This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change-induced apocalypse.
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election.
This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
Have you read the book, or are you relying on literally half of a sentence drawn from an abbreviated blurb summarizing a short radio clip to draw that conclusion?
> But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present."
You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle:
Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up....
Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come across as hysterical and insulting to the future?
The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read, a problem which the radio clip obviously didn't remedy. Although in fairness to NPR, it's just radio, it's not exactly the New York Times Book Review.
> The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
Agency, and its' predecessor The Peripheral, are set both in (a version of, or more precisely multiple versions of) the present day or the very near future, and in the future. There's no way to not take the present day into account. But the politics of Gibson's future are not reminiscent of "MSNBC vs Fox News," if that makes you feel any better.
Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with what you are writing about.
> Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up....
Isn't that a Harry Turtledove novel, or am I thinking of some other mil-SF writer? It's also similar to the plot of the original Deus Ex game.
You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tried to come up with a reason for why his 2017 is different.
And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is not “if only democrats would save us” but rather “our whole system is built on corruption and will destroy us.”
So your comments make zero sense. Your critique is aimed at an abstract idea of what you think a book should be and has no relation to the text itself.
Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel is a sci-fi political spy thriller taking place in a very intensified war on terror, with a backstory that Gore was elected president. The alternate history backstory was intended by MacLeod to show that the paranoid milieu and the security state could take place under any president. The difference is that he didn't have an in-universe explanation for the divergence, the sci-fi in the story didn't deal with it.
The future world premise was in his previous book - The Peripheral. With the same characters. So I wonder why the article said he created this future world just to "fix" his story's timeline.
Yeah I thought that was very odd as well; the intersection of the two stubs seemed inevitable. Not like a last minute correction at all. I think the article must be taking him wildly out of context. At the same time, we have this:
"After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either"
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I can only interpret it as: he was writing it as a somewhat happy world, then thought he would need to revise to make it less happy, and then realized that it should never have been happy at all. Which just seems odd, given his style.
Anyways the whole article is hard to follow, I love me some NPR but this misquote was rough: Gibson is quoted as referring to "an uploaded healing consciousness" whereas if you listen to the audio it is clearly "an uploaded human consciousness", which makes _much_ more sense.
It's true that Gibson's work is compelling because like all great cyberpunk writers, it grafts real world social, cultural, and political considerations in with his futuristic technology. That said, good world-building doesn't mean the author himself might not have naive or problematic politics. J.K. Rowling's expressed views on Twitter have been an ongoing source of controversy. Or perhaps more relevant, Ray Bradbury in his old age became a staunch supporter of George Bush and the wars waged by his administration:
Generally speaking, it is good for literature to address political topics, and perhaps even take particular positions on them, but it is a bad idea for literature to address specific real people or specific real instances of those topics, if for no other reason than the specific instance is going to be yesterday's news by the time your book comes out. And addressing specific people is almost always a very petty look; even if you are superficially in the choir being preached at and cheering along in the heat of the moment, the work is almost certainly failing to touch you deeply and you probably won't remember it in a month.
(Even when taking positions, the really good stuff will still make sure than the people on the wrong side have some sort of insight applied to them and some effort to understand them on their own terms, rather than just crafting strawmen of bad people who are bad, who deserve to lose, because they are bad.)
I think if you look back at the good political work, you'll find most of them fit this pattern. I'm sure exceptions exist, but they are not common.
Obama didn't set up killer FEMA camps, Trump is actively encouraging killer climate change. That's the difference. The example you're looking for is something something Heinlein/Card, where awareness of the very real role politics plays in shaping human history is compellingly cast through a conservative prism and not, like... utter nonsense.
>The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
I'm been watching "The Plot Against America" miniseries and realised that a similar scenario played out in the early 1800's. Imagine a SciFi writer of the time (If such a thing existed) publishing a novel where a time traveller travels back from 2020 to stop the Federalist Hamiltonian conspiracy to bring the U.S back under British rule/Democratic-Republican Jeffersonian conspiracy to enter the war on the side of France and bring the Reign of Terror to America.
It would be 100% political shoehorning of course but people would lap it up all the same.
William McKinley was assassinated 120 years ago and I wouldn't bat an eye about an alternate timeline story involving that. It put Teddy Roosevelt in the office and probably had a massive effect on our current politics.
But as others have pointed out, Gibson was simply trying to salvage his existing manuscript.
But also, I'm blanking on what 2015 event you're referring to. Do you mean 2005 and Katrina?
in the actual book, Gibson's vision of the future is basically as you describe -- it's extremely weird and alien with little mapping to our current political system. meddling in past timelines is an esoteric hobby for the super-rich.
the Clinton/Trump election is mentioned offhand a handful of times through the book, the protagonists didn't have anything to do with it, and it's just not about that at all.
I think that's a great premise. A lot of these "alternative history" novels assume that changing just one thing would radically alter the outcome when really they're just changing one aspect of a much larger system.
I've occasionally thought that a good alternative history novel would be one where someone went back to 1930 and assassinated Hitler, only to find that with less insane leadership in the inevitable war (less resources wasted on superweapons and the occult, stalls Russia with diplomacy, doesn't waste resources in Africa) Germany wins the war and unites all of Europe under a fascist regime.
There is no time travel in The Peripheral or Agency. The future folks figure out how to create a communication channel back to their past, that contact then immediately causing their past's timeline to diverge.
It's actually a brilliant device (not created by WG) because, as he has stated, all sci-fi is really speaking about the "now" of the author who wrote it, in terms of what they believe is possible or probable, whether the author does so consciously or unconsciously.
By presenting alternate timelines where certain major political events occurred differently, Gibson is able to comment on their effects on the "fuckedness quotient" of the moment.
By far, however, his most important message involves his introducing the concept of the "jackpot", which will eventually eclipse his notoriety for having introduced the term "cyberspace" a million years ago.
The jackpot is the sum total devastation we have slow-wrought upon ourselves that leads to more extreme weather and pandemics while providing cover for political groups to form kleptocracies. The term comes from the fact that those with money are always able to profit from change, and that they tend to be rewarded for their brutal competitiveness and ability to leverage any opportunity. And the bigger, the better, therefore a jackpot for them.
What he is really saying is, "The future you are heading for is ugly and is the direct result of the policies we are making right now as entire nations full of unconcerned people."
