
Cyberpunk is dead? - rl1987
http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/2011/03/cyberpunk-is-dead.html
======
demosthenes
This piece reads awfully. I haven't seen anything like this since trying to
understand inscrutable postmodernist literary criticism at college.

I am very interested in this, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding
it. What's he trying to say?

 _Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that are
valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only value is the
one of attention, something we have learned from the advertising process,
which has become the key process of culture. This cultural praxis fails to
find a history of the human faces. The faces tried to break the boundaries of
word and image, they were processes of conscious creation of speaking images
for the feelings that words fail to describe._

~~~
schrototo
I have to confess, I've got a sort of fondness for this writing style. It's
got a certain rythm that makes everything seem more... impactful than it
really is.

edit: of course, what I meant to say was:

While aesthetically confusing on a surface level, the subcurrent of ryhtmic
tonality in these disquisitions impacts the reader's thought process in
subliminal ways. Hitherto the paragon of collegiate studies, these textual
discourses nowadays propagate freely in the super-plebeian fantasy-made-
reality cyber-utopia that is the infosphere. The parentally linked-to
hypertext is a two-fold example of not only the skillfull mastery of the
avant-poetic style, but also the post-print arrangement common in todays
socioeconomic conditions.

~~~
epochwolf
Congratulations, I have not read text like that since my philosophy courses in
college.

------
wladimir
The problem with cyberpunk is that it's no longer the future, it's the
present. Sometimes when I read the news I've got the idea we're kind of living
in a dystopian 90's cyberpunk future...

When it's the new normal it makes sense that the word is "dead" as a
denominator.

~~~
daeken
My thoughts exactly. I don't mean to threadjack, but I'm running a new startup
where I'm building augmented reality displays ( <http://gothameyewear.com/> if
anyone is interested -- haven't posted it here before, simply because there's
not much there), and I occasionally have that "well shit, it's the future"
realization in working on it. We may not be in the 2011 of Shadowrun, but
we'll have decks soon -- they'll be our smartphones.

~~~
Rhapso
I am a college student looking to do research on wearable computers and
interface designs for this kind of device. Looking for interns?

~~~
alnayyir
This guy has a history of "starting" things and never finishing him. You'd be
better off finding someone with a more stable history of finishing what they
started. And when I say history, I mean he's into the double digits of
"startups" he's initiated.

~~~
phlux
Is it better to have started double digit startups than to have not started
anything?

Your snide comment seems to go totally against the idea that we should fail
quickly and often.

Out of curiosity, not knowing anything of the subject of your scorn -- why are
these multitudes of start-stops an issue?

Maybe this intern, who's academic path is in-line with the premise of his
startup - are _just the thing_ he needs to have this one be _the_ one.

\---

Or are you a friend of his teasing him?

~~~
alnayyir
There's a difference between a flake, and moving between things that obviously
aren't going to work.

Nothing ever gets shipped from him, nothing failed quickly to begin with. ( I
don't just mean Alky, either. )

Stop parroting community tropes.

Examples:

Alky

<http://daeken.com/daeken-discount-program>

<https://github.com/daeken/RenrakuOS> \- 2010

<https://github.com/daeken/EveInject> \- 2009

Quote from his blog:

"""

What have you built and what are you building?

Product-wise, I haven't built much; the biggest thing I've built was Alky,
which allowed the conversion of Win32 binaries to run natively on OS X and
Linux. It was a marginal success, although it ended up failing later for
business reasons.

These days, I'm working on a few things:

Renraku: <http://daeken.com/renraku-future-os> This will eventually be
combined with OpenBAMF/IREctive: Reverse-engineering platform and module store
(My primary for-profit project right now)

Books

The Emulator's Handbook: A book on building an emulator from start to finish.
There's simply nothing there yet, which is a damn shame -- we need to get
people involved here.

So far unnamed: A book on reverse-engineering game protocols and emulating
them.

In the future, I'd like to be developing and selling Eyetaps and other
hardware around Renraku.

"""

This isn't fail-fast, it's ship-nothing. It only bothers me because he keeps
attention-whoring for every little idea he gets and ends up disappointing
anybody who thought it was cool.

~~~
phlux
Cool, you're just looking out for this potential interns interest right?

So, just in the interest of full disclosure - what have you
shipped/built/released if, by your own words, this is such a big deal?

Just curious if you're some hyper producing hacker ninjastar or if you just
have it out for this particular HNer.

~~~
alnayyir
I never made any claims and didn't demand the attention of others, the onus
isn't upon me to prove anything if I haven't claimed anything.

If you must know, I'm a software engineer at an early-stage startup in SF.

~~~
phlux
I know that you're now probably 22, that you were struggling a few years ago
because you had to drop out of school and you had very little experience and
were seeking some advice. HNers gave you some good advice at the time too, I
believe. Did you go back to school?

But, now you're on HN calling a guy out on his projects like some project nazi
because you probably think of yourself as really smart, but your more young
than smart.

So, it is ok if this guy starts shit and for whatever reason they dont get
completed. Keep plugging.

