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- Hacker News
- 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)
by gumby - More of a John Brunner future, really.by Apocryphon
- Stand on Zanzibar was so prescient it gave me goosebumps when I read it 5 years ago.by downut
- I love that Gibsons cyberpunk is "realistic" and mundane (at this point): a girl replaces a virtual singer (Mona Lisa Overdrive), another girl steals glasses containing plans for urban redevelopment (Virtual Light), virtual world is as inhabited as real one and you only need helmet to access it (Pattern Recognition). We already are living with these stories and dystopia is already here, to a degree.by eithed
- Life certainly feels like the "Troubles" of The Peripheral have started.by svachalek
- The only reason I know who J.G. Ballard is is because of Jean Baudrillard.
I'm convinced it was the similarity of their names which convinced Jean to read J.G's work.
by Der_Einzige - Where would you recommend I start with J.G.? I got into Baudrillard and have been meaning to go further down the train of thought.by tolugenius
- Something recently occured to me. The plot of the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain (the less-successful followup to the more famous 1965 The Ipcress File and 1966 Funeral in Berlin, all starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer), while I though the movie plot kind of stupid when I first saw it years ago, the plot is today actually completely plausible, and it is odd that no modern James Bond or Impossible Mission-style movie has done it.by teddyh
- the future is here, it's just not evenly distrubuted conversly, there is no human technology that isn't still bieng practiced in it's original form, ie: there are still people knapping stone tools that learned it from there parents and grandparents going on strait back to the first members of our "species" who learned it from there hybrid parents, in an unbroken chain, which is directly connected to ALL modern technology, in that early metal working was done with stone tools, as metal was far to precious for mundane or general use, and still at this moment ALL technolgy is powered by fire, wheels and levers at it's base and is instantly understandable and intuitive in it's use, but as others are pointing out, that matters little in relation to the setting and the style of our gadjets and tools, which as some others point out, may be impossible to understand from a certain asthetic back ground or as I am always happy to find out that something is in fact a WHOLE THING which a bunch of people are realy realy into, or even better when someone has a THING thats just for them. all fine by me.by metalman
- Or, as the quote attributed to the late Paul Harvey goes,
"Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
by GolfPopper - Old dystopias were too neat. Even the evil systems had a plan. Reality is messier and more absurd. Maybe aliens are the only thing left that's still safely fictional.
- Aaah don't jinx it aaaaahby hypfer
- I liked the aliens in District 9. It was a really messy and rich universe.by speed_spread
- I'm cheering for the San Ti. They can't be worse than what we currently have.by Tangurena2
- And some idiots actually want to live in a cyberpunk dystopia (some dude literally said to me one he would "do anything he could to bring it about"), because they were so enamored with the tech the dystopia part flew over their heads.by palmotea
- Why would someone who has never experienced systemic oppression fear systemic oppression? Techbros and techbrowannabes live in a magnitude-10 reality distortion field.
- "The future should look like the future" said someone, before putting on the market a steel-armored SUV that looks like it came from a 1980s dystopian nightmare.by throw310822
- Most of them just want neon lights, dense and chaotic cities, space stations, advanced VR, robots and superpowered implants. None of that requires a corporate dystopia, and I think they would make our lives better.
Then you have the sociopaths who see Night City as a model for a perfect world. They see themselves as someone who can rise to the top quick and become a benevolent dictator ruling the equivalent of a country with none of the inconvenience that comes from being accountable to the people. Someone who can make all the right decisions to maximize shareholder value.
They don't care that it ruins other peoples lives or that it doesn't even benefit them personally because there's only so much you can spend in a lifetime. Life for them is like a video game where the goal is to have more money and power than everyone else. Capital is both the means and the end in a loop that chases fake growth. Which is exactly how corpos in cyberpunk stories think. And the real-life executives in SV boardrooms.
by tancop - I agree, it is easy to miss just because we get used to things quickly. I remember this thought hitting me vividly when I saw this picture during COVID https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MUBajBy-350E5JAjtntEhAYz...by phreeza
- I disagree. Gibson's dystopias are too competent, too well organized, too serious. I feel like we're headed somewhere between the satire of Neal Stephenson and the lunatic delirium of Philip K. Dick.by krapp
- Man that is actually true.
In reality nobody has a plan and everyone is just winging it for the next shareholder meeting.
by TitaRusell - You're still being very magnanimous. Feels more like a tech Ankh-Morpork without the humour to me.
- Was going to say something similar, and my real issue with Gibson is that after reading several of his books - he's a fantastic stylist but, I don't really know what he stands for, compared to someone like PKD, Stanislaw Lem, Octavia Butler, or Kurt Vonnegut.
And any day now - we will actually wake up to realize we are living in Kim Stanley Robinson's Anthropocene climate future from The Ministry of the Future, New York 2140, or the "Science in the Capital" trilogy.
by SoleilAbsolu - 100%
I know that "Idiocracy" gets thrown around all the time, but the reason I think it does is that they do have advanced tech but at the same time everyone is a blathering idiot. That's what gets me about our present reality - on one hand we supposedly have all the world's information at our fingertips, but the absolute dumbest, most bullshit theories get real traction and cause real damage.
When they had the UFC fight on the White House lawn I thought it couldn't be a better example of life imitating art.
- With CRISPR and AI, sapient pearwood is just a few years out.by BobBagwill
- I was young, and needed the money. A week-long contract in San Francisco, to do some contract work. Instead of a vacation.
Well, so I flew to the Embarcadero center, some late fall.
The task was to work on some audio code, and maybe networking, for a popular multiplayer cyber- tank battle game.
It was a great gig. I onboarded with another dev, who sat with me for the first 30 minutes after a few rounds, while we watched dark shapes out in the bay and tried to determine if they were submarines or whales.
Then, when it got dark, we decided to stop testing and do some work, looking out over the bay as our machines rebooted into developer modes.
After our sprint and midnight pizza, the boss came in, introduced himself, and asked me a question that kinda changed my life: “have you read Snow Crash yet?” .. it had just been released, I hadn’t gotten there yet.
“No, I brought the new 2600 with me though, you wanna .. “ .. “Stop”, he said. Walks to his office, digs through a box, gives me a brand new, fresh copy, first edition. Because of course he had a box of them.
“Don’t work on anything else until you’ve read this cover to cover”, was the directive.
“Really”, yes really ..
My onboarding colleague looked at me with an amused smirk, shrugged, and said “yeah, you gotta ..”
So I spent 3 work days and a weekend, reading it.
Get to Monday, I’m good to go. I’ll make this audio code listen to reason.
37th floor, Embarcadero like I said, I get out of the lift and .. there’s a dark mood in the room. DOOM had just hit.
Well, I’ve been living Snow Crash since the day I read it, is all I’m saying.
by MomsAVoxell - I've read your comment, almost waiting for the line that was going to finally disappoint me... and it wasn't there :)
Somehow you recount a memory in an imperfect way, but it is so... apt, so in sync with Snow Crash.
Good reminder that I want to re-read it again now.
Oh, forgot to ask: can you tell us more about that experience? More details?
- Intentional or not, you nailed Gibson's writing style.by rewgs
- 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 Sense/Net.
Which is really the tragedy of it all: we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.
by keiferski - They had to make it cool to make it palatable and not a slog for entertainment purposes. Without that it's just a depressing read of reality.by staplers