📚 Finished reading: "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K. Dick: blog.miljko.org

@miljko What did you think? I loved it when I was a kid. Rereading it as an adult, I thought the first half? two-thirds? were great but then it fell apart. Obviously timely due to the talk over recent years about the metaverse. And I was a one-time Second Life enthusiast and saw the parallel — give people the option to be anything they can imagine in a virtual world, and most people will just choose to be rich and beautiful conventional people.

@MitchWagner Loved it. Even the conclusion worked for me in light of AI slopification. I wish Satoshi Kon were still alive to film it!

Interestingly, PKD said he couldn’t bear to re-read and edit the story, which I guess was inspired by a bad trip + flashbacks he had.

@miljko I reread it in 2021 or 2022. So this was before chatGPT went mainstream. I had not considered the novel in that light. It really was amazingly prescient labout the feedback loop between online influencers and real life. 

@ffmike I was thinking more about the people who bought virtual McMansions, supermodel avatars and virtual clothes like you’d find in a Beverly Hills boutique. When I was a SL enthusiast myself I looked down on those people but now I think they should enjoy SL however they want.

@MitchWagner At least I built my own virtual McMansions :)

SL is still out there. Every once in a while I get tempted to drop in.