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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

#141

Post by jandrese »

narrator wrote: post #126
jandrese wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there is really that much more porn being produced on a per-person basis, just that where they used to be Polaroids that would be lost to time now all of the porn can be distributed worldwide instantly for free. Someone who sat down and worked the numbers might have come to this realization early on, but few people realized exactly what it means to give everybody the means to be their own publisher.

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

#142

Post by ken »

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.

Notable exception: Cloud Atlas (pub. 2004), which admits that "Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword."

> a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events

I think we used to call this the Singularity.

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

#143

Post by anigbrowl »

joering2 wrote: post #128
ragebol wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 evid…

You're being downvoted for teasing. When you are asserting facts you should just provide them, not beg for attention. Hinting and sharing rumors (but not providing anything for people to evaluate) just wastes others' time. This is not the same as speculating on your own account; but you didn't speculate, you asserted facts and then ducked out of providing any.

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

#144

Post by armitron »

tim58 wrote: post #109
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.

I think one of the things it was easy to miss in 1984 when Neuromancer was published was how accessible the internet and computers is. I've watched two year olds interact with the modern internet. 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 Micr…

You're confusing the map with the territory I think. It's safe to say that Gibson's early work is full of insinuations.

He zooms into specific criminal subcultures and describes them in detail but that doesn't mean that the rest of society follows the same principles. It's pretty obvious that there is plenty of "banal" and "average" in the Sprawl trilogy, it's just not overtly described because what would be the point?.

The same is true today. There is excitement and novelty to be found on the Internet. But it's certainly not going to be discovered by the sheep, the 99% that spend their time on Instagram, Youtube and Amazon. Similar characters to the ones found in Gibson's books exist, but similarly, are not visible from the popular sphere.

In that sense, Gibson definitely misses the mark when he describes the Internet today but that's to be expected. The genius of his early work lies in it being IMAGINED, or channeled if you will. Definitely not reasoned. Somehow his imagination tapped into the technological currents that define us today.

Now, having lost his imagination and overcompensating with reason, he has become yet another sheep and his view reflects that.

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

#145

Post by duskwuff »

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.

> 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?

That theme isn't really present in the Neuromancer series. From the perspective of our viewpoint characters, the matrix is primarily a place that one goes to do a job, not a place to hang out; it's seen primarily as the domain of megacorps and mysterious AIs, not a human space.

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

#146

Post by tim58 »

jandrese wrote: post #141
narrator wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there is really that much more porn being produced on a per-person basis, just that where they used to be Polaroids that would be lost to time now all of the porn can be distributed worldwide instantly for free. Someone who sat down and worked the numbers might have come to this realization early on, but few people realized exactly what it means to give everybody the means to be their own publisher.

I think there probably is a lot more porn being produced on a per-person basis. We have a lot more cameras and a lot more ways to share photos/videos now.

I think there is a lot more content in general being produced too.

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

#148

Post by IDtootwoThough »

danharaj wrote: post #73
_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…

> 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.

william gibson is a krakile disturbed jew, just get over it. He's nothing much

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

#149

Post by RichardCA »

The current season of Westworld is very Gibsonian. The main new character (Caleb) is introduced as a vet with PTSD, but as the season unfolds we see he's been augmented, and it's strongly implied that he's living with implanted memories to cover up the horrible stuff he did in the military.

In the most recent episode he got to use a drug called "Genre" that moves you through different states of mental alteration. Whoever wrote this read lots of Gibson.

But the idea that everyone is jacked in to the same network, the hand of corporate control is always present, and shady things are happening all the time, no one thinks of that as unique or novel any more.

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

#150

Post by gpderetta »

jerf wrote: post #138
danharaj wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Generally speaking, it is good for literature to address political topics, and perhaps even take particular positions on them, but it is a bad idea for literature to address specific real people or specific real instances of those topics, if for no other reason than the specific instance is going to be yesterday's news by the time your book comes out. And addressing specific people is almost always a very petty look;…

Then again, the Divine Comedy had real (then) still alive people in hell.

Gibson is no Alighieri but the Peripheral was still a great book.

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