New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson(precastreinforced.co.uk) |
New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson(precastreinforced.co.uk) |
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.
Sure we are. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Here's a nighttime walk through Shenzhen.[1] Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings. Robots on the streets. Drones in the sky. Cameras everywhere. Night markets where you can buy both food and electronics. Self-driving cars. Electric buses and taxis. Women in colorful outfits on motorcycles.
Shenzhen looks more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077, the game.
On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.
What's interesting in sci-fi at the time is that, because software wasn't fully solidified as a concept (nowhere near, in the case of Neuromancer) everything acts like a tool. What you buy stays just as it is, until it becomes obsolete. There's something quite appealing in that completeness. As you say, software is jarring in a way firmware isn't, and it lets developers be lazy.
As for toilets:
> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer
And this is how it should be. Johnny Mnemonic's 320GBs became the reality in mid 90' and mundane by 2005.
They may not be aesthetics you find cool, but clearly they appeal to a large number of others.
Their fictional counterparts don't bother.
People are reaching pretty hard if they don't see what we're dealing with here.
This video gives a decent explanation why fashion has gotten the way it is, particularly for men. The author ultimately traces it back to the French revolution.
I'm probably just sharing it though because of the line "Big brother is here and he looks like shiiit".
The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye.
The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the little noir vignettes where the poets and rebels infiltrated.
Meanwhile in the real world we get Nvidia DGX Spark which has a front finished in beige carpeting, or Meta glasses which make you look like either a dork or a pervert.
Arasaka types are rare, it’s mostly big blobs like DatAmerica.
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.
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?
I do realize "rational" and "tech bro" doesn't jive too well.
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.
I'm convinced it was the similarity of their names which convinced Jean to read J.G's work.
A couple months back I had at a Chinese place in the western parts of Dublin (Ireland) and we could see the operating base of the Mana food delivery drones. Ireland was never known to get early issues of whatever the current dystopian future is being distributed, so it was an interesting sight - drones autonomously locating landing platforms and waiting to be loaded, and then launching to their next delivery.
Mmm, delicious
"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."
Gibson in particular nails this, especially in his original Sprawl trilogy. This sprawling mass is what he calls "biz." It's "just biz."
I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable. Any kind of principle, rule of law, or sense of national or cultural identity requires that coherence. Without it the system dissolves into this random churning stew of scheming, money, and power.
On a personal level it means you have to find these things in your personal life and the family and community you build around you, and you should not look for or expect these things from larger scale social structures. They can't deliver them, and the reasons might not just be "corruption" or "people are assholes." They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate.
Gibson depicts this too. His world of the Sprawl was bleak but there were pockets of people who had created what amounted to intentional communities within it. I'm thinking of the Afro-American-futurist arcologies in Count Zero or the orbital subcultures like the Rastafarians. Some of the subculture around the "console cowboys" also counts.
EDIT:
Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data, Enterprise's AI, droids in Star Wars) or malevolent (Colossus, Skynet, Dune's prehistory).
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.
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.
As China rises to become the new gravitational center, it will be interesting to see how they reshape things in their image. On the one hand, they seem to be more engineering-brained than lawyer-brained, which bodes well (might be a more viable path to cyberpunk). But just as the west has been haunted by its history of white supremacy, China will be haunted by its history of Han supremacy, so I am not holding my breath that we net out to some sort of multi-cultural utopia.
What we're seeing is fundamentally nothing like idiocracy - the similarities are only surface deep, but the structures are vastly different. In Idiocracy, the nation is led by a person who cares about the well-being of all his constituents and seeks out the most capable person in order to improve the material state of his people. Despite his wrestling persona, President Comacho is far, far, FAR closer to Jed Bartlet from the West Wing, than Trump. People in the 2000s could not imagine the true nature of the 2020s.
What you're seeing is a sort of slow-motion civil war. The Trumpist Republicans fundamentally believe only they are allowed to rule and everyone outside their group is an enemy. They despise their enemies and wish to see them suffer, from denying disaster relief, to targeting cities with ICE, the more suffering there is the better. Sadly, reality turned out nothing like Idiocracy.
The early works were generally overtly sci-fi, but mostly earthbound, fitting into the British New Wave of the 1960s, alongside John Brunner. The Drowning World and The Crystal World are both fantastic and unusual for the genre. The short stories are often excellent, and in my opinion some of his most original work is in this period.
The major transition came with The Atrocity Exhibition, a "cut up" novel that was more Cronenberg/Borroughs/Lynch than what came before, and magnified themes that had been emerging in his short stories. Alienation, pop culture fetishism, clinical descriptions of injuries, war (the book was originally called Love and Napalm), the horror lurking under placid suburban utopia. Crash, High-Rise etc. followed in that vein. Crash is probably the best from this period.
