51–60 of 194 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
This comment feels like it's from the early 90's when people were being critical of bands for selling out.
I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal. Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sens…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
This comment feels like it's from the early 90's when people were being critical of bands for selling out.
Another thing they got right was the merger of governments, large corporations, finance, intelligence agencies, and globalized organized crime into one big sprawling mass of Machiavellian nihilists scheming for power. None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play. Gibson in particular nails this, especially in his original Sprawl trilogy. This sprawling m…
I think it's worth asking whether "nobody really believes anything" is itself the result of a cynical manipulative play, one that occurs in the real world, and thus affects our judgement as we compare "today" versus a sci-fi book.
In particular I'm thinking of how certain regimes encourage a kind of "everybody is lying truth is pointless" nihilism, because it gives them a net-benefit in mentally exhausting their victims and deterring anyone without power from organizing.
In other words:
1. The dystopia-story may depict an amoral/post-truth fog and imply that it's an inevitable world-constant within the human hive. Not necessarily because the author believes that's human nature, but because it's window-dressing to the story they want to focus on telling.
2. We may feel like there's a similar fog around us today.
3. We could be harmfully-wrong if we assume our disempowering fog must likewise be an inevitable constant, while instead there are some beekeepers waving smoke-pots to generate it.
I disagree. Gibson's dystopias are too competent, too well organized, too serious. I feel like we're headed somewhere between the satire of Neal Stephenson and the lunatic delirium of Philip K. Dick.
100% I know that "Idiocracy" gets thrown around all the time, but the reason I think it does is that they do have advanced tech but at the same time everyone is a blathering idiot. That's what gets me about our present reality - on one hand we supposedly have all the world's information at our fingertips, but the absolute dumbest, most bullshit theories get real traction and cause real damage. When they had the UFC f…
As China rises to become the new gravitational center, it will be interesting to see how they reshape things in their image. On the one hand, they seem to be more engineering-brained than lawyer-brained, which bodes well (might be a more viable path to cyberpunk). But just as the west has been haunted by its history of white supremacy, China will be haunted by its history of Han supremacy, so I am not holding my breath that we net out to some sort of multi-cultural utopia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this Plenty of forebears here. Orwell's 1984 has mass-produced trash novels generated by a machine. Stanislaw Lem''s Cyberiad has a poetry generator.
The difference is that the AI-made art is strikingly good . And that underlines that it's a superconsciouness and not just a bot.
It could be an allegory for some artistic types who go on a sort of creative bender and work compulsively, nearly suppressing their regular personality and lives. The machine is somehow a tortured, artistic soul. But it could also just be some ironic malfunction, or could itself be an art installation built intentionally but anonymously out of orbital scrap.
That orbital machine certainly is tuned in a way that tickles Easter eggs in the human mind. But it also just seems to loop endlessly, like a forgotten, automated factory.
There is another similarly ambiguous scene, where an artificial construct represents the knowledge and speaking style of a deceased hacker. It is hooked to a doorbell to respond to visitors, but the narrator tells us it also scans the empty alley as snow falls. The scene is poetic, but it does not tell you whether the construct has a mind and is appreciating the snow versus just being triggered by motion and just trying to localize a potential visitor. Any answer you have there, you brought yourself. The book isn't telling.
That ambiguity seemed like half the point with Gibson. And it also seems prescient for our current LLM-meets-humanity moment too.
I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal. Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sens…
At least with Gibson, I think cyberpunk idolized actual punk culture. The coolness was found, brought, or arranged by these characters. The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye. The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the li…
Meanwhile in the real world we get Nvidia DGX Spark which has a front finished in beige carpeting, or Meta glasses which make you look like either a dork or a pervert.