Then, if you read his work even more deeply, you'll find that what he is really saying is that we will always fuck ourselves up when we make decisions based upon any other reason than a compassionate, thinking heart. It's just that the problems caused by global heating have been brewing since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
Thanks for the summary on Gibson's new work. I really needed some clarification because I couldn't really get a sense of the plot in this one (Agency). The characters don't really have an impact on anything...They do nothing in particular except move around to/from various locations, focusing on the aesthetic detail of their surroundings, more than driving the story forward (What would a new Gibson novel be without mention of Japanese denim?). I suppose since most of the characters that make up our present (stub device) are being strung along by the stub masters from the future, that they really have no idea of what's going on/ or at stake. That's understandable, but apparently in the future, stubs are created and manipulated to the whims of their admins and aren't really important, but rather as a 'hobby'. Makes the whole struggle to 'fix' our stub seem kind of pointless.
Yeah, reading The Peripheral first is essential IMO, just like watching Star Wars is necessary before The Empire Strikes Back.
And who doesn't want Otaku denim made on heirloom looms ;-)
Personally, as a software craftsman, I appreciate anyone who dedicates themself to craftsmanship. Japan seems to have a great deal of very dedicated craftspeople (NHK Online videos rule!), and Gibson is definitely a word- and idea-smith, Otaku-grade.
[[And because people need things to watch nowadays, our family personally loves NHK Online's shows 'Design Talks Plus' and 'Trails to Oishii Tokyo', as well as Grand Sumo. We find them fascinating glimpses into a very different culture, one that seems to honor craftsmanship in a way we, as Americans, find beautiful.]]
As to the characters not having 'an impact on anything', that's really how it's always been, unless you're a part of the klept. The only question is, "How you developed yourself in your lifetime to fight oppression and seek to uplift the most disadvantaged?" Because, if you don't, you're just a poorer version of the callous bastards that run the power organizations that do have an effect, effects that have, for example, facilitated global heating for short-term profit at the expense of the rest of us and our heirs.
[ETA: To see the klept in action, check out the parallel HN story about Bloomberg killing reporting on CCP officials getting wealthy in office.]
>>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election.
If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election.
Not only would that be a more impactful long-term change that would likely have prevented the systemic failures that elevated Trump in the first place, but it would probably be easier to enact. You just need to park a handful of people outside a handful of voting precincts to say "Hey, just so you know this ballot is really badly designed. . ."
No first Black president, though. So we'd have to deal with that.
I'm pretty sure there's a limit in the book as to how far back they can go with the time-travel technology. I think it's something like 100 years but don't remember.
Makes more sense when you see his twitter feed these days is mostly retweets of political stuff like your uncle on facebook (or... everyone on twitter).
You just can't become the guy who seriously posts political shit on social media all day and spends so much time consumed by the "them bad, we good" faction war.
agree the premise is really quite pathetic, you have a plot where people travel 100+ years in the past to try to get .... Hillary Clinton elected??? I much better idea would be to have gotten Al Gore elected instead, I think history would have been very different in the 2000's/2010's, think no trillion+ wars in the middle east, possibly no financial crisis, no tsa or patriot act, the change for the past 2 decades would be profound and make for a much more interesting story, also prb why I haven't read Gibson since the pattern recognition trilogy.
The article is an abbreviated version of the radio clip. There's a bit more information and context if you listen to it, although I got the impression the editor might have cut him off mid-rant at the very end.
Since the results of the 2016 election prompted a total rewrite of Agency, discussion of that is hardly a wild turn.
Everything took a wild turn after the 2016 election. Electing Trump will be remembered as the time when America's history took a massive nose dive. One thing I think we'll see is the rise of a left-wing version of the Dark Enlightenment wherein a contingent of leftists, disillusioned with democracy after Trump, just go full tankie and start calling for the purges to begin.
And then we risk a civil war between the left authoritarians and the right authoritarians, each side convinced that America's survival depends on the utter crushing defeat of the other side.
> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."
Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun, a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here).
In the earlier editions, from 1989 through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Matrix (their 'internet') was all virtual reality, and the 'Decker' using it would disappear into that world and barely interact with the rest of the team.
In more recent editions, written after smartphones and wireless internet became common, everything was connected. Everything is connected to the Matrix. In combat, a Decker can hack the opponents' guns to disable them, for example. It's not a world to disappear into; that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.
That's an interesting example, because it's something of a case of convergent evolution.
The earlier Matrix rules had two big issues. First, the pace was wildly different — Matrix turns took like a tenth of the in-game time of meatspace turns. Second, deckers wouldn't share the same space as the rest of the team, so you had two separate, barely interconnected spaces.
The new rules both match how real world technology evolved, but also, and more importantly, solve the pacing and separateness issues.
There were also gameplay reasons behind that for flow. One of the criticisms of the newer model is that the needless connectivity without so much as a logistical benefit doesn't make the decker/hacker feel smart so much as make it feel like the world is set up by colossal idiots who would think giving the army hand grenades which are always remote detonatable without a manual safety fuse would be an excellent idea and be utterly shocked that their entire army got blown up by one hacker.
Whoever paid for that grenade doesn't trust the soldier / mercenary they gave it to very far, that's why the network connection exists in the first place, hackers can exploit that.
This shows how hard it is to write sci-fi when I was joking about "grenades as a service" - someone's gone one better and made a wifi mesh network of landmines!
And then converted the landmines to remote-operated as part of a legal fiction about victim-operated devices. Which is the military version of the concern about robots taking jobs: to what extent is it acceptable to have munitions making their own decisions about taking lives?
Anyway, in the Shadowrun universe you'd definitely be able to hack the mesh network of landmines.
I think this was done as much for gameplay flow as anything else. The main criticism of the older model was that you had to manage combat in 3 separate, and only mildly overlapping, planes which made combat a time-consuming pain to track. Lots of playgroups would discourage people from playing deckers or mages just so they wouldn't have to deal with astral plane/matrix stuff.
One would think that way, right ? Stuff like this in SF always felt unbelievable to me in the past, especially coming from the technical/IT background. No one would be THAT stupid to have their stuff so wide open for anyone to hack into.
Well, then future came and with all the insanely insecure IoT devices all around I'm no longer so sure. :P
> "And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'"
Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it gets harder and harder to write near-future SF as the present is in flux. Especially to write post-apocalyptic SF.
SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards. This remains true even in apocalyptic scenarios, which are always tied to the worries of the present at the time of writing.
But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events. Things like the "5G causes coronavirus" nonsense remind me of what Carl Sagan called the "demon-haunted world".
There was a video done by scientist who worked in Wuhan 5G station that explained how 5G is messing up balance in cells. But its being taken down now. Its okay. Downvote me into oblivion! We been there before. I still can find my posts from many years ago accusing Verizon and other carriers of spying on Americans and closely working with NSA, and I also been called "conspiracy theorist cook" and that there is no evidence at all. Until we had Snowden came to the light of course...