He wrote two autobiographical mainstream novels: Empire of the Sun is the famous one.
The late 90s/2000s novels like Super-Cannes are all rethreads of earlier stuff; the Freudian pop-psych view that we are basically animals denied the outlet of violence got a bit tired at this point. They're really well written, but I felt Ballard had lost his edge and didn't have anything insightful to add. His last novel is quite average.
So: The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, maybe The Crystal World or the collected short stories.
Then I would read Empire of the Sun.
It has some of his best sci-fi, and they're all under 50 pages. His longer fiction (Cocaine Nights, Empire of the Sun, etc.) is okay, but IMO short stories are where he really shined.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70239.The_Best_Short_Sto...
Data painted and performed music: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Data#The_arts
To be fair, his motivation was to become more human. But at least he did have intrinsic motivations that didn’t appear to come from some training.
That aside, there are many examples that long predate Gibson:
Kurt Vonnegut’s EPICAC (1950): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPICAC_(short_story). It also has the motive of a human passing off the AI’s artistic creation as his own.
C. M. Kornbluth’s “With These Hands” (1951): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51531
Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1953): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatiza...
Incidentally, J. G. Ballard’s “Studio 5, The Stars” (1961): https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/some-dance-to-forget
Once the concept of “electronic brains” was there, the idea that they might also produce art like a human brain can wasn’t far.
I'm in the same boat - I wanted to re-read, but couldn't find my copy of Neuromancer (which was a chore to get through the first time I read it years ago), so I've started Mona Lisa Overdrive - same thing. Everything is desribed in some dense street subculture patois or as some Sony or Mitsubishi future-product. I guess if the point is "things are recognizable, but this is now a well-established 'different' culture" - mission accomplished. As mentioned though it is a chore. An unrelenting chore. Once you're done though, it's satisfying to reflect on it.
Plenty of forebears here. Orwell's 1984 has mass-produced trash novels generated by a machine. Stanislaw Lem''s Cyberiad has a poetry generator.
Sounds unlikely to me without the caveat "within this particular brand of politics and socioeconomics".
I think we might just not have run out of money yet. A lot of debt (social, structural, technical, financial, cultural, etc) is going to hit us like a freight train if AI turns out to not be the magic cure people desperately hope it is going to be.
The power of "the biz" rests on cash not running out. Certainly not on loyalty of the workers.
I think it's worth asking whether "nobody really believes anything" is itself the result of a cynical manipulative play, one that occurs in the real world, and thus affects our judgement as we compare "today" versus a sci-fi book.
In particular I'm thinking of how certain regimes encourage a kind of "everybody is lying truth is pointless" nihilism, because it gives them a net-benefit in mentally exhausting their victims and deterring anyone without power from organizing.
In other words:
1. The dystopia-story may depict an amoral/post-truth fog and imply that it's an inevitable world-constant within the human hive. Not necessarily because the author believes that's human nature, but because it's window-dressing to the story they want to focus on telling.
2. We may feel like there's a similar fog around us today.
3. We could be harmfully-wrong if we assume our disempowering fog must likewise be an inevitable constant, while instead there are some beekeepers waving smoke-pots to generate it.
> horrifying totalitarian dictatorship with a market economy
These things are totally compatible, and usually basically synonymous.
I can't see the dystopian music of John Foxx's Ultravox! (or Gary Numan for that matter) without seeing it through the Ballard/Crash Zeitgeist of the "New Romantics".
(Although I see now that "Crash" was published first in 1973—wow.)
It could be an allegory for some artistic types who go on a sort of creative bender and work compulsively, nearly suppressing their regular personality and lives. The machine is somehow a tortured, artistic soul. But it could also just be some ironic malfunction, or could itself be an art installation built intentionally but anonymously out of orbital scrap.
That orbital machine certainly is tuned in a way that tickles Easter eggs in the human mind. But it also just seems to loop endlessly, like a forgotten, automated factory.
There is another similarly ambiguous scene, where an artificial construct represents the knowledge and speaking style of a deceased hacker. It is hooked to a doorbell to respond to visitors, but the narrator tells us it also scans the empty alley as snow falls. The scene is poetic, but it does not tell you whether the construct has a mind and is appreciating the snow versus just being triggered by motion and just trying to localize a potential visitor. Any answer you have there, you brought yourself. The book isn't telling.
That ambiguity seemed like half the point with Gibson. And it also seems prescient for our current LLM-meets-humanity moment too.
What will differ is the autocratic nature we seem to be heading to. Political power may come to rely even more on exploitation of lower instincts. The result can be some kind of 1930s tyranny without high culture.
