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New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

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Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#131

Post by bitmasher9 »

SoleilAbsolu wrote: post #93
krapp wrote: post #29

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.

Was going to say something similar, and my real issue with Gibson is that after reading several of his books - he's a fantastic stylist but, I don't really know what he stands for, compared to someone like PKD, Stanislaw Lem, Octavia Butler, or Kurt Vonnegut. And any day now - we will actually wake up to realize we are living in Kim Stanley Robinson's Anthropocene climate future from The Ministry of the Future, New Y…

Gibson stands for style over substance.

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#132

Post by kergonath »

asnelt wrote: post #118
Animats wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word. Sure we are. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Here's a nighttime walk through Shenzhen.[1] Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings. Robots on the streets. Drones in the sky. Cameras everywhere. Night m…

That's an interesting video. If the skyscrapers were flickering just a little faster, the sky would be the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.

(For those who did not get it, it’s the first line of Neuromancer).

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#134

Post by nephihaha »

o-mo-ka-saaaay wrote: post #99
Animats wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word. Sure we are. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Here's a nighttime walk through Shenzhen.[1] Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings. Robots on the streets. Drones in the sky. Cameras everywhere. Night m…

I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it. It’s like they expected God had made it so that America would be the leader in techno culture evolution. It would be endearing if it weren’t for their impotent rage response to enable fascism for their own ends.

J.G. Ballard was not an American. He grew up in China and spent most of his life in the UK. He has a very subtle British sensibility to a lot of his work.

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#135

Post by toast0 »

thwarted wrote: post #94
justsomehnguy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. And this is how it should be. Johnny Mnemonic's 320GBs became the reality in mid 90' and mundane by 2005.

Agreed. My point is that there's the perception of the characters and corporations as having some meaningful/cool aesthetics in these stories and in the genre, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how they are different than what we have today. And that's part of what makes good stories timeless. 320GB progressed from amazing, to reality, to mundane, to trivial today, but it would take on different…

> you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are

Rollerblading in motorcycle gear; duh.

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#136

Post by 3636yey »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #110
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there something wrong with being critical of bands for selling out, though?

the concept of selling out often seems seriously under-specified, and thus, like many things in our society, it becomes a tool for one set of people to improve their own status by attacking another set of people. It is in the end a moral stance on what are the proper aesthetics, which is the kind of thing that manages to make both morality and aesthetics extremely suspect.

how can someone say morality is suspect and expect to be treated like a human being

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#137

Post by rewgs »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #92

I was young, and needed the money. A week-long contract in San Francisco, to do some contract work. Instead of a vacation. Well, so I flew to the Embarcadero center, some late fall. The task was to work on some audio code, and maybe networking, for a popular multiplayer cyber- tank battle game. It was a great gig. I onboarded with another dev, who sat with me for the first 30 minutes after a few rounds, while we watc…

Intentional or not, you nailed Gibson's writing style.

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#138

Post by kergonath »

Apocryphon wrote: post #106
cocacola1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be then only ones. Cult of Mac, Disney Adults, etc. But they’ve aesthetics that resonate with a lot of people. Meta, Google, etc., for whatever reason, don’t.

Product/design-first vs. engineering-first orgs

I don’t think that’s really it. Plenty of engineers care about elegance and functionality. I think calling them engineering-led is a disservice to engineers in general.

Everything out of Google is Rube-Goldberg machines held together with duct tape. It is engineering in a way, but by squirrels on crack. It’s alien to how engineering is done in the real world.

Everything out of Meta is pure evil. It is engineering-led if you could behavioural psychologists designing Skinner boxes as engineers. Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products. The exception in the Borg.

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#139

Post by Apocryphon »

kergonath wrote: post #138
Apocryphon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product/design-first vs. engineering-first orgs

I don’t think that’s really it. Plenty of engineers care about elegance and functionality. I think calling them engineering-led is a disservice to engineers in general. Everything out of Google is Rube-Goldberg machines held together with duct tape. It is engineering in a way, but by squirrels on crack. It’s alien to how engineering is done in the real world. Everything out of Meta is pure evil. It is engineering-led…

Google was also characterized by their infamous data-first 41 shades of blue A/B test. It seems like they went into an extreme where design was informed by user behavior, by empiricism, rather than by the taste of the designer.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-googl...

> Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products.

Oculus was an acquisition, so maybe that's why.

Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

#140

Post by Cpoll »

nfnfjfjdj wrote: post #120
Animats wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word. Sure we are. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Here's a nighttime walk through Shenzhen.[1] Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings. Robots on the streets. Drones in the sky. Cameras everywhere. Night m…

it just looks like a normal city. If we're declaring things cyberpunk based on LED displays Las Vegas probably wins but China is a horrifying totalitarian dictatorship with a market economy and by that measure sure, guess they beat us to the dystopia! go communism! go China! weeeeee

> cyberpunk

> horrifying totalitarian dictatorship with a market economy

These things are totally compatible, and usually basically synonymous.

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