You're being downvoted for teasing. When you are asserting facts you should just provide them, not beg for attention. Hinting and sharing rumors (but not providing anything for people to evaluate) just wastes others' time. This is not the same as speculating on your own account; but you didn't speculate, you asserted facts and then ducked out of providing any.
To what degree is that a comprehensively accurate representation of the ideas floating around in the conspiracy world?
And if you feel the urge to click on the downward pointing diamond to the left of my comment rather than replying, please pause for a moment and consider that action in the context of your comment, as well as the grandparent comment "But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism...".
"Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they find interesting—not for promotion."
This seems to be another example of how you and I have very different ways of thinking, in this case as it relates to precision in speech and comprehension. More specifically: I didn't solicit upvotes. Rather, I made a suggestion/request (politely): "please pause for a moment and consider that action in the context of..."
As an aside, of the two of us, you are by far the worse violator of HN guidelines, at least as it relates to conversations between you and I. I am able (and willing) to demonstrate this with numerous examples from prior conversations. If you'd be interested in considering these ideas, I'd be happy to lay some out for you. As well, I would be happy to share some techniques that I have found to be very effective in improving my behavior in this general area, let me know if you are interested in hearing some of those ideas.
Another interesting (and I believe important) cultural phenomenon on display in this exchange, is an initial ~projection of supreme confidence in one's beliefs (my perception):
> Facts you say? The world is all ears!
I estimate that this person believes that they deal (think) only in highly skilled thinking & facts, and that anyone with any concerns about 5G deals only in poor thinking & baseless conspiracy theories. And once again, when such a person is challenged, they will rarely respond rationally, using facts, but rather resort to silence (typically accompanied with a downvote), or blatantly obvious diversionary tactics (reframing & redirecting the topic, dishonesty, insults, a wide variety of logical fallacies, etc).
It seems this phenomenon is very hard to see, even when it is pointed out. But if one can manage to find a way to coerce one's mind into actually seeing it, it can be seen everywhere, and in turn gives one a much broader, higher resolution, nuanced view on reality. But, such things are obviously not for everyone. But to know for sure, I recommend one at least give it a try.
> SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards.
This is what I think was so original about The Handmaid's Tale--a possible iteration of our own culture and technology that moved backwards-sideways instead of forward. (Disclaimer: we read this years ago in school, and I haven't had a chance to see the recent adaptation.)
The human hardware and mindware can not be really updated. Technology is magic, a true advance is not existing. You want to hand objects a god could have trouble with, to a primitiv creature.
Exponential information density, exponential energy density, exponential capabilitys.
If you gave a human a replicator, he would make it eat the world.
> SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards.
Notable exception: Cloud Atlas (pub. 2004), which admits that "Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword."
> a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events
We're definitely in more of a Bruce Sterling cyberpunk future than a William Gibson cyberpunk future. Distraction has been feeling eerily prescient recently.
We are actually in the Mike Judge Idiocracy cyberpunk future and it terrifies me. Our president is a reality TV freak, the citizens are so science-retarded that they think Covid is a hoax, the population all sit in our homes watching testicle-kicking videos on huge TVs while drinking Mountain Dew and eating Cheetos while the world melts down outside.
I think we are going to have to push harder. The anti-intellectual cohort has got their preferred elected leaders in more than one country these past few years. Just because smart people exist, doesn't mean they are holding the reigns currently.
Well for one thing Real Estate just doesn't work that way. It may sometimes feel like half the US is a giant suburban sprawl but in reality the elites own 40% of all real estate in America and they keep it nice, private, and undeveloped.
+1. I just watched Eric Weinstein on Lex Fridman's podcast. He is angry about how students have been emasculated by the establishment. That the death of Aaron Schwartz was a tragedy and the students should 'rise up and take back' MIT. Yet he himself has a net worth over 100mill and is doing nothing about it.He promises betterment through revolution like Batista and Castro, yet he himself is busy amassing wealth. Why does he think youth will waste itself on anything else except the pursuit of the dream that made him successful? Internet has just become another tool for control because that's just what humans do - make tools out of anything including their fellow humans.
Precisely. Courage requires actual conquering of fear, which doubtlessly involves confrontation with the status quo rather than a few microphone jibber jabbers. Who in the Western World has a contempt for convenience?
Those seem unrelated to the parent's point. Weinstein is co-opting the death of Aaron Schwartz to push his own far-right ideology. The target of his form of `rise up and take back` is neither "corporate shenanigans" nor "capitalist greed", but those who challenge it from the center and the left.
He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the backing of a media arm and an attitude of suing everyone who challenges his views. School of Thiel and all.
Weinstein isn't far right. You have no idea what far right is if you think he is. He is centre-right maybe centre. His brother and his sister-in-law are both lefties. There is nothing far right about Weinstein or his family.
> He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the backing of a media arm and an attitude of suing everyone who challenges his views. School of Thiel and all.
Actually I do talk to the people you are talking about, and again most of them aren't far right. The actual far-right don't like Weinstein or his brother (they tend to not like Jewish people on the far right).
This is quite a dishonest attempt at rewriting history with no respect for the truth. You can pretend to see your gaslighting remark as truth, but I've looked into every one of your claims about these people and I cannot come close to the same conclusion as you. I do not, however, call his brother far-right. Perhaps you could be excused for believing someone isn't far right when the overton window among english-speaking countries has narrowed so far to the right of center.
(The report itself doesn't do a particular good job either as they use some dubious sources and I don't agree with half of it, but their definitions of the groups are close enough).
I've listened to a lot of Weinstein on various shows he has appeared as a guest on and I haven't heard anything that can be considered far right. One of the first times I seen Weinstein was when he appeared on Dave Rubin who is a gay liberal/libertarian (the last time I watched his show it seemed to change every other week) that lives in California.
> Perhaps you could be excused for believing someone isn't far right when the overton window among english-speaking countries has narrowed so far to the right of center.
This is a complete nonsense. The Anglo-sphere for the most part is pretty much centre, centre-left. Many conservatives and paleo-conservatives complain their conservative parties aren't really conservative (which isn't far-right either btw).
The term far-right in itself is a poor description. A better term is a "reactionary right". But that is a whole other discussion between the "reactionary right" and the "traditional right". Right and Left are really poor descriptions of political positions and that is why many tests online now are multi-dimensional.
Weinstein acts right but talks left. He hoards his hundred millions and goads students to take back MIT. He gives lip service to Aaron Schwartz without doing anything to reduce the digital divide. He is an establishment hypocrite. He is a whiner. (weiner?)
I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. The current generation of VR seems like the first halting steps into that world. Progress towards realtime raytracing and massively online social worlds look like the next steps. The lofty goals of brain machine interface companies whisper faint possibilities of "jacking in" at some distant date.
