The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk • Hacker News Board

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#401

Post by brazzy » Sun, Apr 10, 2022, 7:03 AM UTC

pydry wrote: post #388

brazzy wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, so you're basically pushing Putin's narrative, which is bullshit. The invasion would have happened anyway because it's motivated by fascist imperialism, and the propaganda is mostly made up and would have been the same as well, minus some specifics.

Putin's narrative? The Ukrainian government are entirely open about what Azov is. Putins narrative is that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis. Thats obviously false, but yeah, they absolutely used Nazi paramilitaries to cling on to Russian speaking territory and dont deny it. It sort of sounds like you're saying that this means Nazis arent the bad guys we thought they were and we should stop villifying them, wh…

No, I'm saying that the use of Nazi paramilitaries is not in fact a cause of the Russian invasion. It has certainly been a welcome opener for Russian propagandists, but they're using the Nazi card so indiscriminately that they never really needed it. To the Russian propaganda, every Ukrainian who doesn't welcome the invaders enthusiastically (which nowadays includes the vast majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians) is a Nazi.

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#402

Post by majormajor » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 2:04 AM UTC

jhbadger wrote: post #390

tialaramex wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess in some sense I agree that "MUDs weren't the future" but they are in fact all that anybody keeps building. Facebook's "Metaverse" is just a shitty MUD, likewise for various "Blockchain" projects that produce some sort of virtual land where you... sort of stand around. The art project I visited at the weekend with a friend had a VR environment which was too limited to really be much of a MUD, but it certainly…

I'd argue that Gibson had the most important social prediction in cyberpunk -- one that we kind of ignore today because it became true. In Gibson's future, the real conflicts are not between national governments but between rival tech companies. Obviously Gibson made the mistake common in the 1980s that the tech companies would be Japanese rather than from US or China, but the key prediction was insightful. Later cyb…

The land war between Russia and Ukraine that's happening right now, and the decade+ of land war the US waged in the Middle East before that, make me think any bickering between Google and Apple still look worlds away from corporate-conflict dystopia (of course, this is a critique that also applies to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, which were corp-heavy).

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#403

Post by lawrenceyan » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #266

lawrenceyan wrote: post #263

I wonder what the greybeards that grew up on this science fiction, now in their 40s/50s?, think of the world we live in today.

I wonder what the greybeards that grew up on this science fiction, now in their 40s/50s?, think of the world we live in today. As one of them (I'll be 49 in a couple of months), I expect there is a pretty diverse range of opinions among us. Me? Relative to cyberpunk fiction specifically? I think the old adage "the future is here, its just unevenly distributed" rings very true. Clearly in certain sense we are living i…

Thank you for your perspective. A lot of the problems (and technologies to address them) you talk about are actively being worked on by the way, so it's not all doom and gloom!

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#404

Post by EL_Loco » Thu, Apr 14, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

ant_li0n wrote: post #394

EL_Loco wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neuromancer's opening line is probably one of the most remembered first sentences in american fiction. Every friend of mine who read the book, most of them in the 90's, seem to remember it verbatim. Now that I think of it, do younger people know what he's talking about? I mean, at some point dead channels changed from the noisy grayscale beehive-like granulates to a still blue screen.

It's always been my understanding that a tv tuned to a dead channel was that solid grey color, like when the transmitter is powered on but there is no picture being sent. In other words, not the same thing as just setting the receiver to a frequency with no transmission (static)

All the people I know who've read the novel agree with me that it was supposed to mean static. I wonder if anyone asked Gibson about this, since the advent of the blue screens.