Introduction to the 88 Names Podcast

In 1930, an ambitious young inventor named Philo Farnsworth secured a patent for an invention he’d first dreamed up when he was just 14 years old. Others had built mechanical televisions before, but Farnsworth was the first to make one that worked on electricity—the actual precursor to what modern audiences would recognize as TV. 

Like most young inventors, Farnsworth was starry eyed about the prospects of his invention. In his mind, television would be, above all else, a universal educator. The prospects were endless. Why bother sending a teacher to remote areas of the country when you could just give them a television set? Illiteracy could be eradicated within a generation. So, for that matter, would the distrust of others. Instead of relying on slippery politicians to relay what was happening around the world, audiences would be able to watch events unfold in real time and make up their own minds. We’d be able to learn about our differences and see that what unites us is greater than what divides. “Why would there be any misunderstandings?” writes one of Farnsworth’s biographers. “War would be a thing of the past.” 

Such grand visions do not sound so different from today’s Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, many of whom seem to genuinely believe that the next great moral revolution is just one great tech innovation away. “I’m just trying to make the world a more open place,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg in 2010. 

Zuckerberg, like Farnsworth and any number of dreamy inventors before him, lived to see their high ideals detonate on impact. There is no way of predicting how society will react to the introduction of disrupting technology, but even a casual read of history suggests reality doesn’t take kindly to dreamers. 

So what happens when the dreamers create their own reality? 

Virtual reality, once the exclusive realm of far-flung science fiction, is teetering on the brink of being part of our daily lives. And while there are no shortage of predictions about what this might mean, Matt Ruff’s thrilling new novel 88 Names throws all the speculation into sharp focus, combining a sharply crafted story and unforgettable characters with timely questions about the new cyberworld—and cyberworlds—just around the corner. 

Meet John Chu, an online guide who can optimize your VR experience for a small fee, showing you the ropes of any of the many online role-playing games that have proliferated in Ruff’s novel. Chu is used to respecting his clients’ anonymity, but he soon starts to suspect that a new, wealthy client is a lot more powerful, and dangerous, than he’s letting on. And this particular client’s interests may have less to do with entertainment than they do world domination. Soon, Chu is forced to grapple with the real life ramifications of his virtual life actions. And if he’s not careful, he may not have a real life to come back to. 

In 88 Names, Ruff levels serious questions at the coming VR revolution, wrestling with what this new reality might mean for our moral codes. How will Virtual Reality affect disenfranchised communities? People in poverty? Nations in poverty? What will happen to old taboos, and what new ones will rise to take their place? What sort of laws, if any, will exist in virtual reality? The people pushing for new and better VR tech may not be asking such questions now but after 88 Names, they can never claim that nobody is. 

And they’re questions we aim to deal with here through a series of conversations with experts in issues like tech, entertainment and philosophy that will help you sort fact from fiction about the cyber realities of the future—and understand the ways in which our understanding of the words fact and fiction must soon radically evolve. 

Philo Farnsworth died in 1971, his dream of a war-less world well and truly shattered. Will we be more prepared to meet the implications of virtual technology than we were television? 88 Names is ready to ask the questions. Here is where we will try to find the answers.