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.
> 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.
This video does not look cyberpunk to me. I see cyber, but where's the punk? Where's the "lowlife" or the societal collapse? This is high tech and highly controlled by enormous economic actors, but that doesn't make it cyberpunk at all.
china has something like 50million homeless people. You are seeing the Arasaka quarters. There are much dodgier areas in all of the big Chinese cities (though surprisingly safe as the Chinese are quite docile)
That's an interesting video. If the skyscrapers were flickering just a little faster, the sky would be the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.
Humans everywhere have those characteristics. Currently, China has substantial control of the supply chain for almost everything. I think you'll find Chinese power remains but the wealth and power distribution internally becomes even more centralized. The US and China are similar in this regard.
Johnny Mneumonic (1995), set in the mid 2020s, depicts Beijing as the global epicentre of power and wealth. Much of the action is set in Newark New Jersey, a dystopian hellscape where civil order has broken down.
it just looks like a normal city. If we're declaring things cyberpunk based on LED displays Las Vegas probably wins but China is a horrifying totalitarian dictatorship with a market economy and by that measure sure, guess they beat us to the dystopia! go communism! go China! weeeeee
I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it. It’s like they expected God had made it so that America would be the leader in techno culture evolution. It would be endearing if it weren’t for their impotent rage response to enable fascism for their own ends.
I see it more a reflection of the degree to which America was foundational to programming and internet culture. So in a sense America did beat them to it, even if they might eventually surpass America they are still operating in a technical culture that the US created.
> I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it.
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.
J.G. Ballard was not an American. He grew up in China and spent most of his life in the UK. He has a very subtle British sensibility to a lot of his work.
I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?
On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka 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.
The AIs are supposed to be very expensive, but it's left to the reader to figure out why—maybe it wouldn't work out that way in real life, but if the reader can't explore every part of the economic and technological space of the world (they can't), they become immersed within it, and allow the subconscious to come up with reasons for why such technologies exist in the story.
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
> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer
This is an interesting call out when it comes to the communication/presentation of aesthetics of technology in the book. There's no narrative about actually relieving himself, just the mention that, of course, he has to and this is how it's being handled; the reader fills that in from these few scant details. The need to relieve himself, and ultimately the mention of the Texas catheter, is used as an indicator of how he's able to remain jacked in for so long, and as foreshadowing of expected jacked-in duration as they approach the final stages of the Villa Straylight run (when he purposely neglects to put it back on). So even in the "advanced" technology of the cyberpunk future of Neuromancer, people still gotta piss and wearing a catheter is still uncomfortable.
> Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI,
I think there's a simple explanation to this one: there must have been an atmosphere that consumer demand for everything is default insatiable and any excess productivity will be used to increase total production, regardless of products.
If a sub-Wintermute AGI equivalent to Claude Opus class of ours could run 12 completely synthetic TV stations with help of one part-time human overseer, a cyberpunk entity like Sense/Net would have 1000 employees each responsible for six AGI units amassing 72000 total TV channels in its relevant company sub-division alone. Same in the real world today would mean 2400 of its 1000 employees including interim CEO got fired at the end of the week when its 3 AGI units went operational, but works like Neuromancer were written in a different time than ours.
> they don't show people having driver problems,
This one is probably because 1980s home computers didn't have much of the software "stack", plus peripherals were more or less hardwired to RAM buses. Apps ran side by side with guys from Nebraska[1] code, and could read or write to memory addresses where it thinks where the card is connected to, without having to call syscalls and have OS figure out device addresses and bus protocol packet constructions. So it likely wasn't obvious that there will be situations in the future where the mcguffin black box unit would ask an outdated binary build of an outdated framework that would be needed to be pulled from someone's Download folder and/or fixed by 16-hour tinkering(but the Chinese ICE in Neuromancer had security potting, so maybe that was it).
Agreed. My point is that there's the perception of the characters and corporations as having some meaningful/cool aesthetics in these stories and in the genre, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how they are different than what we have today. And that's part of what makes good stories timeless.
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.
> but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how
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.
Heh, and cool hunting is the setting in Pattern Recognition.
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.
