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Cyberpunk is dead?

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41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#41

This piece reads awfully. I haven't seen anything like this since trying to understand inscrutable postmodernist literary criticism at college. I am very interested in this, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding it. What's he trying to say? Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that are valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only value is the one of attention, some…

You need to break apart the statements and translate it into normal english. If you enjoy this stuff, I recommend reading some philosophy texts from your local university.

> Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that are valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only value is the one of attention, something we have learned from the advertising process, which has become the key process of culture.

Our current culture communicates and understands ideas in the form of sound bites. This is because advertisements have become important in shaping our culture.

> This cultural praxis fails to find a history of the human faces. The faces tried to break the boundaries of word and image, they were processes of conscious creation of speaking images for the feelings that words fail to describe.

We are trying to find a new way to communicate but we are failing at it and becoming irrelevant. (I might be losing something in the translation here.)

--

EdiX's comment "I interpret it as 'kids this days like them lolcats'" is right on target. It captures the angst of the writer bemoaning the loss of culture of our current generation.

On another note, I find this snippet to be strangely ironic. It complains about a failure to redefine the way we communicate. The writer is attempting to precisely define their ideas in language that reminds me of a lawyer trying to write a bulletproof contract. The end result is nearly impenetrable and risks losing the entire message because no one can understand it.

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#42
post #13
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. I don't mean to threadjack, but I'm running a new startup where I'm building augmented reality displays ( http://gothameyewear.com/ if anyone is interested -- haven't posted it here before, simply because there's not much there), and I occasionally have that "well shit, it's the future" realization in working on it. We may not be in the 2011 of Shadowrun, but we'll have decks soon -- they'll be o…

I've convinced myself that augmented reality displays are right around the corner. Don't we have the technology to to do this now? I suppose the challenge might be to make everything light and compact enough. The future is so close I can smell it.

The iPhone/Android device as a kind of handheld augmented reality window is very real and available in a great form factor at a great marginal price (assuming you want the rest of the features of the smart phone to begin with). Still, it's not quite the same as being able to go full on Snow Crash gargoyle.

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#43
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between Anonymous and Wikileaks, I feel like we're practically living in a cyberpunk story. We're just the blissfully uninvolved citizens who don't live in the seedy underbelly.

I'm not sure we at Hacker News are blissfully uninvolved; we're busy building tomorrow's sinister megacorporations. Or Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong.

[deleted]

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#44
post #7
post #2

The problem with cyberpunk is that it's no longer the future, it's the present. Sometimes when I read the news I've got the idea we're kind of living in a dystopian 90's cyberpunk future... When it's the new normal it makes sense that the word is "dead" as a denominator.

That's exactly Gibsons take on it which is why he wrote a book like Pattern Recognition which interestingly enough is much less dystopian than his first three books. These days cyberpunk seems to be more about transhumanism and posthumanism ala Charles Stross books "Accellerando" & "Singularity Sky".

Er, no.

Cyberpunk (in written SF) died around the time "Vincent Omniaveritas" folded his zine Cheap Truth in 1986 (which you can find an archive of here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ ) ... by 1992, when Bantam Spectra published Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" it had descended into self-parody (hint: a heroic central character called Hiro Protagonist? Try saying that aloud).

Transhumanism/posthumanism was big in the 1990s -- Vernor Vinge coughed up the hairball that is the singularity in the mid-1980s and Hans Moravec of CMU popularized it and spread the fertile soil for the early 1990s transhumanists, who also hybridized with libertarians and cypherpunks by way of the extropians mailing list circa 1990-95. But again, by the time you get to the late 1990s folks like Ray Kurzweil were bandwagoning on it, and these days that, too, is ancient history.

"Accelerando" was written circa 1998-2003, and "Singularity Sky" -- not its original title, but one dropped on it by the publisher in search of teh sexxy -- in 1996-98. If you're pointing to them as signs of where SF is at, I'll just get my coat -- because SF is dead.

