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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

#71

Post by mcv »

pjc50 wrote: post #42
ses1984 wrote: post #36

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!)

If your army doesn't continue paying their license for their weapons, the weapons stop working just when you need them.

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

#72

Post by ehnto »

pjc50 wrote: post #37
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 causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt. So .. how's that working out? > the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of. I…

> Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.

Fantastic book, really interesting perspectives on society to be gained by the absolutely enormous lens the Ship Minds are able to view it from.

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

#73

Post by danharaj »

_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…

> Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work?

We're talking about William Fucking Gibson here. Next you'll tell me you hate it when Ursula Leguin 'shoehorned politics' into her work.

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

#74

Post by grawprog »

pjc50 wrote: post #68
grawprog wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I figured you were joking, sadly I just figured something like that had already been thought up and deployed.

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

#75

Post by monknomo »

ashtonkem wrote: post #50

> "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 organi…

Pretty sure Neuromancer isn't a utopian novel, and that Gibson isn't a utopian.

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

#76

Post by achillesheels »

keiferski wrote: post #27
bawana wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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…

Talk is cheap. It's easier, more lucrative, and less costly to build a media personality as a counter-cultural revolutionary than to actually be one.

Precisely. Courage requires actual conquering of fear, which doubtlessly involves confrontation with the status quo rather than a few microphone jibber jabbers. Who in the Western World has a contempt for convenience?

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

#77

Post by ashtonkem »

monknomo wrote: post #75
ashtonkem wrote: post #50

> "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 organi…

Pretty sure Neuromancer isn't a utopian novel, and that Gibson isn't a utopian.

Arguable; I’m not enough of a literary person to argue it out. But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude, and I’d argue that my original point still holds; escapists often fail to recognize the source of the problems they’re escaping from, and recreate them wherever they escape to.

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

#78

Post by smolder »

pharke wrote: post #19

I'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.

We need to have a stable and sustainable enough industry and society for technological advance to keep occuring. We may never populate space or even get our act together soon enough to prevent early destruction of what we've got. The mundane issues of trust, politics, human nature, etc, may prevent us from exploring many possible futures.

I'm saying this not to be a downer, but to impart that we should all have an eye on solving or mitigating those mundane problems, so we can get on to solving the more fun ones.

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

#79

Post by kaibee »

icedchai wrote: post #59
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

Idiocracy was oddly prescient. I really enjoyed that movie. Now that it's reality, not so much...

In Idiocracy , the president recognized his limitations and looked for the smartest person to put in charge of solving the problem.

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

#80

Post by bsanr2 »

_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…

Obama didn't set up killer FEMA camps, Trump is actively encouraging killer climate change. That's the difference. The example you're looking for is something something Heinlein/Card, where awareness of the very real role politics plays in shaping human history is compellingly cast through a conservative prism and not, like... utter nonsense.
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