But it wasn't in the early cyberpunk works. When you consume them you can notice how important was the concept of "style", that characters were excited by the specific brands (implants, weapons, shaders, venues), associated them with social status etc. It was the 90s that brought contempt for brands to (paradoxically) mainstream.
the concept of selling out often seems seriously under-specified, and thus, like many things in our society, it becomes a tool for one set of people to improve their own status by attacking another set of people.
It is in the end a moral stance on what are the proper aesthetics, which is the kind of thing that manages to make both morality and aesthetics extremely suspect.
Nah, the aesthetics argument is a distraction. Engaging with art is engaging with another human being. Finding out that the other human being is, in fact, a corporation in a trenchcoat sucks. I would go so far as to label it a feeling of betrayal that leaks into everything else the artist touches.
Does anyone think The Rock has anything of substance to say about anything anymore? Do we think Post Malone isn't just trying to make a few more bucks after selling out entire genres?
Seeing Iggy fucking Pop shill insurance is genuinely painful.
Hear, hear! Cadillac using Led Zeppelin broke something in me.
I'm on the fence with the Beastie Boys getting used in movie fight scenes. They said they'd never do ads. Elevates the scenes, but it also elevates the IP of Disney and Paramount.
I think that is because it is a social value. It isn't meant to be a rigid rule; it's meant to be a guideline that can adapt to the needs of the situation. There has to be nuance in social values.
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.
it didn't recede, this kind of rebellion was what made it thrive (see the book The Rebel Sell, Why Culture can't be Jammed) or Deleuze:
“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself [...] No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.
It wasn't a coicindence or betrayal that punk bands 'sold out', the punk part is exactly what made them sell out. Demand for authenticity, difference and individualism is what drives consumerism. The heart of consumerism is counter-culture.
That's a very different situation. An individual "anchoring their identity" to a brand isn't doing so to earn money, which is why bands "sell out". It's just a choice they make about who they are, and I have to agree with GP that that seems tragically uncool.
They might be then only ones. Cult of Mac, Disney Adults, etc. But they’ve aesthetics that resonate with a lot of people. Meta, Google, etc., for whatever reason, don’t.
I don’t think that’s really it. Plenty of engineers care about elegance and functionality. I think calling them engineering-led is a disservice to engineers in general.
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.
Google was also characterized by their infamous data-first 41 shades of blue A/B test. It seems like they went into an extreme where design was informed by user behavior, by empiricism, rather than by the taste of the designer.
I think the fact that these kinds of companies were portrayed as such in fiction kind of prevents them from adopting the cool aesthetic. Like they need something to separate them from being the exact image of an evil futuristic corporation that lives in our heads. Or else we might actually recognize what they are.
Agreed, our real-life corporations are still trying to convince themselves (by 'them' I mean employees) that they're the good guys and wrap everything in a layer of HR-speak' "We're helping connect the world! Yay!", " We're collaborating with the ministry of War to zero people, but only if they have a signed judicial order", etc.
I mean we've got Anthropic openly advertising that they may be engineering the end of the world, we have an AI that called itself "MechaHitler" after its founder did a couple of Sieg Heils at a Presidential inauguration, we've got a major company that named itself Palantir.
People are reaching pretty hard if they don't see what we're dealing with here.
Today's billionaires aren't like yesterday's. They could be doing cool shit but they are just padding their own private real estate and stock portfolios. Yawn.
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?
Isn't it better that Bill Gates instead pumped huge amounts of money into philanthropy? Meanwhile SF has the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. A cathedral would be nice to look at but preventing malaria or helping sick kids seems preferable. In the past money couldn't have easily be deployed for good like this and helping fund cathedrals was likely done to increase the donors likelihood of getting into heaven.
My understanding is that represents only a tiny fraction of their wealth. As I understand it, the idea is that it would be better if the billionaire's other frivolous spending was on something that would endure for future generations. (Setting aside the religious question of weather cathedrals are frivolous.)
You've never worked for FedEx, have you? We have wearable propietary tech to do a necessary job, scanning 100lbs+ boxes to load into trailers by hand. It's an extremely rough job as belt pick-off, you're no more human than a machine is at that point. They don't advertise their tech, either. It would just draw unnecessary attention.
