
William Gibson: the prophet of cyberspace talks AI and climate collapse - hhs
https://www.ft.com/content/48b6d0f6-499f-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
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jhbadger
"Even today Gibson says he is puzzled by older readers who approach him at
book signings to thank him for inspiring them to pursue a career in tech."

Yes, it is weird how the world of Neuromancer and his other early novels were
dystopian, but many people didn't see it as "gee, we need to prevent this
world from coming into being" but rather as "gee, the technology these
characters have is amazing".

~~~
krapp
To crib from the man himself, dystopia is here, it just isn't evenly
distributed.

Neuromancer is about cool people doing cool things, cyber-samurai hackers and
razorgirls and space rastafarians, criminals and outcasts, and it's not
surprising that techies would fetishize the image of the anarchist cyber-
cowboy. But how dystopian would the setting be for most people who aren't
criminals getting mixed up with the mafia and paramilitary black-ops groups?

We supposedly live in an Orwellian techno-fascist nightmare of omnipresent
surveillance and thought-control _now_ , but most people don't feel the boot
stamping on their heads. Is that because they're just sheep whose minds are
dulled by fluoride and the adrenaline burn of social media, or because it
isn't stamping on everyone?

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samizdis
Piece available on non-paywalled site here:
[https://dnyuz.com/2020/02/13/william-gibson-cyberspaces-
prop...](https://dnyuz.com/2020/02/13/william-gibson-cyberspaces-prophet-
talks-ai-and-climate/)

~~~
jefurii
I'm suspicious about sites like DNYUZ that offer no information about
themselves. There's an About link at the bottom but the endless autoscroller
is so aggressive I can't click it, and /about/ just leads to an article.

~~~
salawat
You were not kidding about that aggressive auto-scroller. Tested it with find
in page for about fifteen minutes trying to coerce the about link to stay on
page long enough to click or inspect, no dice. I'll have to try catching it
with devtools on my regular system.

~~~
infide1castr0
Even when I managed to click on the link itself it only brought me to the page
I was already reading (the Gibson article)... were you able to find anything
else about them?

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whearyou
He’s so whole minded and generally awesome