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#45
post #28
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. I don't mean to threadjack, but I'm running a new startup where I'm building augmented reality displays ( http://gothameyewear.com/ if anyone is interested -- haven't posted it here before, simply because there's not much there), and I occasionally have that "well shit, it's the future" realization in working on it. We may not be in the 2011 of Shadowrun, but we'll have decks soon -- they'll be o…

I am a college student looking to do research on wearable computers and interface designs for this kind of device. Looking for interns?

This guy has a history of "starting" things and never finishing him. You'd be better off finding someone with a more stable history of finishing what they started. And when I say history, I mean he's into the double digits of "startups" he's initiated.

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#46
post #44
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly Gibsons take on it which is why he wrote a book like Pattern Recognition which interestingly enough is much less dystopian than his first three books. These days cyberpunk seems to be more about transhumanism and posthumanism ala Charles Stross books "Accellerando" & "Singularity Sky".

Er, no. Cyberpunk (in written SF) died around the time "Vincent Omniaveritas" folded his zine Cheap Truth in 1986 (which you can find an archive of here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ ) ... by 1992, when Bantam Spectra published Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" it had descended into self-parody (hint: a heroic central character called Hiro Protagonist? Try saying that aloud). Transhumanism/posthumanism…

So is it wrong to gush, fanboy-style, on HN?

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#47
post #46
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, no. Cyberpunk (in written SF) died around the time "Vincent Omniaveritas" folded his zine Cheap Truth in 1986 (which you can find an archive of here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ ) ... by 1992, when Bantam Spectra published Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" it had descended into self-parody (hint: a heroic central character called Hiro Protagonist? Try saying that aloud). Transhumanism/posthumanism…

So is it wrong to gush, fanboy-style, on HN?

I loved delicious!

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#48
post #44
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly Gibsons take on it which is why he wrote a book like Pattern Recognition which interestingly enough is much less dystopian than his first three books. These days cyberpunk seems to be more about transhumanism and posthumanism ala Charles Stross books "Accellerando" & "Singularity Sky".

Er, no. Cyberpunk (in written SF) died around the time "Vincent Omniaveritas" folded his zine Cheap Truth in 1986 (which you can find an archive of here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ ) ... by 1992, when Bantam Spectra published Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" it had descended into self-parody (hint: a heroic central character called Hiro Protagonist? Try saying that aloud). Transhumanism/posthumanism…

Thats fair enough.

The reason why I wrote what I wrote was that I seem to remember Gibson in an interview himself pointed to some of this stuff as someone who could think further than he could think.

Maybe I misunderstood. Didn't mean to insult your, by the way, great work.

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#49
post #15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've convinced myself that augmented reality displays are right around the corner. Don't we have the technology to to do this now? I suppose the challenge might be to make everything light and compact enough. The future is so close I can smell it.

There are two challenges: getting it into a form factor where normal people would wear it (our initial dev units will not be too far off this mark) and getting the price down to something sane. The latter is the really hard part, if you care about quality; the 0.5" 800x600 OLED displays we're using are $800 for a single unit, and don't drop to $400/unit until you hit a volume of 1000+ units. Of course, they'll get ch…

Considering the first, I suppose it's best to try and integrate display into ordinary-looking sunglasses. Some work has been done to develop "covert HMD" like that. [1,2]

However, the prototypes don't seem to have solved the problem of inputting vision field video - there is no camera hidden inside the sunglasses as far as I can tell.

[1] Steve Mann - Intelligent Image Processing. [2] http://users.cwnet.com/vvortex3/hmd/

Re: Cyberpunk is dead?

#50
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a college student looking to do research on wearable computers and interface designs for this kind of device. Looking for interns?

This guy has a history of "starting" things and never finishing him. You'd be better off finding someone with a more stable history of finishing what they started. And when I say history, I mean he's into the double digits of "startups" he's initiated.

I have started a massive number of projects, but of the startups I've founded, every single one of them has released a product. Of the projects, I have probably a 40% finish rate overall, which isn't half bad IMO, considering that those are projects like creating new OSes, independently recreating the Win32 API, etc.

So no, I don't have a perfect history, but it's pretty good considering the scale at which I've worked.

Edit: Fwiw, I've only started 3 companies, not including this one. Not that many, considering a 6 year time span.

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