I dunno, I think the future described in i.e. Neuromancer can still happen, it's just farther down the road.
that is exactly what those of us simply waiting for a Neuromancer movie have been saying to ourselves for years :(
William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
61–70 of 174 posts
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#62Earlier 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!)
"You throw 'em, We blow 'em"
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#63We'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.
That's all true. The difference is in Idiocracy there's no fracture- everybody's an idiot and perfectly content to be one.
In our time, there's still push-back to any descent into idiocracy.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
Yeah, reading The Peripheral first is essential IMO, just like watching Star Wars is necessary before The Empire Strikes Back.
And who doesn't want Otaku denim made on heirloom looms ;-)
Personally, as a software craftsman, I appreciate anyone who dedicates themself to craftsmanship. Japan seems to have a great deal of very dedicated craftspeople (NHK Online videos rule!), and Gibson is definitely a word- and idea-smith, Otaku-grade.
[[And because people need things to watch nowadays, our family personally loves NHK Online's shows 'Design Talks Plus' and 'Trails to Oishii Tokyo', as well as Grand Sumo. We find them fascinating glimpses into a very different culture, one that seems to honor craftsmanship in a way we, as Americans, find beautiful.]]
As to the characters not having 'an impact on anything', that's really how it's always been, unless you're a part of the klept. The only question is, "How you developed yourself in your lifetime to fight oppression and seek to uplift the most disadvantaged?" Because, if you don't, you're just a poorer version of the callous bastards that run the power organizations that do have an effect, effects that have, for example, facilitated global heating for short-term profit at the expense of the rest of us and our heirs.
[ETA: To see the klept in action, check out the parallel HN story about Bloomberg killing reporting on CCP officials getting wealthy in office.]
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#65This 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...
[deleted]
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#66Why does one assume the Internet is in its final form? I'm about 99% certain the phase we are in is a transitional phase. Upon the arrival of ubiquitous immersive computing, it will go through what may be its final phase shift, but right now it'll be looked back upon similar to the previous eras.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's all true. The difference is in Idiocracy there's no fracture- everybody's an idiot and perfectly content to be one. In our time, there's still push-back to any descent into idiocracy.
I think we are going to have to push harder. The anti-intellectual cohort has got their preferred elected leaders in more than one country these past few years. Just because smart people exist, doesn't mean they are holding the reigns currently.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M7_Spider
This shows how hard it is to write sci-fi when I was joking about "grenades as a service" - someone's gone one better and made a wifi mesh network of landmines!
And then converted the landmines to remote-operated as part of a legal fiction about victim-operated devices. Which is the military version of the concern about robots taking jobs: to what extent is it acceptable to have munitions making their own decisions about taking lives?
Anyway, in the Shadowrun universe you'd definitely be able to hack the mesh network of landmines.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#69"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…
Agreed. This is something that seems to go over-looked. It didn't take one, or even five, years to get someone like Trump in office. This was the result of many decades of significant economic and societal restructuring.
Re: William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
#70> "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…
>"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."
Eloquent way of saying that normies ruined the internet.