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...
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).
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 )
To me, that meant "showing random static," and implied meaninglessness, or at least unknowability.
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.
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]
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...
475 works * 1 yr/work * $300k/yr ~= USD 140 million
Blessed St Isidore, protect us from hallucinations and deliver us from recursively chewing our cud... —the LLMs' prayer