You're statements calling him out defacto call attention to yourself and what
you're doing - so I would recommend getting back to work for that startup
rather than posting on HN in the middle of the day.

~~~
alnayyir
Getting a little personal there don't you think? You should learn some
courtesy.

Time to hit the reset button.

------
locopati
"If I write something set 60 years in the future I am going to have to explain
how humanity got there and that's becoming quite a big job," [Gibson] said.

"Compared to that further investigation of our alien present seems actually
way more doable and it may be more fun to do because it shakes all sorts of
people out of the woodwork that want to talk to me," [Gibson added].

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715>

Also, [http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-
interv...](http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interview/)

~~~
demosthenes
Interestingly, Gibson's latest book - Pattern Recognition - is set in the
present. It's very good.

[http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-William-
Gibson/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-William-
Gibson/dp/0399149864)

It's not the same dystopian future he envisioned in the 1990s. But his keen
eye draws out the darker sides.

~~~
spacemanaki
He's written two books since then, _Spook Country_ and _Zero History_ which
are also set in the present. I haven't read them but supposedly they
constitute a sort of informal trilogy.

I agree that _Pattern Recognition_ is very good. Although I will always have a
soft spot for _Neuromancer_ and his related books and stories.

~~~
dedward
Read those other two - they're as good, if not a little bit better. Nothing
stunningly different.

As a long-time neuromancer and Gibson fan, I can say his writing has changed
and approached the modern day just as it should. Neuromancer made sense at the
time it was published - the net wasn't around, it was a far out concept - lots
of room for imagination. If it were only released today, it would just seem
like really bad sci-fi because the net exists, now, and it's not quite what
Gibson wrote about.

I'd the pattern recognition/spook/zero set are not so much current day as very
near-future. They're entirely plausible with current technology, with a few
inventions along the way that don't currently exist, but probably could. PLus
they're a good read.

~~~
joebadmo
I think WG has always said that writing sci fi for him and many SF authors was
always really about the present. And if you read Neuromancer again, it really
does bear out.

------
dublinclontarf
Not dead, just moved. I think the whole bitcoin thing is very cyberpunk-ish. A
digital crypto-currency.

~~~
demosthenes
Spot on.

Also, browsing pages on Tor and similar networks reminds me a lot of exploring
the internet in the early '90s. It's messy, there are lots of abandoned,
hastily put together pages. There are weird rants.

The internet that the author misses is still out there. It's just not as close
to the surface as it was in the early days of the internet or BBS.

~~~
lloeki
_"It's just not as close to the surface as it was in the early days of the
internet or BBS."_

Precisely. I'll add that today that 'underground' is a very small (yet
important, if not critical to its future) part of the whole internet whereas
in the early days it was most of it; hence the appearance of it being farther
from the surface.

No need to reach for Tor, take HN whose volume is certainly much lower than
those Facebook streams and various LOLcats, yet it is certainly pivotal to
what's actually built on the internet. The next Facebook won't come from its
users, it will come from one of you.

Human-Computer interaction as envisioned is at its peak. Dare you tell me that
Second Life, World of Warcraft, or Eve Online are not quite akin to the
metaverse that was envisioned in Snowcrash. Tell me that those robotic
prosthetic limbs are not close to what you see in Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita in
the US). All those eyes, ears, and even __memory __prosthetic devices
(<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6574>) seen in Ghost in the Shell and
Johnny Mnemonic are not dreamt of anymore, they are very real and useful to
many (although admittedly they did not reach such levels of advancement, but
that's a matter of time). Tell me those efforts to control and monitor
everything including the internet "for the safety of everyone and his dog" are
not dystopian in many ways, and get a look at how the third and fourth world
are manipulating technology in ad-hoc, cheap, creative and dangerous ways to
try and follow us in our first-world countries steps.

Of course there is some error correction to apply with regard to what was
envisioned before all of that was even remotely possible; it is no wonder that
fiction varies from reality.

Cyberpunk lives, for the best and the worst, today.

------
pnathan
Cyberpunk got somehow stuck in mirror shades and virtual reality worlds, and
then wandered off into the artistic fringe.

There was also very little grasp of programming by the cyberpunk writers that
I've read. No understanding of the Cyber part of the Punk. That would have
increased its ability to stay relevant.

------
DanI-S
The article defines punk (in general) as a _deviant subculture that parents
are afraid of._

Perhaps the general decline of punk can be attributed to modern parents being
much less afraid than parents in the 70s. Cyberpunk isn't really exciting when
your parents all have iPhones.

~~~
demosthenes
I'm not sure why Anonymous does not fit the article's definition.

~~~
jokermatt999
Between Anonymous and Wikileaks, I feel like we're practically living in a
cyberpunk story. We're just the blissfully uninvolved citizens who don't live
in the seedy underbelly.

~~~
DanI-S
I'm not sure we at Hacker News are blissfully uninvolved; we're busy building
tomorrow's sinister megacorporations. Or Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong.

~~~
count
At what point do you realize what you're building is what your protagonist
heros always fought against?

And does that realization make you stop?

------
bricestacey
I thought the last two paragraphs were delightful and might help explain the
recent trend for people to leave HN.

Otherwise, the piece is barely legible.

