element base of computer equipment, including storage media, gigabit communication “trunks” that have become available to the average user for a penny, gave the pirates a fundamentally new opportunity.
Bored looking guys lazily wandering around in the crowd quickly pulled pocket gadgets from the wide pockets of immense neo-rapper jackets, reinforced by additional memory modules and broadband wireless adapters. The distribution takes off on a flash drive or disk in minutes. If the pirate’s comrade doesn’t have something on the local media that the client needs, then it merges in the same few minutes from local or western servers. Cops, if they catch such fighters, they really can’t stick anything yet. Technology, as always, is ahead of the law.
The rest of the market has not changed much. All the same iron boxes with counters, plastic canopies above the rows and milling crowds, exchanging banknotes for ephemeral tales, encoded with zeros and ones information about worlds that never existed.
Passing through the ranks, I understand that in a few years this place will be waiting for a really high-quality breakthrough, which will lead to the writing of new rules for the game. If once money was money for which this information was bought, then soon the information itself will become money. The currency for which it will be possible to buy wealth.
***
The front door creaks strainedly, I find myself in a room that is not much different from the store of ordinary computer parts of the middle class.
The first impression is misleading.
The scripter comes from somewhere in the back of the utility room, fastening his fly on the fly.
- Hi.
- Hi. Everything is in place?
- Yes. What will you pay?
- 256 "hard bits".
“Basalt?”
“What did you think?”
In the jargon of networkers, “basalt” refers to the most dense versions of the “building material” of Cyberglob, Dyce, a multilayer information array that describes a material object in various aspects. "A cast of reality." Basalt is the currency of information business professionals. To get truly dense versions of the dice from which gatekeepers make advanced versions of clusters for the Second and Third Zones is not an easy task.
A box from under the SonyErricson 1100 appears on the counter. Without waiting for my surprised replicas, the Scripter opens the lid and displays the contents. I nod with satisfaction. Inside is Dreamer-VI.
"Full speaker."
Mankind has created static artifacts of art for dozens of centuries, the "immobility" of which was determined by the properties of the information medium - stone, wood, metal, paper, on which the signs were written. The images torn from the course of life reflected some single moment of this changeable world, permanently frozen imprints of reality. The figure thawed the problem. Now artists have created works of art, changing as well as reality itself.
The scripter takes the white matte cube out of the box and activates it. A flexible transparent screen creeps out from the top face. From the side - two planes with the contours of the palms. I give the Scripter a disk with “basalt” and lay my hands on the contours. Intricate multi-colored patterns begin to appear on the screen, slowly unfolding spirals, circles and ovals. The “speaker” pulls out information about my emotional state from me and converts it into graphic images. It looks bewitching. The original purpose of Dreamer-VI is meditation practice, when a person who watches the visualization of his emotional state, controls it and corrects it, reaching peace and tranquility. However, opposite options are possible.
Everything seems to be in order. I take my hands off the contours and put the artifact in a box. The script is standing opposite.
I am a designer. I mainly deal with the constructive structure of the building, but recently I began to switch more and more to interiors. Market. I need Dreamer-VI not only to take an empty shelf space or to relax after a hard day. The ability to record visualization of the emotional state of the client gives a lot of material in order to then make the interior that he likes.
- The order? I ask.
- Yes.
Not too talkative type. But it’s always nice to deal with him.
I go outside, holding in my hands what should, as I think, change the world around us a little more.
***
“The boundaries are blurring. To say exactly when it started is to sin against the truth, everyone who looks around and ponders what is happening will have their own reference point.
Borders between states still retain their strength in the form of barriers and customs officers stopping goods from material values, but modern communications have cut through the barbed wire and communication between people on different sides has practically no restrictions. Information is no longer subject to customs inspection.
Streams of advertising are pushing cultural boundaries, accustoming everyone to consume everything. In all the McDonalds of the world, it smells the same. We forget our history, but we can distinguish well between international consumer brand characters, clogging the media with different voices, essentially saying the same thing - “buy me!”.
Reality interferes with fiction. The frames crashed into the twin towers of the aircraft seemed to be copied from Hollywood blockbusters. At the premiere of "cult" films, people are discharged in the costumes of the main characters, and they continue to call popular characters from TV shows on-screen names in real life. The entertainment industry rivets fictional worlds into which we run from time to time.
