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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

#181

Post by csomar »

jmilloy wrote: post #157
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…

This video does not look cyberpunk to me. I see cyber, but where's the punk? Where's the "lowlife" or the societal collapse? This is high tech and highly controlled by enormous economic actors, but that doesn't make it cyberpunk at all.

china has something like 50million homeless people. You are seeing the Arasaka quarters. There are much dodgier areas in all of the big Chinese cities (though surprisingly safe as the Chinese are quite docile)

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

#182

Post by numpad0 »

thwarted wrote: post #70
keiferski wrote: post #10

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…

I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers? On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka…

> Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI,

I think there's a simple explanation to this one: there must have been an atmosphere that consumer demand for everything is default insatiable and any excess productivity will be used to increase total production, regardless of products.

If a sub-Wintermute AGI equivalent to Claude Opus class of ours could run 12 completely synthetic TV stations with help of one part-time human overseer, a cyberpunk entity like Sense/Net would have 1000 employees each responsible for six AGI units amassing 72000 total TV channels in its relevant company sub-division alone. Same in the real world today would mean 2400 of its 1000 employees including interim CEO got fired at the end of the week when its 3 AGI units went operational, but works like Neuromancer were written in a different time than ours.

> they don't show people having driver problems,

This one is probably because 1980s home computers didn't have much of the software "stack", plus peripherals were more or less hardwired to RAM buses. Apps ran side by side with guys from Nebraska[1] code, and could read or write to memory addresses where it thinks where the card is connected to, without having to call syscalls and have OS figure out device addresses and bus protocol packet constructions. So it likely wasn't obvious that there will be situations in the future where the mcguffin black box unit would ask an outdated binary build of an outdated framework that would be needed to be pulled from someone's Download folder and/or fixed by 16-hour tinkering(but the Chinese ICE in Neuromancer had security potting, so maybe that was it).

1: https://xkcd.com/2347/

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

#183

Post by contingencies »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #174
api wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans everywhere have those characteristics. Currently, China has substantial control of the supply chain for almost everything. I think you'll find Chinese power remains but the wealth and power distribution internally becomes even more centralized. The US and China are similar in this regard.

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

#184

Post by ompogUe »

HashHishBang wrote: post #148
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, the aesthetics argument is a distraction. Engaging with art is engaging with another human being. Finding out that the other human being is, in fact, a corporation in a trenchcoat sucks. I would go so far as to label it a feeling of betrayal that leaks into everything else the artist touches. Does anyone think The Rock has anything of substance to say about anything anymore? Do we think Post Malone isn't just tr…

Hear, hear! Cadillac using Led Zeppelin broke something in me.

I'm on the fence with the Beastie Boys getting used in movie fight scenes. They said they'd never do ads. Elevates the scenes, but it also elevates the IP of Disney and Paramount.

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

#185

Post by Duanemclemore »

apercu wrote: post #149
o-mo-ka-saaaay wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t Gibson Canadian?

Nope, he fled the draft there from South Carolina*. He has been there since '67 though.

He appears in an old CBC documentary about the Yorkville neighborhood and the hippies there from then.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3202122

*ETA: Whoops I just realized he was born in SC, but he grew up in Virginia. So THAT'S where he fled to Toronto from.

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

#186

Post by ajmurmann »

harimau777 wrote: post #165
ajmurmann wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it better that Bill Gates instead pumped huge amounts of money into philanthropy? Meanwhile SF has the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. A cathedral would be nice to look at but preventing malaria or helping sick kids seems preferable. In the past money couldn't have easily be deployed for good like this and helping fund cathedrals was likely done to increase the do…

My understanding is that represents only a tiny fraction of their wealth. As I understand it, the idea is that it would be better if the billionaire's other frivolous spending was on something that would endure for future generations. (Setting aside the religious question of weather cathedrals are frivolous.)

Did prior generations of billionaires spend a higher percentage of their wealth on charity?

I also genuinely wonder how the ratio of "paper wealth" has changed. How much money would Elon or Jeff have of they actually sold their shares in their companies? How does that compare to John D Rockefeller or the Getties? I also wonder when those created their charities.

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

#187

Post by MomsAVoxell »

ramparte wrote: post #175
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes it was Spectre VR, I slipped in with Michael Lyons and did some work alongside him on the AWE32 integration, which was brand new then and part of another promotion, and then we did some network things and fixed the BBS a few times. ;)

Moses was a riot, very exuberant.

It was an honor to have anything at all to do with Spectre, I was a pretty big fan of it .. until DOOM hit. ;)

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

#188

Post by dgellow »

ajmurmann wrote: post #186
harimau777 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that represents only a tiny fraction of their wealth. As I understand it, the idea is that it would be better if the billionaire's other frivolous spending was on something that would endure for future generations. (Setting aside the religious question of weather cathedrals are frivolous.)

Did prior generations of billionaires spend a higher percentage of their wealth on charity? I also genuinely wonder how the ratio of "paper wealth" has changed. How much money would Elon or Jeff have of they actually sold their shares in their companies? How does that compare to John D Rockefeller or the Getties? I also wonder when those created their charities.

Who cares about the past. They should be building public infrastructure and do some things the rest of society enjoys instead of buying castles and islands surrounded by fences they visit once every 2 years

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

#189

Post by rewgs »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #168
rewgs wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks, I tried. Snow Crash was Neal Stephenson though, just sayin' ..

Ha, I know. I just picked up strong Gibson vibes.

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

#190

Post by gumby »

The better prescient reference is John Brunner’s triad of The Shockwave Rider (origin of the computer virus, too!), The Sheep Look Up, and Stand on Zanzibar. They very much foreshadow the shallow pop star president, contempt for expertise, mass poverty, and incoherent direct action scenarios of technocracy/mass surveillance/prediction markets (shockwave), climate and pollution (the sheep), and population (Zanzibar). Great, if chilling stories.

They were written in the 60s and 70s but felt disturbingly predictive when I first read them in the 80s and even more so today.

(Big fan of both Ballard and Gibson too, though they are very different)

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