

2010: Cyberpunk World - pietrofmaggi
http://herbsutter.com/2010/12/31/2010-cyberpunk-world/

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martythemaniak
As a huge Stephenson fan (specifically Snowcrash here) I often tell people how
unlike his world our world turned out to be.

In Snowcrash, the rapid pace of technological change has basically splintered
the world and caused the empowerment of men and small organizations and the
collapse of central governments. In the real world, governments learned how to
effectively use mass media to get their message across. From going to war in
Iraq, to going after wikileaks to building Great Walls, governments are doing
great, with a great future ahead of them.

~~~
jacoblyles
Nassim Taleb isn't a perfect prognosticator, but he is an interesting one. In
his latest interview with The Economist he predicts the downfall of the nation
state and the rise of the city state in the next 25 years. He is making an
argument from instability - nation states are large, inefficient enterprises
that have a habit of taking on unprofitable projects like wars. Also, he sees
national currencies like the Euro and the Dollar as too unstable to survive.

I apologize for the long link:

[http://downloads.economist.feedroom.com/podcast/t_assets/201...](http://downloads.economist.feedroom.com/podcast/t_assets/20101201/20101201_wi_taleb_v2_4R4R.mp3?_kip_ipx=1899310534-1292270256&site=economist&cid=8a2059e9ac993b05e749291542c9e65bda3af5bf&sid=aa1673b717ddf9ab1224978f57f5481f9389add3&pid=b259c6502b63364ec8e8ea81816d7d0ab9139b7c)

~~~
peterwwillis
I'm pretty young and uneducated (which means don't listen to anything I say),
but it seems to me that wars are profitable. Arms and heavy vehicle
manufacturers create jobs which stimulate our economy, and the foreign nations
and international banks that control our debt get to dig a little deeper in
our pockets. It sort of helps everyone but the enemy. After the war we get
more money by "winning" contracts to rebuild what we've blown up - but slower
and more inefficiently than is necessary, with lots of extra cash mysteriously
disappearing once it reaches foreign soil (the equivalent of a CEO bonus, but
instead for CIA and whoever else need a payday for ensuring the war goes off
without a hitch).

But I could be wrong.

(Also, what's the alternative to the Dollar and Euro? Micro-economies? Maybe
an economy built out of dealing with a massive number of differing currencies
and economies?)

~~~
jacoblyles
You're committing one of the oldest and most common Economic fallacies, the
"Broken Window Fallacy". Bastiat's "That which is seen and that which is not
seen"[1] or Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" would help clear up your
confusion, or just a good treatment of the Broken Window Fallacy[2].

[1]<http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html>

[2][http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-
fal...](http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp)

------
kiba
He forgot one thing: a cryptocurrency called bitcoin. A cypherpunk dream of
digital cash come true.

Of course, wired said, "just another cypherpunk fever dream destined for the
same dustbin as digital cash..."

<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/internet-war/>

They are...WRONG!

~~~
jodrellblank
Bitcoin? Call me when I don't have to forward ports through a firewall to
handle currency, and when I don't have to keep a local copy of every
transaction ever made by anyone on the whole system.

~~~
burgerbrain
Well if IPv4 runs out soon enough and we successfully jump to IPv6, port
forwarding in general has the potential to become a thing of the past.

That port forwarding is required isn't a bitcoin bug, it's a NAT bug.

~~~
endtime
>when I don't have to keep a local copy of every transaction ever made by
anyone on the whole system.

How about this part? That sounds like a pretty big flaw in the system.

~~~
kiba
You would need to correlate that information with other type of information to
be able to identify the user. As long as you take certain precaution, you
should be fine.

~~~
endtime
Well sure, but it sounds like it would require a lot of storage.

~~~
kiba
There are proposal that make it possible for nodes to not have to download all
that files.

However, it's ain't much of a problem as long as HD keep in pace with Moore's
Law.

~~~
endtime
Moore's Law doesn't apply to a single given machine...my hard drive isn't
magically doubling in size every X months. You see the problem?

------
nazgulnarsil
william gibson, not neal stephenson. whippersnapper.

~~~
Fargren
Actually, the OP's argumetn is then point Gibson has been making for some
years now: there future is here already.

~~~
stcredzero
_Charismatic cyberpersonalities operating principally on the ‘Net live as
permanent residents of no nation_

Bruce Sterling has gone out of his way to become one of these, minus the calls
for his arrest and other negative things. (His calls to digitize everything
you own that you possibly can. His and his wife's problems with no longer
having an actual address.)

------
motters
2010 was very cyberpunk. All that was missing was Wintermute.

~~~
w1ntermute
> All that was missing was Wintermute.

I'm here!

More seriously, the formation/actions of Anonymous remind me of the stand
alone complexes (more formally termed "second-order simulacra," in semiotics)
from Ghost in the Shell, one of the greatest cyberpunk anime series out there.
It's astonishing that Shiro Masamune was able to predict this occurence as a
result of the growth of the internet, and even more astonishing that it
happened ~20 years before he predicted, prior to the existence of cyberbrains
or synthetic "ghosts."

~~~
sp332
4chan was the perfect environment for something like Anonymous to occur. With
no (official) archive, individual posts don't survive long. But you can get
"ripples" of comments to persist for a while by a) re-posting it incessantly
or b) creating an idea that other people want to repeat (basically a meme).
Over time, the surviving memes created a sort of "standing wave" or self-
replicating system out of channers' brains.

I guess what I'm saying is, Anonymous is the cumulative effect of these strong
memes on human brains. The Ghost in the Shell is on a substrate of part-
internet, part-human.