The network is a huge carnival, where real faces are erased by nicknames and phony data in user profiles and everyone can be anything, with anyone and as the soul desires.
The difference between a man and a woman is erased by fashion, stage images of teenagers who are undecided in the wardrobe, and surgeons who change sex. The boundaries between life and death disappear. That unfortunate sheep will also be erected a monument to those who are pulled from the other world with the help of cloning technology and genetic engineering.
We do not need Archimedes turning the earth. We need a fulcrum. The fulcrum around which we can build our coordinate system, where the world has more or less clear contours. "
The screen goes blank for exactly a second to explode with a clip of the old Gorilazz. That's always the case. There was a good lecture. I drink two small sips of still hot coffee. A paper cup with the Shvidko logo looks like an anachronism. For three years now, at Mack, we switched to glasses with “moving pictures”. Then it was fun for children, now contextual advertising for adults is being played.
However, this television screen with a diagonal of 60 also looks like an anachronism. E-ink technology has fallen in price completely, “electronic” wallpapers can be bought at a reasonable price in any large store. And the programmer, if you yourself cannot connect the broadcast through the “smart home” system. Full wall tv. If desired, all the walls of this shopping center could be sealed with screens and advertisements. The question is different - why do it in reality, if all this can be done in virtuality?
Half past ten, Saturday. The mall is still empty. I take out the inside left pocket of a Palm Qaudro 750i jacket, the Classic form factor, expanded by a “scroll”. I carry “Glasses” in another pocket, in an old-fashioned case with velvet. It looks like ordinary glasses, only a slightly expanded handle gives them a gadget for access to Cyberglob. Communication with the "palm" - through the radio channel. I put on “glass”. Light dizziness. The data stream from Reflect blurs the contours of the world, superimposing information layers on matter. Near the glass doors of stores, menus, technical and marketing information are beginning to appear. The user-friendly interface of the Decada operating system unobtrusively pops up in the lower left corner. I would not wear them here, but, Lena asked me to break through the prices of some clothes. Shopping too lazy it’s easier to spend some traffic and drink some more hot coffee. The list of goods is displayed in the lower right corner and its development begins. The list moves smoothly from one outlet to another, goes around the corner, returns, descends to the first floor and returns to the right corner with specific prices in specific stores. Smooth, eye-pleasing animation. The result of the long technological chain of data processing and the imposition of a virtual image of the interior of the building. Reflect downloads information from everywhere, from the streams of internal cameras of the full wave spectrum, the open information systems of the mall to the microchips sewn into clothing labels from fashion boutiques. Through satellite trunks, radio channels and cables, this powerful stream goes somewhere to the processing “platforms” of Sayberglob, where a multilayer cake from the “Dice” is baked from them, "Cast of reality." From there, a thin stream of data descends from heaven at the call of some end-user like me. A couple more clicks on the "palm" and the list flies away on Lenki's e-soap.
Sometimes I think it would be nice not to know about the mechanics that pull these ghostly images onto objectively existing matter. Maybe you should think about changing your profession? ..
From the coffee remains a black viscous residue. Time to go. The Gorilazz clip ends, I go down the stairs to the September morning on the other side of the glass doors and catch the continuation of the “lecture” with the edge of my ear.
“The network of the 90s melted geographical distances and destroyed the administrative boundaries of space. The virtuality of today is realized in the multidimensionality of space, an infinite variational series of expanding realities ... ”
***
The “palm” operating screen is extinguished, I read from the “scroll” - a flexible 8-inch screen that extends from the PDA. The option for left-handed people is the “scroll” is stretched to the right side, the left hand remains on the qwerty-clave of the gadget.
A selection of information was uploaded by the gatekeeper operator three minutes ago when I got into the Pozdnyaki carriage. Gatekeepers fellows, when ten years ago people were talking about uweb-two-three-zero, they prepared their breakthrough and made it clear to everyone that the human factor in the fight against information chaos is a key topic. Gated to work with dense data arrays and armed with tools for searching for information, gatekeepers have long become a real alternative to the "traditional" media, giving the end consumer the information that he needs. Five years since I signed up for the daily extended newsletter of what I need and since then I have not bothered with surfing the net. However, gatekeepers do not do real grandmas on what they filter information arrays. They created Cyberglob and now have the Main Contract on hand,
"Europe has jaundice." That’s for sure, the Arabs and Chinese slender ranks entered the Old World, settled there and began to actively multiply. "The process has begun." No need for crusades and other bloody events. It is enough to come here with your family, to consolidate with fellow countrymen and slowly crush with your fence on the Europeans, softened by the benefits of civilization.
