William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned • Hacker News Board

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#41

Post by whyleyc » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #6

baryphonic wrote: post #2

This 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 actually read the book? Or it’s precursor “The Peripheral” which began the development of these concepts.

Surprisingly the various plot lines are somewhat more nuanced than this description!

It’s like describing The Old Man And The Sea as “a book about a fishing trip”.

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#42

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

ses1984 wrote: post #36

Nasrudith wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Whoever paid for that grenade doesn't trust the soldier / mercenary they gave it to very far, that's why the network connection exists in the first place, hackers can exploit that. At least that's the reason I just made up.

More likely it needs a continuous connection back to the license server for GaaS (grenades as a service).

(This kind of cyberpunk dystopia is very plausible from the intersection of military contracting grift and lowest-bidder IoT design!)

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#43

Post by futureproofd » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

lpah4all wrote: post #21

_red wrote: post #6

Earlier 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...

There is no time travel in The Peripheral or Agency. The future folks figure out how to create a communication channel back to their past, that contact then immediately causing their past's timeline to diverge. It's actually a brilliant device (not created by WG) because, as he has stated, all sci-fi is really speaking about the "now" of the author who wrote it, in terms of what they believe is possible or probable,…

Thanks for the summary on Gibson's new work. I really needed some clarification because I couldn't really get a sense of the plot in this one (Agency). The characters don't really have an impact on anything...They do nothing in particular except move around to/from various locations, focusing on the aesthetic detail of their surroundings, more than driving the story forward (What would a new Gibson novel be without mention of Japanese denim?). I suppose since most of the characters that make up our present (stub device) are being strung along by the stub masters from the future, that they really have no idea of what's going on/ or at stake. That's understandable, but apparently in the future, stubs are created and manipulated to the whims of their admins and aren't really important, but rather as a 'hobby'. Makes the whole struggle to 'fix' our stub seem kind of pointless.

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#44

Post by _red » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #35

_red wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had bee…

You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read, a problem which the radio clip obviously didn't remedy. Although in fairness to NPR, it's just radio, it's not exactly the New York Times Book Review. > The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris. Agency, an…

>You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read

I accept that. But I'm commenting on the article that OP linked which quoted Gibson.

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#45

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #30

arkades wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had bee…

> Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up....

Isn't that a Harry Turtledove novel, or am I thinking of some other mil-SF writer? It's also similar to the plot of the original Deus Ex game.

> shoehorning politics into my work?

Tom Clancy sold a hundred million novels.

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#46

Post by ordinaryradical » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #30

arkades wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had bee…

You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tried to come up with a reason for why his 2017 is different.

And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is not “if only democrats would save us” but rather “our whole system is built on corruption and will destroy us.”

So your comments make zero sense. Your critique is aimed at an abstract idea of what you think a book should be and has no relation to the text itself.

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#47

Post by hinkley » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #15

mcv wrote: post #3

> "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 an…

Sounds about right.

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#48

Post by whyleyc » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #44

justin66 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read, a problem which the radio clip obviously didn't remedy. Although in fairness to NPR, it's just radio, it's not exactly the New York Times Book Review. > The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris. Agency, an…

>You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read I accept that. But I'm commenting on the article that OP linked which quoted Gibson.

You’re commenting on the plot of a book you haven’t read.

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#49

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

metabagel wrote: post #32

ceilingcorner wrote: post #23

"And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'" Honestly, if you were deeply, dramatically surprised by Trump's…

The election probably hinged on the handling of “her emails” by the FBI Director. I don’t see how anyone could have predicted the extent to which he would bungle that. His investigation found no wrong-doing, but he publicly excoriated her anyway. Then, he opened a new investigation, which again found nothing. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probab...

It was a close election, there's probably a lot of single things that could have changed it. One side or the other winning a close election shouldn't fundamentally change your worldview.

Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

#50

Post by ashtonkem » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

> "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."

This is a common mistake utopians of all stripes; the short comings of the world as we know it isn't a consequence of external forces imposing badness on us, it's a consequence of the fallibility of humanity. Unless if you have a concrete plan on how you're going to organize society differently, any attempt to start something fresh will end up recreating all of the ills that drove you from "society" in the first place.