What They Said and What They Mean: The Computable City and the Inscrutability of Academia, Interpreting the Babble about the Metaverse

Remind me if I start to sound like a blowhard to a) keep it real and b) not go to University. (I am a proud non-graduate of any higher body of learning, thank you kindly).

Reading academia is a lot like listening to venture capitalists and the people after their money. I previously offered an interpretation of:

“We’re going to create branded entertainment products and aggregate social communities by creating a Web 3.0 space that leverages best in class talent incentivized with virtual currency. Investment in this opportunity is high risk but the risk:ratio return is high because we will establish best practices and aggregate eyeballs within the social/entertainment Web 3.0 space towards creating a portfolio of opportunities for future monetization.”

I now offer an interpretation of the following, taken from the Computable City:

What They Said
“Those who work with computation are well placed to make important contributions to this broader debate for the use of new forms of computer and network, new digital data sources, and new software across the net in itself represents the way the city is changing. New insights will only come if new forms of computation are developed, requiring all who study the city to become immersed in its intrinsic computability.”

What They Mean
Us folks in urban planning had better learn to use computers. It seems really complicated but I bet it’s important

OK, but wait….in all fairness this is an old article. If you want a peek back in time, check out these two quotes:

“This past Christmas, my wife bought a mid-range Macintosh computer from a supermarket in England for word-processing.”

OK, hold on….for all I knew they STILL sell computers in supermarkets in England. What kind of strange country is that anyways?

Second quote:

How many sites and documents there are on the Web is unknown. Plewe (1995) estimates that six months ago, over one million documents existed but this may be an underestimate for there are now 30 million or more users of the Internet. Once television becomes interactive and once video and other media can be shipped over the net on demand (for this implies that all media will be digital, hence each copy will be almost zero cost), the kind of complexity that we see here will be extensive. It is then that virtual cities will intermingle with real cities, when the abstract and the real will merge into one another, and it is then that our traditional concepts of understanding, let alone planning the city will simply disappear. This is a challenge that we must begin to address if we are to simply cope with these changes.

Welcome to the future kids!