"In Little Shanghai, two stores are crushed." This is local news. About what is happening there, on the other side of the city.
The Chinese came here ten years ago when the construction of real skyscrapers began in Kiev. The crisis with local staff, local snickering general contractors with unrealistic prices and lack of experience in high-rise construction provoked a massive landing of Shanghai brigades building half-kilometer candles in their city. After a couple of years, they rebuilt their quarter in Troeschina, thereby organizing another chinatown. Kiev has become even closer to the civilized world.
The train breaks out onto the South Bridge. A bright September day is striking, forcing a squint and to take your eyes off the screen. Every day I cross the Bridge at least twice a day, but still love to look at the landscape outside the window. Lower Telichka on the right side of the Dnieper - in the palisade of completed and under construction skyscrapers. Ten years ago, the remnants of equipment were taken out of a dilapidated industrial zone, demolished Soviet-era workshops and warehouses, leaving only tangled deposits of utility networks under poor asphalt untouched and re-zoned the territory. The core of the new business center has grown here in less than five years and continues to grow further, competing with Podol City of the Fishing Peninsula. Under the pressure of billions of dollars and the “wishes” of private investors, the “blue lines” of the right and left banks have changed forever.
Whistling cars go into the tunnel. Passengers return to reading newspapers, sticking into communicators, PDAs and simple phones, listening to mp31 and the latest albums of emo artists. Three boys on the contrary are dying from some podcast on the screen of the gadget. The young lady on the left is watching a transmission from the fashion channel on the stylish Nokia FF7575. A neatly dressed pensioner is carefully typing SMS.
"New York. Waiting for a new attack. " Yeshkin cat ... When will they already understand that the Third World War has already begun and is in full swing?
It must be tied to political news.
“Closing QuakeCon-2017.” The first Quaker convention held in Singapore’s sixty-thousandth Crater, the largest center for cyber games in Southeast Asia. Nothing special, but the last paragraph of the news makes you smile. This year, the amount of transfers for cyber fighters for the first time exceeded that in baseball. Esports is gaining momentum. But it all started with local brawls in DOOM. “Smart clothes have become smarter.” Columbia has launched a new line of winter jackets for the 2017-18 season. The slogan of the advertising company is It's Wired. Ponte for visitors. Jackets stitched with heating-cooling systems, diagnostics of the owner’s condition and translators of this data into the network have been riveted by the Chinese for about five years now. “Biocomputers enter the market of individual users. Silicon will finally be a thing of the past. "...
I read this news to the transfer station at the Sports Palace. The screen goes blank, collapses and neatly hides in the side panel.
***
I am walking along the crowded front row of Old Petrovka, the media market that grew out of the “gully”, where speculators sold books and magazines in the early 1990s. Now they sell everything that can carry information. Including pirated products.
Pirates were driven as much as this market existed. Waves of demonstration cleansing passed through these rows several times a year, but cofact dealers again raised their point rolettes and laid out multi-colored boxes with software, games, music and films on the shelves. The situation could not be changed even by a specialized shopping center planted near the market where they sold exclusively media products. It’s a paradox, but hi-tech media sold better at a flea market format flea market than in the galleries of a media mall shining with a supernew design.
Life to the pirates could spoil only the new Minister of Culture, a young, progressive and, most importantly, owning a significant part of the production capacity for the replication of disks. Underground factories quickly covered up. We were also able to agree with customs. True, this did not solve the problem anyway.
Minimization of the element base of computer equipment, including storage media, gigabit communication “trunks” that have become available to the average user for a penny, gave the pirates a fundamentally new opportunity.
Bored looking guys lazily wandering around in the crowd quickly pulled pocket gadgets from the wide pockets of immense neo-rapper jackets, reinforced by additional memory modules and broadband wireless adapters. The distribution takes off on a flash drive or disk in minutes. If the pirate’s comrade doesn’t have something on the local media that the client needs, then it merges in the same few minutes from local or western servers. Cops, if they catch such fighters, they really can’t stick anything yet. Technology, as always, is ahead of the law.
