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Earlier 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
> "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…
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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!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude
Escapism can be pessimistic, as in Gibson. It's not him who "escapes", it's the denizens of the soulless world he described, and the "world" they escape to can be just as alienating. It's no triumph to "escape" to Gibson's matrix, and his world continues to be a crapsack [1][2].
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[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld
[2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literat...
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.
> "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…
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> 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.
It's true that Gibson's work is compelling because like all great cyberpunk writers, it grafts real world social, cultural, and political considerations in with his futuristic technology. That said, good world-building doesn't mean the author himself might not have naive or problematic politics. J.K. Rowling's expressed views on Twitter have been an ongoing source of controversy. Or perhaps more relevant, Ray Bradbur…
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>[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…
I've occasionally thought that a good alternative history novel would be one where someone went back to 1930 and assassinated Hitler, only to find that with less insane leadership in the inevitable war (less resources wasted on superweapons and the occult, stalls Russia with diplomacy, doesn't waste resources in Africa) Germany wins the war and unites all of Europe under a fascist regime.
>"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." Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.
If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in 1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Microsoft's unofficial mission was "a computer on every [office] desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software". It sounded overly ambitious, even into the 90s.
>"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." Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.