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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

#151

Post by gpderetta »

duskwuff wrote: post #145
Apocryphon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is present in the follow up Count Zero though. Also while Gibson focuses on characters at the fringe of society, the world itself is not significantly more distopian than our world (or the '80s), which is probably one of the author's points.

I still wouldn't call it escapism though.

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

#152

Post by gpderetta »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #137
pharke wrote: post #19

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.

We're not jacking in and penetrating black ice with tech stolen from a corporation-state, but I still think the Internet is mysterious and, if not "sexy", at least endlessly fascinating. Both because you usually never know what device you're actually accessing and where it is, and because it's not uncommon to have no idea who put it there or why.

>We're not jacking in and penetrating black ice with tech stolen from a corporation-state

I'm not so sure about that. Stuxnet, the Shadow Brokers leaks, and who knows what is being sold on the black market; this continuity seems very close to the plot of a cyberpunk novel.

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

#153

Post by sphynxypoo »

xvilka wrote: post #99
ordinaryradical wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tried to come up with a reason for why his 2017 is different. And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is no…

The future world premise was in his previous book - The Peripheral. With the same characters. So I wonder why the article said he created this future world just to "fix" his story's timeline.

Yeah I thought that was very odd as well; the intersection of the two stubs seemed inevitable. Not like a last minute correction at all. I think the article must be taking him wildly out of context. At the same time, we have this:

"After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either"

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I can only interpret it as: he was writing it as a somewhat happy world, then thought he would need to revise to make it less happy, and then realized that it should never have been happy at all. Which just seems odd, given his style.

That being said, he did discuss a lot of revision due to current events in this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gi...

Anyways the whole article is hard to follow, I love me some NPR but this misquote was rough: Gibson is quoted as referring to "an uploaded healing consciousness" whereas if you listen to the audio it is clearly "an uploaded human consciousness", which makes _much_ more sense.

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

#154

Post by satori99 »

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…

Interestingly, a decade later, both Tad William's Otherland (1996), and Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash (1992) described networked virtual realities which everyday normal people had access to, but they were referred to as "Ken and Barbies" or similar. Their use of off-the-shelf avatars and no custom software gave them away. And the Techno-elites still had their own spaces within these worlds that were either off-limits or hard to find.

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

#155

Post by duskwuff »

gpderetta wrote: post #151
duskwuff wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is present in the follow up Count Zero though. Also while Gibson focuses on characters at the fringe of society, the world itself is not significantly more distopian than our world (or the '80s), which is probably one of the author's points. I still wouldn't call it escapism though.

> the world itself is not significantly more distopian than our world (or the '80s)

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment! The backstory to the Sprawl universe is crushingly dystopian -- Soviet Russia has won a nuclear war, destroying a number of European cities (particularly in Germany) and irradiating much of the European continent. In the wake of that war, it appears that the US government has largely collapsed, leaving megacorporations (like Sense/Net), wealthy families (like the Tessier-Ashpools), and street gangs (like the Yakuza and Panther Moderns) as the primary sources of power.

2020 sure isn't great, but I'd still prefer it to the crapsack world that Gibson built.

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

#156

Post by joering2 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #143
joering2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The video was removed from net. What do you want me to do about it ?

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

#158

Post by anigbrowl »

joering2 wrote: post #156
anigbrowl wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The video was removed from net. What do you want me to do about it ?

Continuously changing story = BS.

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

#159

Post by ilaksh »

ashtonkem wrote: post #50

> "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." This is a common mistake utopians of all stripes; the short comings of the world as we know it isn't a consequence of external forces imposing badness on us, it's a consequence of the fallibility of humanity. Unless if you have a concrete plan on how you're going to organi…

I think what's really going to a create a different sort of world, not a Utopia but still vastly different, is trans-humanity and post-humanity.

Gibson and many others have tried to imagine the transition from human to post-human which is largely about the power of brain computer interfaces.

To me, the convergence of advanced and/or general purpose AI, high bandwidth brain computer interfaces, and new levels of immersion in virtual/augmented reality provided by the new BCIs have a potential to transform the qualitative nature of human existence and so there is plenty of room left for science fiction along those lines. Although I will admit that I have not in any way explored much of that genre.

One idea is of a type of video game that involves high-bandwidth neural input enabling a type of waking lucid dream, where the AI reads your brain and modifies the scene to align with it. Maybe several people and advanced AIs are involved in this game. And suppose that there is a type of almost-human level AI being simulated as characters. Or maybe real humans plugged in and acting without lucid dreaming powers but the ability to affect the environment if they activate certain types of triggers recognized by an AI.

That is pretty far-fetched, but I think I have described a scenario where gods and magic are real.

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

#160

Post by MrGilbert »

Apocryphon wrote: post #116
ses1984 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities. Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control… everything is monitored and kept under control. War… has changed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUf_8jyxbiM

War. War never changes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=C2Pt-LnQ2po

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