I'm with you there. I think as long as we keep up the old visions and cherish them, somebody will make it real. For me it looks like logical way forward but it may not to everyone. The popularity of AR may break VR in the future.
>> I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point.
In the year 2000 up to maybe 2004, it was definitely a mysterious and sexy place... The absence of good search engines made it mysterious and pornography made it sexy.
We need to have a stable and sustainable enough industry and society for technological advance to keep occuring. We may never populate space or even get our act together soon enough to prevent early destruction of what we've got. The mundane issues of trust, politics, human nature, etc, may prevent us from exploring many possible futures.
I'm saying this not to be a downer, but to impart that we should all have an eye on solving or mitigating those mundane problems, so we can get on to solving the more fun ones.
The human brain processes ~40gigabits/second of information. Current direct brain interfaces are probably closer to 400bits/second Computer to Brain. I think it's very possible that we will hit wetware limitations for direct brain interfaces an order of magnitude or two less than ~40gigabits/seconds. With less information to process the digital worlds created by brain machine interfaces will be significantly less stimulating than the real world.
In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine interfaces.
Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy place.
I would argue that that number is a bit high for sense input. Figures I've seen are about 20x lower on the high end. The only time I've seen estimates as high as the one you gave are when they are considering the full field of vision for each eye and translating that directly to pixels assuming there is 100% fidelity. Human vision doesn't work that way, we dedicate far fewer neurons to our peripheral vision outside the fovea. You also have to remember that neurons transmit data at a much slower rate than electrical connections (100m/s vs 300,000km/s) so the path to building a better brain machine interfce is to have a large number of electrodes which seems to me a fairly straightforward problem to solve e.g. make them smaller and adding more of them. The other side of the coin is that we aren't aware of all of our sensory input all of the time so you can get away with only transmitting the important stuff which greatly reduces the bandwidth needed. Further out, there's likely some form of abstraction going on inside our brains and if we can communicate data on that level we'll likely need even less input to create a realistic experience.
As an aside, I don't think I'd opt for the type of uploading outlined in that novel considering it involves a posthumous destructive scan of the connectome. There wouldn't be any continuity so you'd probably just end up with a copy. The only type of uploading I could see working would be a Ship of Theseus approach where you gradually replace your biological neurons with artificial neurons and even that causes some hesitation.
We're not jacking in and penetrating black ice with tech stolen from a corporation-state, but I still think the Internet is mysterious and, if not "sexy", at least endlessly fascinating. Both because you usually never know what device you're actually accessing and where it is, and because it's not uncommon to have no idea who put it there or why.
>We're not jacking in and penetrating black ice with tech stolen from a corporation-state
I'm not so sure about that. Stuxnet, the Shadow Brokers leaks, and who knows what is being sold on the black market; this continuity seems very close to the plot of a cyberpunk novel.
"And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'"
Honestly, if you were deeply, dramatically surprised by Trump's election, you weren't paying enough attention. The causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt.
It lead me to wonder if there is a term for such a phenomenon: the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of.
The election probably hinged on the handling of “her emails” by the FBI Director. I don’t see how anyone could have predicted the extent to which he would bungle that. His investigation found no wrong-doing, but he publicly excoriated her anyway. Then, he opened a new investigation, which again found nothing.
1) The "FBI emails changed the election" narrative is a thesis, not a statement of fact. I seriously doubt the average person knew or cared about this. This sounds like the news media over-emphasizing their own relevance.
2) I don't think it really matters for the point I'm trying to make. Even if Hillary had won, the election would have been close, thus showing that the support for Trump's platform was still widespread. If he lost, we'd probably just see a different right-wing populist candidate arise in 2020. The issues that led to his rise would still exist, which is precisely my point.
It was a close election, there's probably a lot of single things that could have changed it. One side or the other winning a close election shouldn't fundamentally change your worldview.
> The causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt.
So .. how's that working out?
> the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of.
Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.
How's what working out? I'm not in that demographic and I didn't vote for Trump, nor am I a Republican. I'm just detailing a phenomenon. The jury still seems to be out on whether Trump's Rust Belt base is benefiting from his policies, but the coronavirus may end up being more influential in returning jobs to the U.S. than anything the president could do.
> Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.
Agreed. This is something that seems to go over-looked. It didn't take one, or even five, years to get someone like Trump in office. This was the result of many decades of significant economic and societal restructuring.
> Honestly, if you were deeply, dramatically surprised by Trump's election, you weren't paying enough attention
I guess I wasn't. Because I distinctly remember when Trump was just one of the Republican hopefuls, I saw that the odds of him becoming President were 1000 to 1 and I recall thinking I should put a £100 bet on it, but thought it would just be a waste of money.
I guess you're retired through your foresight though? Or, wait...let me guess... you don't bet? It would be the fourth time I'd heard that. Is there some future restriction on betting that stops you time travellers with perfect knowledge of the future from cashing in?
> I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present."
TV show The Good Fight Season 4, Episode 1 "The Gang Deals with Alternate Reality has brilliant dark humor take on alternate reality where Hillary Clinton won the election.
spoiler alert
---
(spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)
> (spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)
that's eerily close to current reality. (#MeToo only when politically expedient; Weinstein's damage control advisor is now a senior campaign adviser to a 'liberal' contender for the WH)
I disagree, the cyber fighting is almost exactly how he described it. Tons of misinformation, requiring personal compute agents to sort through it for you. Attacking high-profile targets by buying zero-days, creating distractions, then pivoting to more obscure vulnerabilities in the corporate firewalls. Attack & parry, then riposte.
I find his descriptions more apt now than when his books were first published.
> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."
This is a common mistake utopians of all stripes; the short comings of the world as we know it isn't a consequence of external forces imposing badness on us, it's a consequence of the fallibility of humanity. Unless if you have a concrete plan on how you're going to organize society differently, any attempt to start something fresh will end up recreating all of the ills that drove you from "society" in the first place.
Arguable; I’m not enough of a literary person to argue it out. But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude, and I’d argue that my original point still holds; escapists often fail to recognize the source of the problems they’re escaping from, and recreate them wherever they escape to.
It's not really arguable. Gibson wrote punk literature, at least back then; he identified himself as a punk subculture writer, and punk isn't utopian. He was not describing a desirable future, but a depressing one where soulless corporations rule the world.
> But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude
Escapism can be pessimistic, as in Gibson. It's not him who "escapes", it's the denizens of the soulless world he described, and the "world" they escape to can be just as alienating. It's no triumph to "escape" to Gibson's matrix, and his world continues to be a crapsack [1][2].
The setting as a whole is dystopian, but the possibilities of the net as a free space for people to flee into and become empowered there- isn't that a utopian enclave, a refuge?
Regardless of post hoc genre classifications like cyberpunk vs. postcyberpunk, you can still have pockets of hope within a generally dystopian setting, and perhaps Gibson's cyberspace was the place in Neuromancer.
I'm specifically arguing about Gibson, Neuromancer and his related works, not about the cyberpunk genre at large. Gibson self-identifies -- or did, anyway -- as a punk writer. Cyberspace is not really a pocket of hope in his stories. The ending of Neuromancer itself is ambiguous and not exactly optimistic. Many of his short stories are similarly dark and depressing, things seldom ending well for his characters.
I'm not speaking of cyberpunk in general. Note that Gibson himself has stated the modern "cyberpunk" genre largely misses the point, mistaking a novel counter-cultural idea for its visual trappings.
> but the possibilities of the net as a free space for people to flee into and become empowered there- isn't that a utopian enclave, a refuge?
That theme isn't really present in the Neuromancer series. From the perspective of our viewpoint characters, the matrix is primarily a place that one goes to do a job, not a place to hang out; it's seen primarily as the domain of megacorps and mysterious AIs, not a human space.
It is present in the follow up Count Zero though. Also while Gibson focuses on characters at the fringe of society, the world itself is not significantly more distopian than our world (or the '80s), which is probably one of the author's points.
> the world itself is not significantly more distopian than our world (or the '80s)
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment! The backstory to the Sprawl universe is crushingly dystopian -- Soviet Russia has won a nuclear war, destroying a number of European cities (particularly in Germany) and irradiating much of the European continent. In the wake of that war, it appears that the US government has largely collapsed, leaving megacorporations (like Sense/Net), wealthy families (like the Tessier-Ashpools), and street gangs (like the Yakuza and Panther Moderns) as the primary sources of power.
2020 sure isn't great, but I'd still prefer it to the crapsack world that Gibson built.
I think what's really going to a create a different sort of world, not a Utopia but still vastly different, is trans-humanity and post-humanity.
Gibson and many others have tried to imagine the transition from human to post-human which is largely about the power of brain computer interfaces.
To me, the convergence of advanced and/or general purpose AI, high bandwidth brain computer interfaces, and new levels of immersion in virtual/augmented reality provided by the new BCIs have a potential to transform the qualitative nature of human existence and so there is plenty of room left for science fiction along those lines. Although I will admit that I have not in any way explored much of that genre.
One idea is of a type of video game that involves high-bandwidth neural input enabling a type of waking lucid dream, where the AI reads your brain and modifies the scene to align with it. Maybe several people and advanced AIs are involved in this game. And suppose that there is a type of almost-human level AI being simulated as characters. Or maybe real humans plugged in and acting without lucid dreaming powers but the ability to affect the environment if they activate certain types of triggers recognized by an AI.
That is pretty far-fetched, but I think I have described a scenario where gods and magic are real.
Why does one assume the Internet is in its final form? I'm about 99% certain the phase we are in is a transitional phase. Upon the arrival of ubiquitous immersive computing, it will go through what may be its final phase shift, but right now it'll be looked back upon similar to the previous eras.
Yes! What's interesting about Gibson's vision is that he assumed connectivity would be hard, but VR would be easy. It's a world of payphones, fax machines, and "simstim" where you can receive someone else's sensory input and ride along inside their head as they move through the world.
That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we nail VR.
Simstim is - at least in part - being worked on by a company called Openwater[0]. Mary Lou Jepsen did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while back that speaks to the ambition of thought/memory recording via an MRI-like device and the "insertion"/playback of the same in other people [1].
I asked because the world of Brainstorm consisted of payphones too, and they did that 'telepathy' with headsets which could replay recorded experiences over that modem line.
Hard to classify that movie, at its time it was pure science-fiction, now it is a technothriller from the past. But very watchable, i think.
Its final form is an ultra-regulated space where you need to apply to the government in order to put up a website, etc, and your website-permit can be revoked if you violate the law (i.e. copyright strikes)
> "Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff."
That is the story of all technology. The horse was the super weapon used by kings and warriors. It ended up being something that farmers used to plow their fields. Same with ships, cars, telephones, radios, televisions, computers.
>"Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all
like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff."
Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.
I think one of the things it was easy to miss in 1984 when Neuromancer was published was how accessible the internet and computers is. I've watched two year olds interact with the modern internet.
If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in 1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Microsoft's unofficial mission was "a computer on every [office] desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software". It sounded overly ambitious, even into the 90s.
You're confusing the map with the territory I think. It's safe to say that Gibson's early work is full of insinuations.
He zooms into specific criminal subcultures and describes them in detail but that doesn't mean that the rest of society follows the same principles. It's pretty obvious that there is plenty of "banal" and "average" in the Sprawl trilogy, it's just not overtly described because what would be the point?.
The same is true today. There is excitement and novelty to be found on the Internet. But it's certainly not going to be discovered by the sheep, the 99% that spend their time on Instagram, Youtube and Amazon. Similar characters to the ones found in Gibson's books exist, but similarly, are not visible from the popular sphere.
In that sense, Gibson definitely misses the mark when he describes the Internet today but that's to be expected. The genius of his early work lies in it being IMAGINED, or channeled if you will. Definitely not reasoned. Somehow his imagination tapped into the technological currents that define us today.
Now, having lost his imagination and overcompensating with reason, he has become yet another sheep and his view reflects that.
Interestingly, a decade later, both Tad William's Otherland (1996), and Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash (1992) described networked virtual realities which everyday normal people had access to, but they were referred to as "Ken and Barbies" or similar. Their use of off-the-shelf avatars and no custom software gave them away. And the Techno-elites still had their own spaces within these worlds that were either off-limits or hard to find.
One might have run the risk of being called a delusional pervert if one had correctly anticipated the massive scale that online sex work has grown to since the dawn of the internet.
I don't think there is really that much more porn being produced on a per-person basis, just that where they used to be Polaroids that would be lost to time now all of the porn can be distributed worldwide instantly for free. Someone who sat down and worked the numbers might have come to this realization early on, but few people realized exactly what it means to give everybody the means to be their own publisher.
I think there probably is a lot more porn being produced on a per-person basis. We have a lot more cameras and a lot more ways to share photos/videos now.
I think there is a lot more content in general being produced too.
I strongly believe we need more separation from the real world and the internet. Every year it seems like more of our physical lives are being placed into social forms on the internet which should be more of an escape than bringing it all over.
"Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time and effort to understand."
Yes, that's Gibson's new book, "Agency". It's complicated because it's contrived, not because the subject matter is complicated. Probably his worst book to date.
The current season of Westworld is very Gibsonian. The main new character (Caleb) is introduced as a vet with PTSD, but as the season unfolds we see he's been augmented, and it's strongly implied that he's living with implanted memories to cover up the horrible stuff he did in the military.
In the most recent episode he got to use a drug called "Genre" that moves you through different states of mental alteration. Whoever wrote this read lots of Gibson.
But the idea that everyone is jacked in to the same network, the hand of corporate control is always present, and shady things are happening all the time, no one thinks of that as unique or novel any more.
The reasons why society decided to re-root itself on top of internet are to be investigated. Capitalism logic caught in a loop looking for virginial spaces to re-grow with even less constraints ?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadThis is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
It took him hours to realize a Hillary presidency wouldn't have been a utopia?
I don't see this as a pathetic premise.
You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle:
Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up....
Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come across as hysterical and insulting to the future?
The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
> The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
Agency, and its' predecessor The Peripheral, are set both in (a version of, or more precisely multiple versions of) the present day or the very near future, and in the future. There's no way to not take the present day into account. But the politics of Gibson's future are not reminiscent of "MSNBC vs Fox News," if that makes you feel any better.
Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with what you are writing about.
I accept that. But I'm commenting on the article that OP linked which quoted Gibson.
Isn't that a Harry Turtledove novel, or am I thinking of some other mil-SF writer? It's also similar to the plot of the original Deus Ex game.
> shoehorning politics into my work?
Tom Clancy sold a hundred million novels.
And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is not “if only democrats would save us” but rather “our whole system is built on corruption and will destroy us.”
So your comments make zero sense. Your critique is aimed at an abstract idea of what you think a book should be and has no relation to the text itself.
"After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either"
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I can only interpret it as: he was writing it as a somewhat happy world, then thought he would need to revise to make it less happy, and then realized that it should never have been happy at all. Which just seems odd, given his style.
That being said, he did discuss a lot of revision due to current events in this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gi...
Anyways the whole article is hard to follow, I love me some NPR but this misquote was rough: Gibson is quoted as referring to "an uploaded healing consciousness" whereas if you listen to the audio it is clearly "an uploaded human consciousness", which makes _much_ more sense.
We're talking about William Fucking Gibson here. Next you'll tell me you hate it when Ursula Leguin 'shoehorned politics' into her work.
https://www.salon.com/control/2001/08/29/bradbury_2/
https://books.google.com/books?id=rRmlA33pEcsC&pg=PT192&lpg=...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080521050300/http://anthony.gn...
(Even when taking positions, the really good stuff will still make sure than the people on the wrong side have some sort of insight applied to them and some effort to understand them on their own terms, rather than just crafting strawmen of bad people who are bad, who deserve to lose, because they are bad.)
I think if you look back at the good political work, you'll find most of them fit this pattern. I'm sure exceptions exist, but they are not common.
Gibson is no Alighieri but the Peripheral was still a great book.
I'm been watching "The Plot Against America" miniseries and realised that a similar scenario played out in the early 1800's. Imagine a SciFi writer of the time (If such a thing existed) publishing a novel where a time traveller travels back from 2020 to stop the Federalist Hamiltonian conspiracy to bring the U.S back under British rule/Democratic-Republican Jeffersonian conspiracy to enter the war on the side of France and bring the Reign of Terror to America.
It would be 100% political shoehorning of course but people would lap it up all the same.
But as others have pointed out, Gibson was simply trying to salvage his existing manuscript.
But also, I'm blanking on what 2015 event you're referring to. Do you mean 2005 and Katrina?
the Clinton/Trump election is mentioned offhand a handful of times through the book, the protagonists didn't have anything to do with it, and it's just not about that at all.
I've occasionally thought that a good alternative history novel would be one where someone went back to 1930 and assassinated Hitler, only to find that with less insane leadership in the inevitable war (less resources wasted on superweapons and the occult, stalls Russia with diplomacy, doesn't waste resources in Africa) Germany wins the war and unites all of Europe under a fascist regime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfU1lYAIlWs
It's actually a brilliant device (not created by WG) because, as he has stated, all sci-fi is really speaking about the "now" of the author who wrote it, in terms of what they believe is possible or probable, whether the author does so consciously or unconsciously.
By presenting alternate timelines where certain major political events occurred differently, Gibson is able to comment on their effects on the "fuckedness quotient" of the moment.
By far, however, his most important message involves his introducing the concept of the "jackpot", which will eventually eclipse his notoriety for having introduced the term "cyberspace" a million years ago.
The jackpot is the sum total devastation we have slow-wrought upon ourselves that leads to more extreme weather and pandemics while providing cover for political groups to form kleptocracies. The term comes from the fact that those with money are always able to profit from change, and that they tend to be rewarded for their brutal competitiveness and ability to leverage any opportunity. And the bigger, the better, therefore a jackpot for them.
What he is really saying is, "The future you are heading for is ugly and is the direct result of the policies we are making right now as entire nations full of unconcerned people."
Then, if you read his work even more deeply, you'll find that what he is really saying is that we will always fuck ourselves up when we make decisions based upon any other reason than a compassionate, thinking heart. It's just that the problems caused by global heating have been brewing since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
And who doesn't want Otaku denim made on heirloom looms ;-)
Personally, as a software craftsman, I appreciate anyone who dedicates themself to craftsmanship. Japan seems to have a great deal of very dedicated craftspeople (NHK Online videos rule!), and Gibson is definitely a word- and idea-smith, Otaku-grade.
[[And because people need things to watch nowadays, our family personally loves NHK Online's shows 'Design Talks Plus' and 'Trails to Oishii Tokyo', as well as Grand Sumo. We find them fascinating glimpses into a very different culture, one that seems to honor craftsmanship in a way we, as Americans, find beautiful.]]
As to the characters not having 'an impact on anything', that's really how it's always been, unless you're a part of the klept. The only question is, "How you developed yourself in your lifetime to fight oppression and seek to uplift the most disadvantaged?" Because, if you don't, you're just a poorer version of the callous bastards that run the power organizations that do have an effect, effects that have, for example, facilitated global heating for short-term profit at the expense of the rest of us and our heirs.
[ETA: To see the klept in action, check out the parallel HN story about Bloomberg killing reporting on CCP officials getting wealthy in office.]
Surprisingly the various plot lines are somewhat more nuanced than this description!
It’s like describing The Old Man And The Sea as “a book about a fishing trip”.
If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election.
