
William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned - hhs
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/19/810570879/william-gibson-says-todays-internet-is-nothing-like-what-he-envisioned
======
mcv
> _" the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that
> we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."_

Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of
_Shadowrun_ , a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future
where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point
here).

In the earlier editions, from 1989 through the 1990s and early 2000s, the
Matrix (their 'internet') was all virtual reality, and the 'Decker' using it
would disappear into that world and barely interact with the rest of the team.

In more recent editions, written after smartphones and wireless internet
became common, _everything_ was connected. Everything is connected to the
Matrix. In combat, a Decker can hack the opponents' guns to disable them, for
example. It's not a world to disappear into; that world has come to the
physical world and merged with it.

~~~
Nasrudith
There were also gameplay reasons behind that for flow. One of the criticisms
of the newer model is that the needless connectivity without so much as a
logistical benefit doesn't make the decker/hacker feel smart so much as make
it feel like the world is set up by colossal idiots who would think giving the
army hand grenades which are always remote detonatable without a manual safety
fuse would be an excellent idea and be utterly shocked that their entire army
got blown up by one hacker.

~~~
ses1984
Whoever paid for that grenade doesn't trust the soldier / mercenary they gave
it to very far, that's why the network connection exists in the first place,
hackers can exploit that.

At least that's the reason I just made up.

~~~
pjc50
More likely it needs a continuous connection back to the license server for
GaaS (grenades as a service).

(This kind of cyberpunk dystopia is very plausible from the intersection of
military contracting grift and lowest-bidder IoT design!)

~~~
grawprog
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M7_Spider](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M7_Spider)

~~~
pjc50
This shows how hard it is to write sci-fi when I was joking about "grenades as
a service" \- someone's gone one better and made a wifi mesh network of
landmines!

And then converted the landmines to remote-operated as part of a legal fiction
about victim-operated devices. Which is the military version of the concern
about robots taking jobs: to what extent is it acceptable to have munitions
making their own decisions about taking lives?

Anyway, in the Shadowrun universe you'd _definitely_ be able to hack the mesh
network of landmines.

~~~
grawprog
I figured you were joking, sadly I just figured something like that had
already been thought up and deployed.

------
pjc50
> "And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer,
> and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in
> 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was
> so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I
> thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'"

Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it gets harder and
harder to write near-future SF as the present is in flux. Especially to write
post-apocalyptic SF.

SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological
development and social progress moving forwards. This remains true even in
apocalyptic scenarios, which are always tied to the worries of the present at
the time of writing.

But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic
events. Things like the "5G causes coronavirus" nonsense remind me of what
Carl Sagan called the "demon-haunted world".

~~~
cjohnson318
> SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological
> development and social progress moving forwards.

This is what I think was so original about The Handmaid's Tale--a possible
iteration of our own culture and technology that moved backwards-sideways
instead of forward. (Disclaimer: we read this years ago in school, and I
haven't had a chance to see the recent adaptation.)

~~~
walshemj
Not really Frankenstein, War of the worlds where not a Whig view of history.

Only early plup SF Gernsback etc had that view

------
baryphonic
This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the
headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his
emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change-
induced apocalypse.

~~~
_red
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been
wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to
create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election.

This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot
ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...

~~~
arkades
> But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a
> future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the
> population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where
> characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the
> election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the
> world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of
> the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very
> much be present."

I don't see this as a pathetic premise.

~~~
_red
>I don't see this as a pathetic premise.

You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision
(I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it
from another angle:

Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was
about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama
getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA
camps he set up....

Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as
pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come
across as hysterical and insulting to the future?

The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little
that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on
hubris.

~~~
danharaj
> Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into
> my work?

We're talking about William Fucking Gibson here. Next you'll tell me you hate
it when Ursula Leguin 'shoehorned politics' into her work.

~~~
Apocryphon
It's true that Gibson's work is compelling because like all great cyberpunk
writers, it grafts real world social, cultural, and political considerations
in with his futuristic technology. That said, good world-building doesn't mean
the author himself might not have naive or problematic politics. J.K.
Rowling's expressed views on Twitter have been an ongoing source of
controversy. Or perhaps more relevant, Ray Bradbury in his old age became a
staunch supporter of George Bush and the wars waged by his administration:

[https://www.salon.com/control/2001/08/29/bradbury_2/](https://www.salon.com/control/2001/08/29/bradbury_2/)

[https://books.google.com/books?id=rRmlA33pEcsC&pg=PT192&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=rRmlA33pEcsC&pg=PT192&lpg=PT192)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080521050300/http://anthony.gn...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080521050300/http://anthony.gnn.tv/blogs/24458/The_Great_Bradbury_Bummer)

~~~
danharaj
Sure. Shitty politics in fiction still flies.

------
narrator
>"Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the Internet
that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff."

Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the
world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have
always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.

~~~
tim58
I think one of the things it was easy to miss in 1984 when Neuromancer was
published was how accessible the internet and computers is. I've watched two
year olds interact with the modern internet.

If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in
1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a
lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Microsoft's
unofficial mission was "a computer on every [office] desk, and in every home,
running Microsoft software". It sounded overly ambitious, even into the 90s.

~~~
satori99
Interestingly, a decade later, both Tad William's _Otherland_ (1996), and Neal
Stephenson's _Snowcrash_ (1992) described networked virtual realities which
everyday normal people had access to, but they were referred to as "Ken and
Barbies" or similar. Their use of off-the-shelf avatars and no custom software
gave them away. And the Techno-elites still had their own spaces within these
worlds that were either off-limits or hard to find.

~~~
tim58
Something happened between 1984 and 1992 where imagining a virtual world had
to include large numbers of everyday people.

------
ashtonkem
> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we
> would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."

This is a common mistake utopians of all stripes; the short comings of the
world as we know it isn't a consequence of external forces imposing badness on
us, it's a consequence of the fallibility of humanity. Unless if you have a
concrete plan on how you're going to organize society differently, any attempt
to start something fresh will end up recreating all of the ills that drove you
from "society" in the first place.

~~~
monknomo
Pretty sure Neuromancer isn't a utopian novel, and that Gibson isn't a
utopian.

~~~
ashtonkem
Arguable; I’m not enough of a literary person to argue it out. But the
sentence above is a very escapist attitude, and I’d argue that my original
point still holds; escapists often fail to recognize the source of the
problems they’re escaping from, and recreate them wherever they escape to.

~~~
the_af
It's not really arguable. Gibson wrote _punk_ literature, at least back then;
he identified himself as a punk subculture writer, and punk isn't utopian. He
was not describing a desirable future, but a depressing one where soulless
corporations rule the world.

> _But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude_

Escapism can be pessimistic, as in Gibson. It's not him who "escapes", it's
the denizens of the soulless world he described, and the "world" they escape
to can be just as alienating. It's no triumph to "escape" to Gibson's matrix,
and his world continues to be a crapsack [1][2].

\----

[1]
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld)

[2]
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literat...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literature)

~~~
Apocryphon
The setting as a whole is dystopian, but the possibilities of the net as a
free space for people to flee into and become empowered there- isn't that a
utopian enclave, a refuge?

Regardless of post hoc genre classifications like cyberpunk vs. postcyberpunk,
you can still have pockets of hope within a generally dystopian setting, and
perhaps Gibson's cyberspace was the place in Neuromancer.

~~~
duskwuff
> but the possibilities of the net as a free space for people to flee into and
> become empowered there- isn't that a utopian enclave, a refuge?

That theme isn't really present in the _Neuromancer_ series. From the
perspective of our viewpoint characters, the matrix is primarily a place that
one goes to do a job, not a place to hang out; it's seen primarily as the
domain of megacorps and mysterious AIs, not a human space.

~~~
gpderetta
It is present in the follow up Count Zero though. Also while Gibson focuses on
characters at the fringe of society, the world itself is not significantly
more distopian than our world (or the '80s), which is probably one of the
author's points.

I still wouldn't call it escapism though.

~~~
duskwuff
> the world itself is not significantly more distopian than our world (or the
> '80s)

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment! The backstory to the Sprawl
universe is crushingly dystopian -- Soviet Russia has won a nuclear war,
destroying a number of European cities (particularly in Germany) and
irradiating much of the European continent. In the wake of that war, it
appears that the US government has largely collapsed, leaving megacorporations
(like Sense/Net), wealthy families (like the Tessier-Ashpools), and street
gangs (like the Yakuza and Panther Moderns) as the primary sources of power.

