Meatspace Is Where I Keep My Stuff

What’s meatspace?

The internet spent thirty years promising escape from the body, then demanded a charging cable and somewhere dry to put the router. Meatspace is hacker slang for the physical world: furniture, weather, elbows, loose screws and the adapter you discarded after a panel of experts agreed it belonged to nothing.

Digital life has not abolished matter. The cloud is physical servers in physical buildings, joined by physical cables, drinking physical electricity and converting it into invoices with exceptional metaphysical confidence. Abstraction is a superb tool. It is not a disappearance spell, regardless of what the keynote animation implied.

This shirt classifies reality as STORAGE: INCONVENIENT BUT RELIABLE. It holds your coat, keys, coffee, backups and the damp mammal presently announcing that ownership is obsolete. Everything is virtual until the battery swells, the roof leaks or somebody has to carry the future out of a van.

Evidence: Meatspace, The Jargon File, What is the cloud?, Cloudflare