Neal Stephenson Quote

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers canbuild their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can buildbuildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such asvast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules ofthree-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people cango to hunt and kill each other.The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it's justa computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- noneof these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces ofsoftware, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network.When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildingsand electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curveof the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations -- the userinterfaces -- of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineeredby major corporations. In order to place these things on the Street, they havehad to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buyfrontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors,the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Streetall goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays fordeveloping and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the Street. itis a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years ago, when theStreet protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his buddies pooled theirmoney and bought one of the first development licenses, created a littleneighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little patchwork of lightamid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a necklace ofstreetlights around a black ball in space.Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has. Bygetting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole business.Some of them even got very rich off of it.That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by-30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes.