Nice. Two really interesting people. A new friend of mine directed the movie "Timothy Leary's Dead", which coincidentally I bought this morning before I saw this HN link. My Dad's girlfriend also knew Leary and I plan on watching this movie with her and my Dad.
Also, I had forgotten about Mondo 2000 - nice blast from the past.
Also part 2: Gibson, if you ignore a few classic writers like James Joyce, is my favorite author. I may be really wrong, but I expect that the social structures in his cyber punk books (like the Sprawl, Corporate Ecologies, etc.) may actually be our future.
It would seem, in a post-COVID 2022, writing from cash-is-gone Shenzhen, the welcome mat of the PRD-sprawl with news today of Canada's anti-protest crackdowns, Korean epidemia, and Chinese naval lasers off the Australian coast, that Gibson understated the human appetite for autocracy and big governance and overstated the facility of megacorps to succeed from nation states as the dominant social architects. Having worked in Samsung HQ, corporate dystopias melded with neo-Confucian or other East Asian culture-derived hierarchies are very much real. Only the AIs and some smart materials are yet to come. Synth-food is on the mark and flying robotics is technically here but not yet accepted by regulators. As someone I met from a major Chinese tech company yesterday said, as he confided corporate think-tank strategic future visions of a phone-free 5G future where smart surfaces like taxi windows beamed real time computing from the privacy-unobtainable corporate cloud and autonomous facial identification precluded antiquated rituals of QR-code based mobile payment, nobody cares about privacy and convenience is king. Gibsonian dystopia is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Are there any good studies of how well particular sci-fi writers predicted the future and what processes they used to attempt it. I say this
a) As I remember an article ranking John Bruner as one of the best, but can't remember where I read it, though a web search revealed this article [1] listing some of his significant successes in guessing right (though he had some misses as well).
b) It lists some of the techniques he tried to do this, 3 years reading up on a variety of topics, visited various places and did some 'parallel thought exercises'?
Is there anything similar for any other sci-fi writers or series as it reminds me of the psychohistory idea that popped up recently in Asimov's Foundation TV series which is a rabbit-hole in itself [2].
I’ve heard much more cyberpunk people than I’ll ever be argue it’s the other way around. That WG didn’t predict the future but the futures comes to be as there’s a generation of people really kinda thinking it makes sense and living it. I guess we’ll find out.
Mondo2000 - how decadence, ego and extreme parties led us to forget the fear of totalitarian uses of technology, while said uses became the Palantir darling of Peter Thiel's vast money club of clubs.
source: organizing committee for pre-Mondo, did not get busted in that raid, you know which one I mean
I am grateful for this interesting thread -- I did write that knee-jerk bit above, out of some amount of anguish, I also had fun party dreams of the future at that time. The original artwork in pre-Mondo (not naming it here) was some of the best I had seen in print, and I have seen a lot of print. "stay curious" and I will try too..
it was a large format print art book called "High Frontiers" maybe with Magazine. Think Heavy Metal Magazine, fewer pages, less cohesion.. this was certainly before Wired Magazine 1.0 and that graphics barrage.. better taste, more counterculture flavor in the big grand one, IMO
Different time. It wasn’t a totalitarian zeitgeist. The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. The art and music was darker and edgier on the surface but the view of the future was optimistic.
Today you have authoritarian populist nationalism on the right and authoritarian technocracy on the left. The mood is pessimistic and everyone is arguing about who should be forced to think or do what. The music is trite and superficially happy and everyone is seething with hate.
Machines are tools. Technology follows the zeitgeist. Everything is being bent toward totalitarianism and surveillance because that is what we are doing with it.
totalitarianism and authoritarianism should not be used interchangeably, they're opposites. Totalitarianism is mass mobilization and uninhibited violence, think Cultural Revolution, authoritarianism is, to quote Gibson given that we're in a thread about him, Singapore's 'Disneyland with the death penalty'. Radical depolitization.
People are more apathetic than hateful (today's 'riots' hardly deserve the label by historical standards) and there is more of an indifference than a pessimism. You're not told what to think (or compelled to action), but rather told what not to say (or how not to act), and otherwise left alone.
>The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe.
Looking back on it, it's hard to decipher. I explained to my son that once, a movie usher asked me to put out my cigarette at a midnight movie. This while the rest of the patrons were smoking pot, which was so commonplace at midnight movies that the authorities just ignored it. Those decades were a strange battleground between intellectual freedom (and hedonism) jousting with the establishment. This decade, I don't feel that promise of wholly unbridled intellectual freedom, and the excitement it caused. I suppose the establishment won.
> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe.
From 1993 on, Louis Rossetto heavily pushed the idea in Wired magazine that Silicon Valley was heavily libertarian[1]. I had not been to the Bay much at the time and actually believed this was true of the Valley.
> authoritarian technocracy on the left
Like who, the Kellogg's workers who were on strike? The GM strike in Mexico? Even the left in what remains of non-gentrified Oakland is different than the bubble of upper middle class Bay FAANG liberals.
[1] By libertarian I mean libertarian in the American sense, which nowadays is right-libertarian.
complicit with the "surveillance capitalism" model of profiling and tracking every adult with disposable income, and then some. That is in itself, enough to convict the American political class, to my mind. As said more than forty years ago in America and more true than ever, the "two party" system is not really.
You’re describing neoliberalism, not the liberals or the left. Surveillance capitalism in the tech sector arose with the rise of FAANG, which depends on monetizing personal data for its models. The American political class is guilty of not regulating this industry, which came about as a result of the influence of the libertarian right, not the left. While entirely fictional, Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle" is an interesting overview of the surveillance zeitgeist and philosophy from a centrist POV. I wouldn’t really recommend the film as it’s terrible, but the book illustrates how every good tech idea is a slippery slope or double-edged sword. Every idea that has the potential to make us more free, also has the risk of enslaving us. The reason the tech sector requires regulation in this arena is because they aren’t willing to do it themselves as it impacts their profits. There’s nobody in DC looking out for the consumer or interested in protecting personal data, and that’s the most troubling part of the problem. Our representatives aren’t there to protect us, they are there to protect the donor class.
> The American political class is guilty of not regulating this industry, which came about as a result of the influence of the libertarian right, not the left.
How do you interpret this belief specifically with regards to the genesis of Facebook and Google and Apple, the biggest direct collectors of end-user data in the industry?
Are you talking about the military history of the development of SV, or the sources of initial capital for these ventures?
Who involved with the early stages of Google, Apple, or Facebook was a leftist? (I can't name any - no, Jobs's time as a hippy doesn't make him a leftist.)
Who was a libertarian? (I can name several. And they're mostly still around one way or another.)
IMO, any leftist influence in SV was killed (or carefully cordoned for marketing purposes) early in the first dot-com boom.
I was there and the political lense you are using, appears to be a retrofit, not real influences. The real influences are too many to list, no one can, but small companies routinely delivered products while larger, funded, probably conservative, companies were left in the dust, repeatedly. Jobs was not left or right exactly, he was 26 years old and they shipped products while giant companies had meetings. The lubricant for this small company action was certainly cash money, but the parts were sophisticated and non-trivial electronics with a lot of physics math involved, and inventory problems to deliver.
Political-lens descriptions of early Silicon Valley are telling only one corner of a large and active situation, IMO.
> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe.
Huh? The 80's were all Ronald Reagan. The 90's were Bill and Hillary Clinton sparking the rise of Newt Gingrich and the GOP we have today. Yes, Bill was a Dem, but he was very much not a lefty. He got stuff done (the notorious Crime bill) done because he was right of center.
Please explain what you mean. I'm guessing I don't get it from the words you used.
You can find counterexamples, but the big difference is how people reacted. Almost everyone thought Waco was unjust and excessive. Today many people (especially on the left) would say they had it coming. Meanwhile the right now openly talks about the need to regulate business more and Trump’s whole message was more about cracking down on others than freedom for his base.
Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors. Today nobody cares. The right would never have tolerated January 6th. Now half of them think maybe democracy is a bad idea anyway.
If you’d released an expose back then of Facebook and its shadow profiles, people would have almost universally freaked out and boycotted Facebook. Today nobody cares.
Nobody would have gone for locked down devices and app stores then. Look up the reaction to Microsoft’s original “trusted computing” initiative and contrast it with today’s acceptance of walled gardens. Nobody cares.
Back then we built personal computers with the goal of serving the user. Now the shift is toward thin clients to get people into cloud silos to… uhh… serve the user in a different sense… more like that old “to serve man” Twilight Zone episode.
The biggest difference I see today is general public acceptance of technocracy, surveillance, and authoritarianism.
I think the apathy is because we've been bombarded with evil for so many years, and the rise of the quiet minority (30+%), who have very different values than what we saw every day on TV and in newspapers. Those people previously had little to no voice, but because of Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, etc, etc, they were able to band together and elect a criminal and start to take control of local and state elections, to remake the progressive world that we all thought we lived in.