At least with Gibson, I think cyberpunk idolized actual punk culture. The coolness was found, brought, or arranged by these characters.
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.
There was some coolness in the tech, though. The Ono-Sendai Cyberspace VII deck, the mirror shade digital glasses (cut Gibson some slack, it was the 1980s), artificial limbs finished in onyx or chrome.
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.
These things were cool when coveted or adopted by the cool characters.
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.
There are attempts to make stylized "coolness" in tech. That's how you get the Cybertruck, or RGB lights everywhere in custom desktops. Be careful of what you wish for.
It's important to mention that the counterculture "punk" part was simply an totally extraneous embellishment to make the story "cool." The noir part is a perennial pulp crutch to make things seem dark; it's simply a coloring of addiction and betrayal.
Gibson is doing something with that: he's saying that technical culture has ceased to be exclusive and elevated, and has become part of the fabric of human existence. Just like his broken prism-Hemingway prose says something about the nature of identity when there so much of it is virtual and artificial.
But if there hadn't been a "punk rock" substrate in the mid-70s to mid-80s to associate with people who weren't wealthy - if there hadn't ever been garage rock - then he'd probably have had to express the same thing through Steinbeck-style techno-field workers and Upton Sinclair derived techno-socialist plotters. He's inspired by computer criminals, which are really an unimaginable thing right before then - the closest analog might have been counterfeiters. A subculture immersed in high technology. Maybe clandestine LSD chemists are somewhere in there.
He still, as most all vulgar "cyberpunk" derived stuff still lazily does, would have been able to rely on noir tropes. And note how the "Yakuza" is simply a stand in for 1920s Chicago gangster tropes, but given a global edge because of his vision that the virtual future would collapse distances.
The "coolness" was utterly shallow, and instantly became assholes stapling circuit boards to leather jackets. Or "steampunk," which was exclusively a surface aesthetic for people who thought that technology was too hard to reason about, so they just decided that if tech was simply magic, why not just do fantasy at the dawn of the industrial age? Dispose of all of those pesky questions about identity(s) and just ask "wouldn't it be cool if..."
edit: there were people working in the same vein at the time, the Semiotext(e) SF anthology and the Mirrorshades anthology showed what cyberpunk (and cyberpunk-adjacent) thought of itself; questions about identity, reality, and linearity; and their interactions with communication and simulation technology. They were ignored for noir retreads with circuitboards and leather jackets. Almost immediately it was saturated with childish fantasy - actual hackers working on Tolkienesque "cyberpunk" roleplaying scenarios for Steve Jackson Games. Ironically the situation ("E911") around creation of a childish, escapist "cyberpunk" product was a historical expression of the actual themes that the cyberpunks were largely chasing. No wonder Sterling (also fairly pulpy writer) wrote the definitive account.
I agree on the style and influences particularly in the trilogy. Yes, there are pulpy aspects and tropes. To me, there are strong dashes of beat poet and impressionism as well. This shallowness is a style, but I think the themes carry through.
I had the pleasure of reading Neuromancer in a college course on Gothic horror, so we read it alongside the likes of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Freud. And we looked at it through that lens. To me, the core theme of Gibson's storytelling is that the human condition persists. You'll have this spectrum of personalities and behaviors regardless of the technological backdrop. To me, this is an antidote for the delusional fantasy that one clever plot device is going to bring Utopia and somehow erase our evolved human foibles.
I'm not sure we have any disagreement, except perhaps in the subtext of your latter paragraphs. I don't think the shallowness is a flaw. I am not disappointed to find technology normalized and trivialized as set pieces for stories that could otherwise exist in almost any era. I think that's the whole point...
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".
I think in Gibson, most people and most corporations are boring. Capitalized and homogenized slop. The plots revolve around individuals and nooks and crannies that are cool, against the grain, hence the pink in cyberpunk. I think that exists in reality, too, but of course you have to go find it.
Those aesthetics are only "cool" in the sense that stylized comic book / military sci-fi conceptions of tech are cool. Also '80s nostalgia, and satire. In reality, none of that could exist practically in the modern day. Real-world high-tech is either consumer-oriented family friendly or hopelessly enterprise beige and gray. LA NIMBYs are not going to let you build a corporate pyramid. The closest we have in reality is the Memphis Bass Pro Shop.
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.
Can confirm, it's very much Hiro Protagonist. I love the style, and the over-the-topness of it all made more sense once I learned that it was originally planned as a graphic novel, IIRC.
Gibson's style is much more post-modern. I read Neuromancer right after Gravity's Rainbow and expected some reprieve from dense prose, but it was almost the same difficulty level, especially for a non-native reader.
edit: Adding my favorite Snow Crash quote:
> When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
Hah. I forgot about that promo. That must have been the second version of Spectre (VR) or a console, I don’t remember having consultants when we worked on the first one, and we hadn’t connected with Moses Ma (whose offices those were) during the first one.
A couple days later, I'd read the book and could get back to the code. So after we got a few things plugged in upstairs my onboarding co-developer buddy decides the next task is to show me around town. Our eyes need a break from the smashed pixels, and I sure can't look at or listen to any more broken audio code for the time being.
In the lobby of the Embarcadero, SGI had a CAVE set up for demo's.
We spent a couple of minutes lustfully sniffing at it .. expensive hardware we games programmers were convinced we'd have in our own cubicles, some day. "No .. some day, everyone will have a graphics engine like an SGI .. in their pockets", we chortle, not really serious. The demo was cute, a blocky seagull flying through gullies and over gourad-shaded hills and things. Fantastic. Then, as now, I couldn't last more than a few minutes with the headset on until the horizon parallax disorder takes its toll. I look as I type this now, over at my museum shelf full of SGI gear .. an Indy, an O2, an Octane2 .. and I'm typing all this as my already-outdated GPU's scream in the background so I don't have to write a line of code ever again. I miss SGI.
We head down to the wharf to watch late night tourists and see about some food. I'm not really digging the clam chowder, Mr. Onboard finds some fish and chips he'd rather feed to the sea lions.
I note that the little "record your own pop song" booth business that I'd seen teenage girls belting out their hits, some 5 years previously when I'd visited San Fran as a teenager myself at a shinier age .. is now a run-down shanty. Bums everywhere - that was normal for San Francisco of course - but the gloss and shine of the 80's that I'd remembered from my previous visit had all gone, the wind didn't smell like toasty sugar much any more, as it once had. Piss and vinegar, maybe. Maybe the bums were friendlier, then. Cleaner, somehow. The bay wind was still cold as fuck.
We bounce around downtown SF a bit, deciding to walk until we work out something else to do. "Maybe catch a show at a theatre I know", he chuckles to himself. I have no idea what he could mean, it's too late for that now surely, and besides we are miles from any kind of entertainment. Cable cars and tourists and stressed out businessmen. Punks spitting at old people. Seagulls, incongruous, chasing at paper. A cold wind sometimes interrupted by a blast from skyscraper doors, opening and closing like some breathing coral cell, replenishing the neighborhood with warm CO2, heavy in the tubes.
We make it to the theatre Mr. Onboard had been babbling about, and I find out who the Mitchell brothers were and what, finally, was behind the green door. Suddenly that contractor rate didn't seem so great.
Afterwards, we stumble towards his place in a hip spot of town, where I'll crash out on his couch, just across the road from a ghetto slum or two. We'd be safe, he says, if we don't cross the road.
The steep hills hurt my ankles, and I'm getting tired of not knowing where the horizon is. Los Angeles doesn't have that problem, I note. He doesn't care, there's nothing cool happening in LA, all the action is in San Fran. He's kinda right, but I knew some things, even then.
He deals with the ritual of getting into the place - 5 locks, 5 different keys - and we settle in for .. 5 hours of sleep .. before we need to be back at Embarcadero, first thing, for the company standup. I note his apartment, a 3-bedroom place for which he's paying a nearly 5-figure rent, is very clearly occupied by zoo animals.
Pizza and keyboards, half-finished PC's with their guts strewn over the coffee table, trendy programming books and socks everywhere, an SH101 synthesizer leaning on the grubby window, 3 different varieties of Ivy League hoodies, Princeton and two others, and so much other interesting detritus and paraphernalia not relevant to the situation, which is that we are two wired-up coders, desperate for sleep.
