Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today I'm talking with John

Norton with whom we've discussed over the years many aspects of technology and politics

and we are going to try and look in the round at what's the next big thing.

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John is the, among many other things, technology correspondent for the observer, you can read

his column there every week. John we've probably touched base on some of these questions,

more often than we care to remember over the last few years but we haven't talked about

on Talking Politics for a while and we're going to try and look as big as we can at how

some of the different questions about technology and politics fit together. So I'm going to

start by asking about something I don't think we've ever discussed before which is the

metaverse. You tend to hear about things long before the rest of us do. I can't remember

when I first saw the phrase but probably I'm guessing six to eight months ago. Can

you remember where you were when you first heard someone or read someone say the metaverse?

Well I can't remember where I was but I can't remember when in 1992.

That is further back when we. When Neil Stevenson's novel Snowcrash was published because

the metaverse plays a key role in that dystopian sci-fi novel. It's a very good book. It

kind of peers into the midterm future and it's a future in which the United States as

we know it has disintegrated or at any rate the government of the United States has disintegrated.

...