Not only would that be a more impactful long-term change that would likely have prevented the systemic failures that elevated Trump in the first place, but it would probably be easier to enact. You just need to park a handful of people outside a handful of voting precincts to say "Hey, just so you know this ballot is really badly designed. . ."
No first Black president, though. So we'd have to deal with that.
You just can't become the guy who seriously posts political shit on social media all day and spends so much time consumed by the "them bad, we good" faction war.
Since the results of the 2016 election prompted a total rewrite of Agency, discussion of that is hardly a wild turn.
And then we risk a civil war between the left authoritarians and the right authoritarians, each side convinced that America's survival depends on the utter crushing defeat of the other side.
Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun, a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here).
In the earlier editions, from 1989 through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Matrix (their 'internet') was all virtual reality, and the 'Decker' using it would disappear into that world and barely interact with the rest of the team.
In more recent editions, written after smartphones and wireless internet became common, everything was connected. Everything is connected to the Matrix. In combat, a Decker can hack the opponents' guns to disable them, for example. It's not a world to disappear into; that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.
The earlier Matrix rules had two big issues. First, the pace was wildly different — Matrix turns took like a tenth of the in-game time of meatspace turns. Second, deckers wouldn't share the same space as the rest of the team, so you had two separate, barely interconnected spaces.
The new rules both match how real world technology evolved, but also, and more importantly, solve the pacing and separateness issues.
At least that's the reason I just made up.
(This kind of cyberpunk dystopia is very plausible from the intersection of military contracting grift and lowest-bidder IoT design!)
And then converted the landmines to remote-operated as part of a legal fiction about victim-operated devices. Which is the military version of the concern about robots taking jobs: to what extent is it acceptable to have munitions making their own decisions about taking lives?
Anyway, in the Shadowrun universe you'd definitely be able to hack the mesh network of landmines.
The US allegedly has something like this for MANPADS missiles given to not-so-trusted allies.
https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10642-harry_potter_and_the_not-s...
Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control… everything is monitored and kept under control.
War… has changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUf_8jyxbiM
https://youtube.com/watch?v=C2Pt-LnQ2po
Well, then future came and with all the insanely insecure IoT devices all around I'm no longer so sure. :P
Eloquent way of saying that normies ruined the internet.
One could argue that, in some aspects, it has substituted it.
Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it gets harder and harder to write near-future SF as the present is in flux. Especially to write post-apocalyptic SF.
SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards. This remains true even in apocalyptic scenarios, which are always tied to the worries of the present at the time of writing.
But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events. Things like the "5G causes coronavirus" nonsense remind me of what Carl Sagan called the "demon-haunted world".
> Things like the "5G causes coronavirus"
To what degree is that a comprehensively accurate representation of the ideas floating around in the conspiracy world?
And if you feel the urge to click on the downward pointing diamond to the left of my comment rather than replying, please pause for a moment and consider that action in the context of your comment, as well as the grandparent comment "But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism...".
"Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they find interesting—not for promotion."
As an aside, of the two of us, you are by far the worse violator of HN guidelines, at least as it relates to conversations between you and I. I am able (and willing) to demonstrate this with numerous examples from prior conversations. If you'd be interested in considering these ideas, I'd be happy to lay some out for you. As well, I would be happy to share some techniques that I have found to be very effective in improving my behavior in this general area, let me know if you are interested in hearing some of those ideas.
Another interesting (and I believe important) cultural phenomenon on display in this exchange, is an initial ~projection of supreme confidence in one's beliefs (my perception):
> Facts you say? The world is all ears!
I estimate that this person believes that they deal (think) only in highly skilled thinking & facts, and that anyone with any concerns about 5G deals only in poor thinking & baseless conspiracy theories. And once again, when such a person is challenged, they will rarely respond rationally, using facts, but rather resort to silence (typically accompanied with a downvote), or blatantly obvious diversionary tactics (reframing & redirecting the topic, dishonesty, insults, a wide variety of logical fallacies, etc).
It seems this phenomenon is very hard to see, even when it is pointed out. But if one can manage to find a way to coerce one's mind into actually seeing it, it can be seen everywhere, and in turn gives one a much broader, higher resolution, nuanced view on reality. But, such things are obviously not for everyone. But to know for sure, I recommend one at least give it a try.
Have you been in touch with @dang yet? I am of the opinion that your sort of behavior does not belong on HN.
This is what I think was so original about The Handmaid's Tale--a possible iteration of our own culture and technology that moved backwards-sideways instead of forward. (Disclaimer: we read this years ago in school, and I haven't had a chance to see the recent adaptation.)
Only early plup SF Gernsback etc had that view
Notable exception: Cloud Atlas (pub. 2004), which admits that "Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword."
> a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events
I think we used to call this the Singularity.
In our time, there's still push-back to any descent into idiocracy.
I think the anti-intellectual cohort have been helped in that by the super rich who had their preferred elected leaders as well.
Just like "hacker" in "hacker news".
I can't understand why anyone would even begin to take calls for revolution from someone like that seriously, when he's so obviously a grifter.
He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the backing of a media arm and an attitude of suing everyone who challenges his views. School of Thiel and all.
> He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the backing of a media arm and an attitude of suing everyone who challenges his views. School of Thiel and all.
Actually I do talk to the people you are talking about, and again most of them aren't far right. The actual far-right don't like Weinstein or his brother (they tend to not like Jewish people on the far right).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/overview-of-the-f...
(The report itself doesn't do a particular good job either as they use some dubious sources and I don't agree with half of it, but their definitions of the groups are close enough).
I've listened to a lot of Weinstein on various shows he has appeared as a guest on and I haven't heard anything that can be considered far right. One of the first times I seen Weinstein was when he appeared on Dave Rubin who is a gay liberal/libertarian (the last time I watched his show it seemed to change every other week) that lives in California.
> Perhaps you could be excused for believing someone isn't far right when the overton window among english-speaking countries has narrowed so far to the right of center.
This is a complete nonsense. The Anglo-sphere for the most part is pretty much centre, centre-left. Many conservatives and paleo-conservatives complain their conservative parties aren't really conservative (which isn't far-right either btw).
The term far-right in itself is a poor description. A better term is a "reactionary right". But that is a whole other discussion between the "reactionary right" and the "traditional right". Right and Left are really poor descriptions of political positions and that is why many tests online now are multi-dimensional.
In the year 2000 up to maybe 2004, it was definitely a mysterious and sexy place... The absence of good search engines made it mysterious and pornography made it sexy.
I'm saying this not to be a downer, but to impart that we should all have an eye on solving or mitigating those mundane problems, so we can get on to solving the more fun ones.
In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine interfaces.
Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy place.