Btw, even back 20 years I was ringing the alarm bells of authoritarianism and surveillance, to my friends (most of whom are way smarter than I am) and not a single one of them gave any shits. I really don't understand it.
To me, the biggest difference is that people reacted as individuals or as two individuals interacting.
No one would send out a group email to talk about Bill Clinton and form some kind of group consensus opinion. I think the start of this though was conservative talk radio and the in-group that formed in relation to the "liberal" out-group it promoted. Before that people were individuals deciding their personal stance on an issue to issue basis.
There really should be no surprise that once 99% of interaction is in the context of a groups that everything becomes dominated by in-group and out-groups.
The conservative use of the pejorative "liberal" to form an out-group though was just so poisonous and set a process in motion that once started can't really be stopped. Then once social networks come about it was basically over for the individual.
Millions of individuals are impossible to control but groups no so much. So here we are and I don't see any reason for optimism other than to enjoy your life now.
The future is more and more suspicion and surveillance of the individual by the group.
this is interesting and I agree with some of it, however, please "Nobody cares." is more drama than fact. I care and so do you. Saying its opposite is dramatic, but maybe not constructive. tough days to be optimistic,these days, I agree with that. still making things here though!
> Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors.
Back then, truckers wouldn't have been suspicious of a basic public health program. Reagan & Clinton (and similar conservative-to-third-way politics in other countries) did a fine job putting a wedge between liberals and labor. That the allegiances have changed doesn't necessarily mean any part of the political program has.
(Waco is also not as clear-cut as you make it; it was, let's say, bipartisanly popular at the time, then equally unpopular 5 years later which seems to be what you remember, and today I don't think anyone is thinking much about it at all.)
I am betting that meant that the tech scene had a stronger libertarian vibe then (a la John Perry Barlow, say). Of course, some critics (I'm thinking of Curtis' Hypernormalization[1]) would say that was more like a retreat from reality.
Thanks for posting this. I had no idea that Mondo 2000 was all online now. I think about that publication often and now I can check my memories.
I was always fascinated reading about nootropics and smart drugs but never had the opportunity to give any a try. Drinking a cup of coffee is the closest I've been to that scene. It would be interesting to talk to some people who were deep into that 30 years ago and see what they think about it now.
Ah, fond memories of reading Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing, and there was also 2600 and a few smaller ones, and BBSs made you feel like an early resident of the future sprawl. I'll just link here to a cool comic that sometimes pops up on HN, and is pretty good regarding the whole vibe of the period:
I remember reading this in a class a few years later where we were studying Neuromancer in like gr. 12 English (alternative school), and if there's something I feel like I haven't seen since the 90s, it's a couple of guys talking about fiction. The books and authors they talk about were pillars of teenage aspiring intellectuals' ontology of the world. Books at the time were these rarefied pleasures, where they weren't cheap, they took a lot of time, and you never knew whether you would meet someone who would have read it too, but it really mattered when you did, because it was like having grown up together in a way, or being from the same place. Anyway, even in the world of infinite podcasts, that conversation transscript between those two guys stands the test of time as amazing.
I mean, yeah, OK, obviously things have gone off the rails in a lot of ways. And a lot of our expectations didn't work out the way we expected.
The question is, is this situation recoverable? Maybe the sentence above should end with the word "yet" as in
"And a lot of our expectations didn't work out the way we expected, yet".
We don't have to lean into defeatism and give up. Maybe it's just time to step back, think really hard and long, do some strategizing, and figure out a way to get the train back on the rails?
True, if you interpret "we" as "the community of people on the Internet" (who in the early days were mostly hackers, academics, and technologists of various sorts), then that interpretation is no longer valid. Now "The Internet" is roughly synonymous with "everybody".
But the group of people that made up the "old we" (to the extent that such a thing ever existed) still exists. That's the "we" I'm referring to now. So the question, to my mind, is whether or not there is still a distinct "we" who had grand visions of what the Internet and technology could do for society (in a good way) and whether there are still actions we could take to encourage development in a positive direction.
I think the answer is "yes", but that may just be wishful thinking. But I try to be an optimist.
Maybe you don't have a "we", but there are hundreds of groups of hackers collecting on various Discord servers who are just as invested in exploring the potentials of the future of technology as anyone from last century, and there are likely far more of them now than at any previous point in time.
Hehe, I'm old enough to have read the sprawl trilogy in my youth, good read indeed. I also remember seeing Gibson interviewed in pretty much every single paper and magazine out there in the begining of the Internet era because of he's writing regarding Cyberspace. