Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!)
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
#52The hacker spirit of the early Internet has been replaced by corporate shenanigans and capitalist greed.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…
Those seem unrelated to the parent's point. Weinstein is co-opting the death of Aaron Schwartz to push his own far-right ideology. The target of his form of `rise up and take back` is neither "corporate shenanigans" nor "capitalist greed", but those who challenge it from the center and the left.
He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the backing of a media arm and an attitude of suing everyone who challenges his views. School of Thiel and all.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#53> "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…
I think this was done as much for gameplay flow as anything else. The main criticism of the older model was that you had to manage combat in 3 separate, and only mildly overlapping, planes which made combat a time-consuming pain to track. Lots of playgroups would discourage people from playing deckers or mages just so they wouldn't have to deal with astral plane/matrix stuff.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#54Earlier 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...
> 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…
It's not a pathetic premise, but tying it so closely to a current political event guarantees that it won't age well.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#55This 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...
>>[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.
If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election.
Not only would that be a more impactful long-term change that would likely have prevented the systemic failures that elevated Trump in the first place, but it would probably be easier to enact. You just need to park a handful of people outside a handful of voting precincts to say "Hey, just so you know this ballot is really badly designed. . ."
No first Black president, though. So we'd have to deal with that.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#56> "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.'" Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it g…
Actually, there are some interesting facts about COVID and 5G radiowaves.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#57Earlier 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…
That's the entire point he is trying to express. It's like you just stop reading after the first sentence.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#58> "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.'" Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it g…
> SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards.
This is what I think was so original about The Handmaid's Tale--a possible iteration of our own culture and technology that moved backwards-sideways instead of forward. (Disclaimer: we read this years ago in school, and I haven't had a chance to see the recent adaptation.)
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#59We're definitely in more of a Bruce Sterling cyberpunk future than a William Gibson cyberpunk future. Distraction has been feeling eerily prescient recently.
We are actually in the Mike Judge Idiocracy cyberpunk future and it terrifies me. Our president is a reality TV freak, the citizens are so science-retarded that they think Covid is a hoax, the population all sit in our homes watching testicle-kicking videos on huge TVs while drinking Mountain Dew and eating Cheetos while the world melts down outside.
Idiocracy was oddly prescient. I really enjoyed that movie. Now that it's reality, not so much...
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#60Earlier 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.
It’s so you can’t throw the grenade back at the manufacturer.