The rest of the market has not changed much. All the same iron boxes with counters, plastic canopies above the rows and milling crowds, exchanging banknotes for ephemeral tales, encoded with zeros and ones information about worlds that never existed.
Passing through the ranks, I understand that in a few years this place will be waiting for a really high-quality breakthrough, which will lead to the writing of new rules for the game. If once money was money for which this information was bought, then soon the information itself will become money. The currency for which it will be possible to buy wealth.
***
The front door creaks strainedly, I find myself in a room that is not much different from the store of ordinary computer parts of the middle class.
The first impression is misleading.
The scripter comes from somewhere in the back of the utility room, fastening his fly on the fly.
- Hi.
- Hi. Everything is in place?
- Yes. What will you pay?
- 256 "hard bits".
“Basalt?”
“What did you think?”
In the jargon of networkers, “basalt” refers to the most dense versions of the “building material” of Cyberglob, Dyce, a multilayer information array that describes a material object in various aspects. "A cast of reality." Basalt is the currency of information business professionals. To get truly dense versions of the dice from which gatekeepers make advanced versions of clusters for the Second and Third Zones is not an easy task.
A box from under the SonyErricson 1100 appears on the counter. Without waiting for my surprised replicas, the Scripter opens the lid and displays the contents. I nod with satisfaction. Inside is Dreamer-VI.
"Full speaker."
Mankind has created static artifacts of art for dozens of centuries, the "immobility" of which was determined by the properties of the information medium - stone, wood, metal, paper, on which the signs were written. The images torn from the course of life reflected some single moment of this changeable world, permanently frozen imprints of reality. The figure thawed the problem. Now artists have created works of art, changing as well as reality itself.
The scripter takes the white matte cube out of the box and activates it. A flexible transparent screen creeps out from the top face. From the side - two planes with the contours of the palms. I give the Scripter a disk with “basalt” and lay my hands on the contours. Intricate multi-colored patterns begin to appear on the screen, slowly unfolding spirals, circles and ovals. The “speaker” pulls out information about my emotional state from me and converts it into graphic images. It looks bewitching. The original purpose of Dreamer-VI is meditation practice, when a person who watches the visualization of his emotional state, controls it and corrects it, reaching peace and tranquility. However, opposite options are possible.
Everything seems to be in order. I take my hands off the contours and put the artifact in a box. The script is standing opposite.
I am a designer. I mainly deal with the constructive structure of the building, but recently I began to switch more and more to interiors. Market. I need Dreamer-VI not only to take an empty shelf space or to relax after a hard day. The ability to record visualization of the emotional state of the client gives a lot of material in order to then make the interior that he likes.
- The order? I ask.
- Yes.
Not too talkative type. But it’s always nice to deal with him.
I go outside, holding in my hands what should, as I think, change the world around us a little more.
***
“The boundaries are blurring. To say exactly when it started is to sin against the truth, everyone who looks around and ponders what is happening will have their own reference point.
Borders between states still retain their strength in the form of barriers and customs officers stopping goods from material values, but modern communications have cut through the barbed wire and communication between people on different sides has practically no restrictions. Information is no longer subject to customs inspection.
Streams of advertising are pushing cultural boundaries, accustoming everyone to consume everything. In all the McDonalds of the world, it smells the same. We forget our history, but we can distinguish well between international consumer brand characters, clogging the media with different voices, essentially saying the same thing - “buy me!”.
Reality interferes with fiction. The frames crashed into the twin towers of the aircraft seemed to be copied from Hollywood blockbusters. At the premiere of "cult" films, people are discharged in the costumes of the main characters, and they continue to call popular characters from TV shows on-screen names in real life. The entertainment industry rivets fictional worlds into which we run from time to time.
The network is a huge carnival, where real faces are erased by nicknames and phony data in user profiles and everyone can be anything, with anyone and as the soul desires.
The difference between a man and a woman is erased by fashion, stage images of teenagers who are undecided in the wardrobe, and surgeons who change sex. The boundaries between life and death disappear. That unfortunate sheep will also be erected a monument to those who are pulled from the other world with the help of cloning technology and genetic engineering.
We do not need Archimedes turning the earth. We need a fulcrum. The fulcrum around which we can build our coordinate system, where the world has more or less clear contours. "