This is a semi-regular update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.

Current book word count: 142,713

Writing

I am happily typing away and 41 of 75 chapters are ready for editing. This included a couple of chapters that needed significant restructuring. I already knew that I had been sloppy writing the chapters on the Web area, but I really didn’t do a great job on those. I guess my biggest issue is focusing on the story of the Web how it relates to narratives about the metaverse without getting into the details of the history of the Web. I have written entire chapters about some obscure Web platform that can be seen as the spiritual successor to this really big trend now. And while interesting it didn’t add anything to the topic of the metaverse. A lot of words ended up on the cutting floor. Also known as my “rejected snippets” folder, which diligently collects these things to maybe turn them into an article.

But overall I feel good with the progress. I also feel good about the structure and how the points come together.

At least that’s what I tell myself. It’s a pretty complex book in the sense that it tries to weave together societal and cultural trends with technology and different ideas and ideologies how they all go together. There are a lot of things that build on each other and if I miss one piece or didn’t introduce it properly, it will be very hard to follow later. Of course people have read it piece-meal already, but this will be the first time that this thing will collide with the editors in full.

Viewing

I am mostly validating all the links & references for the book, so I haven’t read a lot of new things, but I did watch the Primeagen and Casey Muratori tear into an AI-generated game. I grew up as a gamedev, and I still very much enjoy reading code and concepts from game projects, so I found this one especially interesting and funny.