zlacker

Growing up in the oughts, the future was Ghost in the Shell: SAC and Xenosaga and .hack//Sign and Gundam 00. I didn't see the dystopia; I imagined a glass metropolis beside a glittering bay, bleached and blue; VR diving into pools of ephemeral neon filament; trips to a space colony. The ISS had launched when I was in elementary school. 2012 came, and I graduated from college, and the Rift had its Kickstarter. I had a supercomputer in my pocket and a black president. Things seemed on track.

Of course, Oculus dragged its feet until it was bought by Facebook, who dragged things even more. Obama droned weddings. The ISS prepares for reentry burn in a few years. Et cetera. All of it - the corporate politicking; the political atrocities; the logarithmic progression of scientific advances, where technological progress is overtaken by the social calamity it unleashes - predicted by the media that had set my mental image of the future in the first place. Whose fault is it that the future failed to materialize again? I'd say corporate greed and the captured institutions that are supposed to police them for the greater good, but the fact that we're seeing the dream die again means that laying blame might be futile (particularly if we're not going to actually do anything about the bad actors).

Essentially, the Millennial era has been one where the glamour ghost came a-knockin' again, but the smart people who were paying attention already knew how the story goes. As for the rest of us? Mana du vortes.

>>underl+(OP)
a view from a generation earlier: >>39084117

Re: Ghost in the Shell, I find it amusing that Gibson's 1984 opening line: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." used to mean grey, but now could mean bright blue (or even black?) due to the march of progress...

>>082349+94
The poetic meaning of the line still works. The sky, the symbol of boundless optimism, the place of open infinite wonder and possibility...reduced to meaninglessness, closed possibilities, and failed promise.

>>082349+94
I tend to think that the 90s actually did see its analogue to psychedelics in the internet. No need to be a psychonaut and fry your brain anymore; just surf the web. It's the same sort of ideal of connecting with universal knowledge.

There's even a heuristic to track these kinds of awakenings, roughly, and I'm absolutely certain you're not going to guess it. Got it in your head? Okay, wrong, it was "landmark black cinema." The Wiz came out in 1978 after 4 years of the musical. In 1995, we had The Lion King, followed by the Broadway play in 1997. If you look for something repeating the pattern, you find Black Panther in 2018 (alongside a glamour around a specific component of the web, social media and the mature smartphone).

I don't mean to make any sort of causative connection, but perhaps there is something about a widespread desire to "move forward" and "embrace openness" that also benefits the funding of these sorts of productions (and then the subsequent public enthusiasm for them upon release). And there's always a collapse back to conservatism shortly thereafter (Disco Demolition Day and Reagan; Bush and 9/11; COVID and its backlash, and the subsequent failure of Bernie Sanders to beat Joe Biden, and then Joe Biden/Kamala Harris to beat Donald Trump).

>>underl+N42
The interesting thing about Disco Demolition Day is how localised (to North America?) that backlash seems to have been; I didn't get over here to Europe until this century, but as far as I can tell disco never "died" here.

Good point: Timothy Leary was moving in cyberpunkish circles shortly before his death, and my only IRL interaction with John McCarthy was at a cyberdelic-influenced party in a Bay Area tract house.

What a long strange surf it's been.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgR6UNeQxXEv

(see also >>41826083 )

>>underl+(OP)
Resonates me a lot, I am a decade older though. From my POV it looks like we were overgrown kids but now just getting old.

>>underl+(OP)
Comparing a Wired Magazine from 2014 compared to 2024 is pretty illuminating to me, because in terms of aesthetics nothing had really changed, the "modern" adverts for furniture or gadgets could be interchangable. But the difference in the content and "spirit" of the writing was palatable, 2014 definetly felt alot more forward looking and speaking towards a more unified crowd, where 2024 was often a barrage of fears and anxieties of X upcoming technologies, or how X industry was not inclusive of Y crowd, the whole thing felt alot more diversionary and tribalistic. I've observed the same thing in media, where alot of the focus has shifted from value through exploration of new concepts to value via representation.

So perhaps corporate greed is one thing, but I'd also argue that America itself dosen't seem very interested in the future anymore either, they seem alot more interested in dividing the cake now rather than making it larger.

>>082349+94
> the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

To me, that meant "showing random static," and implied meaninglessness, or at least unknowability.

>>082349+94
> used to mean grey, but now could mean bright blue (or even black?) due to the march of progress...

Issues (and maybe possibilities) about reading works out of context and time. There's often a need / tendency to place those ideas relative to your own.

On the issues: Downloaded and started looking through Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636, Catholic Patron Saint of Computers and Internet). [1] The striking part reading through the later year discussions and critique though was how often writers needed to place their own later meaning and rearview criticism on an archival encyclopedist from ~1300-1400 years ago.

  > an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, glossed with his own derivations of the technical terms relevant to the topic in hand. Derivations apart, it was lifted from sources almost entirely at second or third hand ..., none of it checked, and much of it unconditional eyewash – the internet, in other words, to a T.
  > His reductions and compilations did indeed transmit ancient learning, but Isidore, who often relied on scholia and earlier compilations, is often simplistic scientifically and philosophically, especially compared to .. figures such as Ambrose and Augustine.

Except that wasn't the point. He was creating an encyclopedia. Isidore quotes from around 475 works from over 200 authors in his works, including those outside the Etymologiae. Several of the works quoted would have never survived or even been known about without Isidore's efforts. The goal (opinion) was preserving the knowledge. He wrote what was there, and 1300-1400 years later there's a criticism that he only gathered 475 works and didn't find first hand sources for every account?

On the maybe possibilities: Neuromancer's pretty great. In the first paragraph you're already transported to another world:

  > “It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke.  The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. [2]

On the opening line in 2024: could mean grey, could mean static, could mean blue, could mean black, could mean a screen saver. Could mean some future unknown "television" from the land of headjacks, AR web topologies, and xeno-sentient entertainment. Even 40 years later the meaning is already changed in reading based on the readers state, and the reader's prior experiences. And because it was a future-tech, cyperpunk image of a world yet to be, was it really meant to be a 1980's television sky?

By the third paragraph Gibson's already discussion "antique" seven-function force-feedback manipulator Russian military prosthesis' and who invented nerve-splicing beneath the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company.

[1] Etymologiae, WP, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae

[2] Neuromancer, Ch 1, penguinrandomhouse.ca, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/293994/neuromancer-b...

>>araes+ux5
No idea how far off I may be on my back-of-the-enveloping here, but:

   475 works * 1 yr/work * $300k/yr ~= USD 140 million

assuming 1 year for a scribe to copy a work and that scribal work was high end knowledge work (thus USD 150k salary, 300k fully burdened) would have a current-day Isidore as tackling a project that first required USD ~140 million worth of inputs? (his latter day critics may be jealous that their support is missing one or two of those zeros?)

Blessed St Isidore, protect us from hallucinations and deliver us from recursively chewing our cud... —the LLMs' prayer