Both parties believe it. It's why you only have two parties.
Your country's only real God is making a quick buck and everyone believes it their duty to do so. The immigrants, the non-immigrants, the politicians, the business people, everyone.
There's money to be made in cruelty, so there's money being made in cruelty. There's money to be made in being outraged about someone making money from cruelty, so there's money being made from being outraged.
Your only God is a quick buck, remember. Nothing else. Nothing.
Gibson's novels predicted Asian ascendency (insomuch as you can have ascendency in a dystopia). Through a quirk of the time period in which they were written they happened to present it as emanating from Japan rather than China.
It is in the end a moral stance on what are the proper aesthetics, which is the kind of thing that manages to make both morality and aesthetics extremely suspect.
It was a rare magical moment where consumerism receded - flannels were never about brands. Your band had to be "authentic" (and I hate that word) and anti corporate. It's the point in time where we all started hating ticket master.
It was replaced by GAP sweatshirts and Britney Spears, and you can draw a straight line to people waiting on lines for iPhones, your C suite in fleece vests and Taylor Swift.
I don't think you can just state something like that as some sort of axiom without providing any rationale. Obviously China has become much more powerful and important over the past 4 decades, but I highly doubt they will be the new "gravitational center", for two primary reasons.
First, their demographics are horrible - their population peaked 5 years ago and will continue to decline, meaning they will need to look inward to dedicate more resources to supporting their aging population. While fertility rates are well below replacement in nearly all of the developed world, the extreme ethnic homogeneity and near complete inability to assimilate immigrants long term make East Asia's demographics much more problematic.
Second, nobody wants a conformist autocratic society to be the "center of gravity" of the world. For decades following WWII, the US, despite all of its problems, really was looked up to as a beneficial force by many (yes, again, I know we did some extremely shitty things during the Cold War, but just looking at surveys of different countries' views of the US it was overwhelmingly positive in the Western world). Whereas today, despite China being essentially "the world's workshop", basically all of their trading partners look at them with suspicion and reticence.
I think we're looking at a near and mid-term future where there is basically no (or a crumbling) center of gravity. And this is basically what existed in the areas of the former Western Roman Empire for centuries after its collapse until the rise of Charlemagne, so I think your comparison to "decaying Roman Empire" phase is apropos.
In truth, I don’t think anyone can predict how things will play out at this point. China may well settle for regional control and having a globe full of trading partners with whom they work to build trust, they may double down on their “loan shark” leverage strategy with other developing nations, or they may build up their military and go full colonizer, which may or may not erupt into a hot war. The US might go long slow decline, or may erupt into civil war or widespread civil disobedience, or unlikely as it seems get its act together and course correct. The EU might fall to infighting and dissolve or rally and lead. Rogue nations might pull a truly batshit move with nukes or bioweapons. Who knows how India and SEA will play out at this point? Climate change acceleration will likely put incredible strain on all systems, and the jury is out on the ultimate trajectory/timeline of AI and robotics.
We have been blessed and cursed to live in interesting times if nothing else.
The tech devices were also used as markers of uncool rich people. Symbols of excess disposable income, rather than carefully invested aesthetics.
In the seedy areas, the implants and augmentations were depicted across an array of cool and uncool characters. Some character were meant to think they themselves were cool, while the narrator or the main characters saw them as part of the uncool backdrop. Try-too-hards, wannabes, etc.
Why not make an epic bridge or tower with gargoyles on it? Why not a museum or park?
You can walk around Europe and see buildings from centuries ago. Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?
Maybe they do not believe that there will be a human civilization in 2426.
But I guess George Lucas is a billionaire who has you covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_Museum_of_Narrative_Art
320GB progressed from amazing, to reality, to mundane, to trivial today, but it would take on different meaning if there was some breakthrough real-life research that indicated the human brain is, in total, say, only 325GB. Which is what Johnny Mnemonic is really about, even if the numbers and units used are dated.
Rollerblading in motorcycle gear; duh.
Oh, that's easy! They are cool!
NB in ~50 years cool would change it meaning and things would be no longer cool for a contemporary reader but some other word designating an awesomeness and delight.
That they are cool is the only thing that needs to be said. The reader fills that in with their own perception, which is how we're ending up with the Torment Nexus, because some people think the Torment Nexus is cool.
Everything out of Google is Rube-Goldberg machines held together with duct tape. It is engineering in a way, but by squirrels on crack. It’s alien to how engineering is done in the real world.
Everything out of Meta is pure evil. It is engineering-led if you could behavioural psychologists designing Skinner boxes as engineers. Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products. The exception in the Borg.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-googl...
> Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products.
Oculus was an acquisition, so maybe that's why.
