William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by Funes- » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #3

> "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…

>that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.

One could argue that, in some aspects, it has substituted it.

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

#122

Post by walshemj » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

cjohnson318 wrote: post #58

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…

> SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards. This is what I think was so original about The Handmaid's Tale--a possible iteration of our own culture and technology that moved backwards-sideways instead of forward. (Disclaimer: we read this years ago in school, and I haven't had a chance to see the recent adaptation.)

Not really Frankenstein, War of the worlds where not a Whig view of history.

Only early plup SF Gernsback etc had that view

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

#123

Post by currymj » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

_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…

in the actual book, Gibson's vision of the future is basically as you describe -- it's extremely weird and alien with little mapping to our current political system. meddling in past timelines is an esoteric hobby for the super-rich.

the Clinton/Trump election is mentioned offhand a handful of times through the book, the protagonists didn't have anything to do with it, and it's just not about that at all.

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

#124

Post by noah670 » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

I strongly believe we need more separation from the real world and the internet. Every year it seems like more of our physical lives are being placed into social forms on the internet which should be more of an escape than bringing it all over.

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

#125

Post by the_af » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #119

the_af wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The setting as a whole is dystopian, but the possibilities of the net as a free space for people to flee into and become empowered there- isn't that a utopian enclave, a refuge? 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.

I'm specifically arguing about Gibson, Neuromancer and his related works, not about the cyberpunk genre at large. Gibson self-identifies -- or did, anyway -- as a punk writer. Cyberspace is not really a pocket of hope in his stories. The ending of Neuromancer itself is ambiguous and not exactly optimistic. Many of his short stories are similarly dark and depressing, things seldom ending well for his characters.

I'm not speaking of cyberpunk in general. Note that Gibson himself has stated the modern "cyberpunk" genre largely misses the point, mistaking a novel counter-cultural idea for its visual trappings.

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

#126

Post by narrator » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #110

narrator wrote: post #93

>"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.

One thing futurists always got wrong about the Internet was how much porn there would be.

One might have run the risk of being called a delusional pervert if one had correctly anticipated the massive scale that online sex work has grown to since the dawn of the internet.

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

#127

Post by uk_programmer » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

ilikehurdles wrote: post #120

uk_programmer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is quite a dishonest attempt at rewriting history with no respect for the truth. You can pretend to see your gaslighting remark as truth, but I've looked into every one of your claims about these people and I cannot come close to the same conclusion as you. I do not, however, call his brother far-right. Perhaps you could be excused for believing someone isn't far right when the overton window among english-speak…

The UK Gov actually has an overview for you to inform yourself as to what they consider far right:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/overview-of-the-f...

(The report itself doesn't do a particular good job either as they use some dubious sources and I don't agree with half of it, but their definitions of the groups are close enough).

I've listened to a lot of Weinstein on various shows he has appeared as a guest on and I haven't heard anything that can be considered far right. One of the first times I seen Weinstein was when he appeared on Dave Rubin who is a gay liberal/libertarian (the last time I watched his show it seemed to change every other week) that lives in California.

> Perhaps you could be excused for believing someone isn't far right when the overton window among english-speaking countries has narrowed so far to the right of center.

This is a complete nonsense. The Anglo-sphere for the most part is pretty much centre, centre-left. Many conservatives and paleo-conservatives complain their conservative parties aren't really conservative (which isn't far-right either btw).

The term far-right in itself is a poor description. A better term is a "reactionary right". But that is a whole other discussion between the "reactionary right" and the "traditional right". Right and Left are really poor descriptions of political positions and that is why many tests online now are multi-dimensional.

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

#128

Post by joering2 » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

ragebol wrote: post #90

joering2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there are some interesting facts about COVID and 5G radiowaves.

Such as?

There was a video done by scientist who worked in Wuhan 5G station that explained how 5G is messing up balance in cells. But its being taken down now. Its okay. Downvote me into oblivion! We been there before. I still can find my posts from many years ago accusing Verizon and other carriers of spying on Americans and closely working with NSA, and I also been called "conspiracy theorist cook" and that there is no evidence at all. Until we had Snowden came to the light of course...

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

#129

Post by germinalphrase » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

cwp wrote: post #89

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.

Simstim is - at least in part - being worked on by a company called Openwater[0]. Mary Lou Jepsen did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while back that speaks to the ambition of thought/memory recording via an MRI-like device and the "insertion"/playback of the same in other people [1].

[0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/

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

#130

Post by germinalphrase » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #38

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…

This guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein I can't understand why anyone would even begin to take calls for revolution from someone like that seriously, when he's so obviously a grifter.

Why so obviously a grifter?