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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

#81

Post by noir_lord »

ehnto wrote: post #67
newsbinator wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The anti-intellectual cohort has got their preferred elected leaders.

I think the anti-intellectual cohort have been helped in that by the super rich who had their preferred elected leaders as well.

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

#82

Post by rgblambda »

_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…

>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.

I'm been watching "The Plot Against America" miniseries and realised that a similar scenario played out in the early 1800's. Imagine a SciFi writer of the time (If such a thing existed) publishing a novel where a time traveller travels back from 2020 to stop the Federalist Hamiltonian conspiracy to bring the U.S back under British rule/Democratic-Republican Jeffersonian conspiracy to enter the war on the side of France and bring the Reign of Terror to America.

It would be 100% political shoehorning of course but people would lap it up all the same.

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

#83

Post by uk_programmer »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #52
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…

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…

Weinstein isn't far right. You have no idea what far right is if you think he is. He is centre-right maybe centre. His brother and his sister-in-law are both lefties. There is nothing far right about Weinstein or his family.

> 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.

Actually I do talk to the people you are talking about, and again most of them aren't far right. The actual far-right don't like Weinstein or his brother (they tend to not like Jewish people on the far right).

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

#84

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

> "Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff."

That is the story of all technology. The horse was the super weapon used by kings and warriors. It ended up being something that farmers used to plow their fields. Same with ships, cars, telephones, radios, televisions, computers.

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

#85

Post by _0ffh »

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…

I think an OCP is rather something that you couldn't possibly have expected. I'm not sure that this is the case here.

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

#86

Post by hombre_fatal »

_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...

Makes more sense when you see his twitter feed these days is mostly retweets of political stuff like your uncle on facebook (or... everyone on twitter).

You just can't become the guy who seriously posts political shit on social media all day and spends so much time consumed by the "them bad, we good" faction war.

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

#87

Post by Apocryphon »

arkades wrote: post #13
_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...

> 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 a little pathetic in that it's cribbing from the premise of Stephen King's 11/22/63.

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

#88

Post by Apocryphon »

rgblambda wrote: post #82
_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…

>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. I'm been watching "The Plot Against America" miniseries and realised that a similar scenario played out in the early 1800's. Imagine a SciFi writer of the time (If such a thing existed) publishing a novel where a time traveller travels back from 2020 to s…

I would read that now.

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

#89

Post by cwp »

gfodor wrote: post #66

Why 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.

Yes! What's interesting about Gibson's vision is that he assumed connectivity would be hard, but VR would be easy. It's a world of payphones, fax machines, and "simstim" where you can receive someone else's sensory input and ride along inside their head as they move through the world.

That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we nail VR.

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

#90

Post by ragebol »

joering2 wrote: post #56
pjc50 wrote: post #4

> "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.

Such as?
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