As an aside, I don't think I'd opt for the type of uploading outlined in that novel considering it involves a posthumous destructive scan of the connectome. There wouldn't be any continuity so you'd probably just end up with a copy. The only type of uploading I could see working would be a Ship of Theseus approach where you gradually replace your biological neurons with artificial neurons and even that causes some hesitation.
I'm not so sure about that. Stuxnet, the Shadow Brokers leaks, and who knows what is being sold on the black market; this continuity seems very close to the plot of a cyberpunk novel.
Honestly, if you were deeply, dramatically surprised by Trump's election, you weren't paying enough attention. The causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt.
It lead me to wonder if there is a term for such a phenomenon: the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probab...
2) I don't think it really matters for the point I'm trying to make. Even if Hillary had won, the election would have been close, thus showing that the support for Trump's platform was still widespread. If he lost, we'd probably just see a different right-wing populist candidate arise in 2020. The issues that led to his rise would still exist, which is precisely my point.
Hillary won by 3 million votes, but she lost by only ~80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
So .. how's that working out?
> the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of.
Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.
How's what working out? I'm not in that demographic and I didn't vote for Trump, nor am I a Republican. I'm just detailing a phenomenon. The jury still seems to be out on whether Trump's Rust Belt base is benefiting from his policies, but the coronavirus may end up being more influential in returning jobs to the U.S. than anything the president could do.
> Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.
Cool, I will look into that.
Fantastic book, really interesting perspectives on society to be gained by the absolutely enormous lens the Ship Minds are able to view it from.
I guess I wasn't. Because I distinctly remember when Trump was just one of the Republican hopefuls, I saw that the odds of him becoming President were 1000 to 1 and I recall thinking I should put a £100 bet on it, but thought it would just be a waste of money.
I guess you're retired through your foresight though? Or, wait...let me guess... you don't bet? It would be the fourth time I'd heard that. Is there some future restriction on betting that stops you time travellers with perfect knowledge of the future from cashing in?
TV show The Good Fight Season 4, Episode 1 "The Gang Deals with Alternate Reality has brilliant dark humor take on alternate reality where Hillary Clinton won the election.
spoiler alert ---
(spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)
that's eerily close to current reality. (#MeToo only when politically expedient; Weinstein's damage control advisor is now a senior campaign adviser to a 'liberal' contender for the WH)
I find his descriptions more apt now than when his books were first published.
This is a common mistake utopians of all stripes; the short comings of the world as we know it isn't a consequence of external forces imposing badness on us, it's a consequence of the fallibility of humanity. Unless if you have a concrete plan on how you're going to organize society differently, any attempt to start something fresh will end up recreating all of the ills that drove you from "society" in the first place.
> But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude
Escapism can be pessimistic, as in Gibson. It's not him who "escapes", it's the denizens of the soulless world he described, and the "world" they escape to can be just as alienating. It's no triumph to "escape" to Gibson's matrix, and his world continues to be a crapsack [1][2].
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[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld
[2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literat...
Regardless of post hoc genre classifications like cyberpunk vs. postcyberpunk, you can still have pockets of hope within a generally dystopian setting, and perhaps Gibson's cyberspace was the place in Neuromancer.
I'm not speaking of cyberpunk in general. Note that Gibson himself has stated the modern "cyberpunk" genre largely misses the point, mistaking a novel counter-cultural idea for its visual trappings.
That theme isn't really present in the Neuromancer series. From the perspective of our viewpoint characters, the matrix is primarily a place that one goes to do a job, not a place to hang out; it's seen primarily as the domain of megacorps and mysterious AIs, not a human space.
I still wouldn't call it escapism though.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment! The backstory to the Sprawl universe is crushingly dystopian -- Soviet Russia has won a nuclear war, destroying a number of European cities (particularly in Germany) and irradiating much of the European continent. In the wake of that war, it appears that the US government has largely collapsed, leaving megacorporations (like Sense/Net), wealthy families (like the Tessier-Ashpools), and street gangs (like the Yakuza and Panther Moderns) as the primary sources of power.
2020 sure isn't great, but I'd still prefer it to the crapsack world that Gibson built.
Gibson and many others have tried to imagine the transition from human to post-human which is largely about the power of brain computer interfaces.
To me, the convergence of advanced and/or general purpose AI, high bandwidth brain computer interfaces, and new levels of immersion in virtual/augmented reality provided by the new BCIs have a potential to transform the qualitative nature of human existence and so there is plenty of room left for science fiction along those lines. Although I will admit that I have not in any way explored much of that genre.
One idea is of a type of video game that involves high-bandwidth neural input enabling a type of waking lucid dream, where the AI reads your brain and modifies the scene to align with it. Maybe several people and advanced AIs are involved in this game. And suppose that there is a type of almost-human level AI being simulated as characters. Or maybe real humans plugged in and acting without lucid dreaming powers but the ability to affect the environment if they activate certain types of triggers recognized by an AI.
That is pretty far-fetched, but I think I have described a scenario where gods and magic are real.
That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we nail VR.
[0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/
Hard to classify that movie, at its time it was pure science-fiction, now it is a technothriller from the past. But very watchable, i think.
That is the story of all technology. The horse was the super weapon used by kings and warriors. It ended up being something that farmers used to plow their fields. Same with ships, cars, telephones, radios, televisions, computers.
Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.
If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in 1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Microsoft's unofficial mission was "a computer on every [office] desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software". It sounded overly ambitious, even into the 90s.
He zooms into specific criminal subcultures and describes them in detail but that doesn't mean that the rest of society follows the same principles. It's pretty obvious that there is plenty of "banal" and "average" in the Sprawl trilogy, it's just not overtly described because what would be the point?.
The same is true today. There is excitement and novelty to be found on the Internet. But it's certainly not going to be discovered by the sheep, the 99% that spend their time on Instagram, Youtube and Amazon. Similar characters to the ones found in Gibson's books exist, but similarly, are not visible from the popular sphere.
In that sense, Gibson definitely misses the mark when he describes the Internet today but that's to be expected. The genius of his early work lies in it being IMAGINED, or channeled if you will. Definitely not reasoned. Somehow his imagination tapped into the technological currents that define us today.
Now, having lost his imagination and overcompensating with reason, he has become yet another sheep and his view reflects that.
I think there is a lot more content in general being produced too.
Yes, that's Gibson's new book, "Agency". It's complicated because it's contrived, not because the subject matter is complicated. Probably his worst book to date.
In the most recent episode he got to use a drug called "Genre" that moves you through different states of mental alteration. Whoever wrote this read lots of Gibson.
But the idea that everyone is jacked in to the same network, the hand of corporate control is always present, and shady things are happening all the time, no one thinks of that as unique or novel any more.