We'd all be living on a bridge if it were up to that guy.
William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
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Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#12This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change-induced apocalypse.
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
Have you read the book, or are you relying on literally half of a sentence drawn from an abbreviated blurb summarizing a short radio clip to draw that conclusion?
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#13This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change-induced apocalypse.
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
> But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present."
I don't see this as a pathetic premise.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
> "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either." It took him hours to realize a Hillary presidency wouldn't have been a utopia?
Is giving his sentence the least possible charitable reading to make a quip a good use of your time, or anyone else's?
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#15> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here." Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun , a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here). In the earlier editions, from 1989 through…
There were also gameplay reasons behind that for flow. One of the criticisms of the newer model is that the needless connectivity without so much as a logistical benefit doesn't make the decker/hacker feel smart so much as make it feel like the world is set up by colossal idiots who would think giving the army hand grenades which are always remote detonatable without a manual safety fuse would be an excellent idea and be utterly shocked that their entire army got blown up by one hacker.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#16I dunno, I think the future described in i.e. Neuromancer can still happen, it's just farther down the road.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#17The hacker spirit of the early Internet has been replaced by corporate shenanigans and capitalist greed.
Just like "hacker" in "hacker news".
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#18I dunno, I think the future described in i.e. Neuromancer can still happen, it's just farther down the road.
Well for one thing Real Estate just doesn't work that way. It may sometimes feel like half the US is a giant suburban sprawl but in reality the elites own 40% of all real estate in America and they keep it nice, private, and undeveloped.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#19I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. The current generation of VR seems like the first halting steps into that world. Progress towards realtime raytracing and massively online social worlds look like the next steps. The lofty goals of brain machine interface companies whisper faint possibilities of "jacking in" at some distant date.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#20The hacker spirit of the early Internet has been replaced by corporate shenanigans and capitalist greed. Just like "hacker" in "hacker news".
+1. I just watched Eric Weinstein on Lex Fridman's podcast. He is angry about how students have been emasculated by the establishment. That the death of Aaron Schwartz was a tragedy and the students should 'rise up and take back' MIT. Yet he himself has a net worth over 100mill and is doing nothing about it.He promises betterment through revolution like Batista and Castro, yet he himself is busy amassing wealth. Why does he think youth will waste itself on anything else except the pursuit of the dream that made him successful? Internet has just become another tool for control because that's just what humans do - make tools out of anything including their fellow humans.