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 thing—is 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.
This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence that they could not conceive of society without it. Within the history of the United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind.
All big things are made up of trifles. My entire life has been built on trifles.
My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.
It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.
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