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New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
171–180 of 194 posts
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#172Another 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 sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable. Any kind of principle, rule of law, or sense of national or cultural identity requires that coherence. Without it the system dissolves into this random churning stew of scheming, money, and power.
I think you are probably reading a disproportionate amount of fiction.
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#173[dead]
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CCP is firmly in control of China. They don't let corporations run the country.
That just means one giant corporate entity runs the country.
And let us not forget that there are about as many billionaires in the chinese parliament as there are millionaires in the US parliament.
China is corrupt, mercantilist, and run like a maffia family, and with the coming demographic hit, their power will soon diminish.
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet a nickel he worked on Spectre — a copy of Snow Crash shipped with certain editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game)
Yup, that's the one.
Hah. I forgot about that promo. That must have been the second version of Spectre (VR) or a console, I don’t remember having consultants when we worked on the first one, and we hadn’t connected with Moses Ma (whose offices those were) during the first one.
Sam
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would disagree with that, I've seen people anchor their own identity to that of brands like Apple or Disney. They may not be aesthetics you find cool, but clearly they appeal to a large number of others.
Anchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
But it wasn't in the early cyberpunk works. When you consume them you can notice how important was the concept of "style", that characters were excited by the specific brands (implants, weapons, shaders, venues), associated them with social status etc. It was the 90s that brought contempt for brands to (paradoxically) mainstream.
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#177I 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…
You've never worked for FedEx, have you? We have wearable propietary tech to do a necessary job, scanning 100lbs+ boxes to load into trailers by hand. It's an extremely rough job as belt pick-off, you're no more human than a machine is at that point. They don't advertise their tech, either. It would just draw unnecessary attention.
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's important to mention that the counterculture "punk" part was simply an totally extraneous embellishment to make the story "cool." The noir part is a perennial pulp crutch to make things seem dark; it's simply a coloring of addiction and betrayal. Gibson is doing something with that: he's saying that technical culture has ceased to be exclusive and elevated, and has become part of the fabric of human existence. J…
I agree on the style and influences particularly in the trilogy. Yes, there are pulpy aspects and tropes. To me, there are strong dashes of beat poet and impressionism as well. This shallowness is a style, but I think the themes carry through.
I had the pleasure of reading Neuromancer in a college course on Gothic horror, so we read it alongside the likes of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Freud. And we looked at it through that lens. To me, the core theme of Gibson's storytelling is that the human condition persists. You'll have this spectrum of personalities and behaviors regardless of the technological backdrop. To me, this is an antidote for the delusional fantasy that one clever plot device is going to bring Utopia and somehow erase our evolved human foibles.
I'm not sure we have any disagreement, except perhaps in the subtext of your latter paragraphs. I don't think the shallowness is a flaw. I am not disappointed to find technology normalized and trivialized as set pieces for stories that could otherwise exist in almost any era. I think that's the whole point...
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#179I 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…
> 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…
> The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
One of my favourite Gibson quotes.
Re: New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intentional or not, you nailed Gibson's writing style.
Thanks, I tried. Snow Crash was Neal Stephenson though, just sayin' ..
Can confirm, it's very much Hiro Protagonist. I love the style, and the over-the-topness of it all made more sense once I learned that it was originally planned as a graphic novel, IIRC.
Gibson's style is much more post-modern. I read Neuromancer right after Gravity's Rainbow and expected some reprieve from dense prose, but it was almost the same difficulty level, especially for a non-native reader.
edit: Adding my favorite Snow Crash quote:
> When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
> music
> movies
> microcode (software)
> high-speed pizza delivery