It's a somewhat liminal experience to walk with a famous sci-fi author through a tech conference; there are many, many callouts. Money is never sent in thanks for the inspo. The one that sticks out to me the most is Facebook rebranding to "Meta" -- Neal Stephenson coined the term in 1992. As far as I know, they never sent thanks in any form.
It was 'metaverse' that Neal Stephenson coined (which Meta did take and use in a way that does not, to my untrained eye, seem legally defensible.) "Meta" is a prefix from Ancient Greek, dating back thousands of years.
As a kid that’s a hilarious name because “trump” is also a euphemism for fart. To this day, fart is the first thing I think of when I hear the word trump.
On the subject of corrupt-vs-build, Tolkien's contemporary CS Lewis had some good bits in The Screwtape Letters, in which a senior devil is advising a junior on the corruption of his charge. (I don't think one needs to be Christian to pick out its insightful bits on the human condition.)
> Well, I am afraid it is no good trying to make him brave. Our research department has not yet discovered (though success is hourly expected) how to produce any virtue. This is a serious handicap. To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh? But as we cannot supply these qualities ourselves, we can only use them as supplied by the Enemy—and this means leaving Him a kind of foothold in those men whom, otherwise, we have made most securely our own. A very unsatisfactory arrangement, but, I trust, we shall one day learn to do better.
> Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels. If conscience resists, muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people’s enemies. In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but not sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness.
The amount of people in my life who use Meta for the company and not still Facebook is probably exactly zero. I'm not talking about articles or meta-(haha) discussion about Meta or HN, though.
"At long last, we built the Torment Nexus from the famous scifi novel 'Don't Ever Build the Torment Nexus'. We hear the author was thrilled about our thank you letter and the 10% off coupon for the TormentNexus(tm) online shop that we included!"
> As far as I know, they never sent thanks in any form.
It concerned me more that Mark Zuckerberg regarded the Metaverse as something even desireable at all. In Snowcrash it's an escape from a dystopian real life--popular only to the extent that the alternative was so awful.
Well some people had really gorgeous high quality environments. And it was a good place to play Neal’s version of beat saber (the original used real swords).
Overall ultimately it’s a genre book that exists in a grim genre, though. If you consider that the entire 3d gaming world came after there’s plenty of beauty and optimism to be had in three dimensional environments.
How many people have you thanked for the words and phrases they originated? Note: They didn't make them famous. That happens through various means (marketing, PR, luck, etc...)
At least as many as the number of times I've tried to claim someone else's words and phrases as my exclusive intellectual property in order to profit, because I believe the latter is zero.
Trademarking words is common. "Apple" is one. It doesn't mean you can't use the word apple, it only means you can't name a computer company "Apple". There is still Apple Corps, Apple Bank, and tons of bakeries, cafes, donut shops, restaurants etc named things like "Apple Cafe", "Apple Donuts", "Apple Tree Diner", etc..
Or one can be like Apple, and just sort of ignore trademarks till you own them. Apple is kind of famous for taking over a significant portion of the music industry, despite a pre-existing agreement with Apple Corp never to do so. Not to mention launching the iPhone while Cisco still held the 'iPhone' trademark.