2020 sure isn't great, but I'd still prefer it to the crapsack world that
Gibson built.

------
arbitrage
I disagree, the cyber fighting is almost exactly how he described it. Tons of
misinformation, requiring personal compute agents to sort through it for you.
Attacking high-profile targets by buying zero-days, creating distractions,
then pivoting to more obscure vulnerabilities in the corporate firewalls.
Attack & parry, then riposte.

I find his descriptions more apt now than when his books were first published.

------
Symmetry
We're definitely in more of a Bruce Sterling cyberpunk future than a William
Gibson cyberpunk future. Distraction has been feeling eerily prescient
recently.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
We are actually in the Mike Judge Idiocracy cyberpunk future and it terrifies
me. Our president is a reality TV freak, the citizens are so science-retarded
that they think Covid is a hoax, the population all sit in our homes watching
testicle-kicking videos on huge TVs while drinking Mountain Dew and eating
Cheetos while the world melts down outside.

~~~
newsbinator
That's all true. The difference is in Idiocracy there's no fracture-
everybody's an idiot and perfectly content to be one.

In our time, there's still push-back to any descent into idiocracy.

~~~
ehnto
I think we are going to have to push harder. The anti-intellectual cohort has
got their preferred elected leaders in more than one country these past few
years. Just because smart people exist, doesn't mean they are holding the
reigns currently.

~~~
noir_lord
> The anti-intellectual cohort has got their preferred elected leaders.

I think the anti-intellectual cohort have been helped in that by the super
rich who had their preferred elected leaders as well.

------
pharke
I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at
some point. The current generation of VR seems like the first halting steps
into that world. Progress towards realtime raytracing and massively online
social worlds look like the next steps. The lofty goals of brain machine
interface companies whisper faint possibilities of "jacking in" at some
distant date.

~~~
tim58
The human brain processes ~40gigabits/second of information. Current direct
brain interfaces are probably closer to 400bits/second Computer to Brain. I
think it's very possible that we will hit wetware limitations for direct brain
interfaces an order of magnitude or two less than ~40gigabits/seconds. With
less information to process the digital worlds created by brain machine
interfaces will be significantly less stimulating than the real world.

In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be
generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total
information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine
interfaces.

Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward
to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware
limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy
place.

~~~
pharke
I would argue that that number is a bit high for sense input. Figures I've
seen are about 20x lower on the high end. The only time I've seen estimates as
high as the one you gave are when they are considering the full field of
vision for each eye and translating that directly to pixels assuming there is
100% fidelity. Human vision doesn't work that way, we dedicate far fewer
neurons to our peripheral vision outside the fovea. You also have to remember
that neurons transmit data at a much slower rate than electrical connections
(100m/s vs 300,000km/s) so the path to building a better brain machine
interfce is to have a large number of electrodes which seems to me a fairly
straightforward problem to solve e.g. make them smaller and adding more of
them. The other side of the coin is that we aren't aware of all of our sensory
input all of the time so you can get away with only transmitting the important
stuff which greatly reduces the bandwidth needed. Further out, there's likely
some form of abstraction going on inside our brains and if we can communicate
data on that level we'll likely need even less input to create a realistic
experience.

As an aside, I don't think I'd opt for the type of uploading outlined in that
novel considering it involves a posthumous destructive scan of the connectome.
There wouldn't be any continuity so you'd probably just end up with a copy.
The only type of uploading I could see working would be a Ship of Theseus
approach where you gradually replace your biological neurons with artificial
neurons and even that causes some hesitation.

------
gfodor
Why does one assume the Internet is in its final form? I'm about 99% certain
the phase we are in is a transitional phase. Upon the arrival of ubiquitous
immersive computing, it will go through what may be its final phase shift, but
right now it'll be looked back upon similar to the previous eras.

~~~
cwp
Yes! What's interesting about Gibson's vision is that he assumed connectivity
would be hard, but VR would be easy. It's a world of payphones, fax machines,
and "simstim" where you can receive someone else's sensory input and ride
along inside their head as they move through the world.

That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we
nail VR.

~~~
germinalphrase
Simstim is - at least in part - being worked on by a company called
Openwater[0]. Mary Lou Jepsen did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while
back that speaks to the ambition of thought/memory recording via an MRI-like
device and the "insertion"/playback of the same in other people [1].

[0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-
telepathy/

~~~
cwp
Yeah, I was at that talk. A little out there, but pretty awesome.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Have you seen Brainstorm from 1983?

