Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows and special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the idea that reality is not fixed and can be shaped by imagination and innovation.
Neal Stephenson's quote reflects on the concept of reality as a malleable landscape, where individuals or 'developers' can create unique spaces and experiences that extend beyond traditional confines. It encourages thinking about how creativity and technology can transform our environments, allowing for the construction of elements that challenge our perceptions of time and space, effectively blurring the lines between the real and the imagined.
In practice
In a discussion about virtual reality experiences, this quote can illustrate how technology allows us to construct new realities.
For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.
Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.
Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.
It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thingβis it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?
I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there." There might as well be, "Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.
And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time , there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
sure, we need the gypsies. we always have. because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?
The traditional doctrine of man and not the measurement of skulls and footprints is the key for the understanding of that anthropos who, despite the rebellion of Promethean man against Heaven from the period of Renaissance and its aftermath, is still the inner man of every man, the reality which no human being can deny wherever and whenever he lives, the imprint of a theomorphic nature which no historical change and transformation can erase completely from the face of that creature called man.
An outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law and not necessarily against it.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
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