I make a big mistake, and half-assedly press the power button on the disembowled PC, just for grins. I only wanted to see if it booted, not expecting it to. He laughs, "okay then.." disappears into his room and I see the sudden grey glow, hear the chime I'd been optimizing buffers and I/O handlers for all day, and off we go, some more pixels to smash, "one more quick round" endlessly until the sun starts to come up through that grubby window. I'll never forget the SH101 silhouette, broken by sunrise, burned into my retina, immutable.
We take a taxi back to the office, sleepless, and my new onboarder friend/colleague loads up a tub of coffee, heads back to his cubicle. "See you at lunch", he says, but when I go to get him at lunch-time, he's fast asleep under his desk, and I don't have the energy to wake him, so I trudge out to find the one subway shop in the Embarcadero, whose jalapeño subs I can also still taste in my mind.
Good times. Halcyon days. We had a tally of 12 submarines and 8 whales, that week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think a lot of this is the cultural force of the US being the gravitational center of world politics and finance for several decades. It’s always had a strong anti-intellectual faction, and now as we enter it’s “decaying Roman Empire” phase, it will behave increasingly erratically as it’s elite strip it for parts and the citizenry watch in shock.
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.
> As China rises to become the new gravitational center
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.
Fair points all around. I am perhaps unduly extrapolating from a lifetime of there always being a “superpower” and assuming that the power vacuum left by US decay will be inevitably and directly filled by China.
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.
Really great take. Can't emphasize enough how much I agree with your "I don’t think anyone can predict how things will play out at this point" and "We have been blessed and cursed to live in interesting times if nothing else" statements.
I have to post my rant every time Idiocracy gets mentioned, so feel free to downvote (it is the best way to spend my karma!)
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 effects of mobile phones, "social" media and AI are showing signs of Idiocracy. Thinking is abandoned, living is consumption, and difficult tasks are taken over by machines.
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.
> The Trumpist Republicans fundamentally believe only they are allowed to rule and everyone outside their group is an enemy
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gibson had a hell of a time getting the second book, _Agency_, out the door because the real world kept leap frogging him. I fear we may never get _The Jackpot_ because we'll get Jackpotted for real before he can finish it.
We entered cyberpunk completely the moment OpenAI released chatGPT. We are already deep into it and flying cars soon will follow. Maybe it started even earlier with bitcoin, but definitely is on.
There is a fine line between science fiction informing reality, and straight up delusion. We are living in delusional times—like a fever dream. Sooner or later, the patient either heals or dies.
Depends on what you're after. Ballard had several modes in which he wrote.
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.
I highly recommend the “collected interviews” of Ballard that was released some years ago … very interesting exchanges and some almost shockingly present judgments about the future… Especially the future of media in the YouTube age.
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.)
My favorite is "The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard".
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.
The unevenly distributed future is a William Gibson thing.
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.
If it was William Gibson everyone would be wearing black jeans, hardly ever use a computer, going on adventures all around the city and talking to members of the opposite sex. For sure that's not where we are.
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.
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."
Another thing they got right was the merger of governments, large corporations, finance, intelligence agencies, and globalized organized crime into one big sprawling mass of Machiavellian nihilists scheming for power. None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.
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).
> 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
Yeah it's really amazing how prescient these books are given when they were written. I wish I enjoyed them more, I'm reading Mona Lisa Overdrive now and other than intellectual admiration of it all I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through. I don't enjoy the prose, and how dense it is I guess cause I am not a careful reader.
> I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through
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.
I don't think the novel necessarily implies this consciousness. It is left ambiguous.
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.
> 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.
I think you are probably reading a disproportionate amount of fiction.
> 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.
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.
> Another thing they got right was [...] None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.
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.
Sprawl is where he originally started exploring these ideas but Jackpot is where he really focused deep into them and it's even more prescient. It's also bleaker, he has clearly recalibrated his estimate of how much power and control these new entities will have and what they will choose to do with it. Unfortunately I think it's a better representation of the path we're on.
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.
reply