111–120 of 174 posts
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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.
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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.
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.
In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine interfaces.
Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy place.
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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...
agree the premise is really quite pathetic, you have a plot where people travel 100+ years in the past to try to get .... Hillary Clinton elected??? I much better idea would be to have gotten Al Gore elected instead, I think history would have been very different in the 2000's/2010's, think no trillion+ wars in the middle east, possibly no financial crisis, no tsa or patriot act, the change for the past 2 decades wou…
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Actually, there are some interesting facts about COVID and 5G radiowaves.
Facts you say? The world is all ears!
> Things like the "5G causes coronavirus"
To what degree is that a comprehensively accurate representation of the ideas floating around in the conspiracy world?
And if you feel the urge to click on the downward pointing diamond to the left of my comment rather than replying, please pause for a moment and consider that action in the context of your comment, as well as the grandparent comment "But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism...".
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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.
Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control… everything is monitored and kept under control.
War… has changed.
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> 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 think that's a great premise. A lot of these "alternative history" novels assume that changing just one thing would radically alter the outcome when really they're just changing one aspect of a much larger system. 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 (l…
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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...
>>[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 t…
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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.
It's not really arguable. Gibson wrote punk literature, at least back then; he identified himself as a punk subculture writer, and punk isn't utopian. He was not describing a desirable future, but a depressing one where soulless corporations rule the world. > 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 worl…
Regardless of post hoc genre classifications like cyberpunk vs. postcyberpunk, you can still have pockets of hope within a generally dystopian setting, and perhaps Gibson's cyberspace was the place in Neuromancer.
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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 challenge…