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/)

~~~
cwp
No, just the clip that Lou showed at the talk.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
I asked because the world of Brainstorm consisted of payphones too, and they
did that 'telepathy' with headsets which could replay recorded experiences
over that modem line.

Hard to classify that movie, at its time it was pure science-fiction, now it
is a technothriller from the past. But very watchable, i think.

------
kerkeslager
I dunno, I think the future described in i.e. Neuromancer can still happen,
it's just farther down the road.

~~~
dpau
that is exactly what those of us simply waiting for a Neuromancer _movie_ have
been saying to ourselves for years :(

------
RichardCA
The current season of Westworld is very Gibsonian. The main new character
(Caleb) is introduced as a vet with PTSD, but as the season unfolds we see
he's been augmented, and it's strongly implied that he's living with implanted
memories to cover up the horrible stuff he did in the military.

In the most recent episode he got to use a drug called "Genre" that moves you
through different states of mental alteration. Whoever wrote this read lots of
Gibson.

But the idea that everyone is jacked in to the same network, the hand of
corporate control is always present, and shady things are happening all the
time, no one thinks of that as unique or novel any more.

------
HONEST_ANNIE
> I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world
> either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one —
> would still be very much be present."

TV show The Good Fight Season 4, Episode 1 "The Gang Deals with Alternate
Reality has brilliant dark humor take on alternate reality where Hillary
Clinton won the election.

spoiler alert \---

(spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost,
but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big
donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> (spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump
> lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who
> is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)

that's eerily close to current reality. (#MeToo only when politically
expedient; Weinstein's damage control advisor is now a senior campaign adviser
to a 'liberal' contender for the WH)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> "Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the
> Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly
> stuff."

That is the story of all technology. The horse was the super weapon used by
kings and warriors. It ended up being something that farmers used to plow
their fields. Same with ships, cars, telephones, radios, televisions,
computers.

------
Animats
_" Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time and effort
to understand."_

Yes, that's Gibson's new book, "Agency". It's complicated because it's
contrived, not because the subject matter is complicated. Probably his worst
book to date.

------
noah670
I strongly believe we need more separation from the real world and the
internet. Every year it seems like more of our physical lives are being placed
into social forms on the internet which should be more of an escape than
bringing it all over.

------
ceilingcorner
_" And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer,
and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017,
but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so
organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought
'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'"_

Honestly, if you were deeply, dramatically surprised by Trump's election, you
weren't paying enough attention. The causes of working-class angst against
globalism and coastal centers of power goes back to at least the late 70s,
with the offshoring of jobs and the subsequent death of thousands of towns in
the now-called Rust Belt.

It lead me to wonder if there is a term for such a phenomenon: the realization
that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't
actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of.

~~~
pjc50
> The causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of
> power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and
> the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt.

So .. how's that working out?

> the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new,
> surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you
> were ignorant of.

Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in _Excession_.

~~~
ehnto
> Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.

Fantastic book, really interesting perspectives on society to be gained by the
absolutely enormous lens the Ship Minds are able to view it from.

------
agumonkey
The reasons why society decided to re-root itself on top of internet are to be
investigated. Capitalism logic caught in a loop looking for virginial spaces
to re-grow with even less constraints ?

------
yellowbat
The hacker spirit of the early Internet has been replaced by corporate
shenanigans and capitalist greed.

Just like "hacker" in "hacker news".

~~~
bawana
+1. I just watched Eric Weinstein on Lex Fridman's podcast. He is angry about
how students have been emasculated by the establishment. That the death of
Aaron Schwartz was a tragedy and the students should 'rise up and take back'
MIT. Yet he himself has a net worth over 100mill and is doing nothing about
it.He promises betterment through revolution like Batista and Castro, yet he
himself is busy amassing wealth. Why does he think youth will waste itself on
anything else except the pursuit of the dream that made him successful?
Internet has just become another tool for control because that's just what
humans do - make tools out of anything including their fellow humans.

~~~
pjc50
This guy?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein)

I can't understand why anyone would even begin to take calls for revolution
from someone like that seriously, when he's so obviously a grifter.

~~~
germinalphrase
Why so obviously a grifter?

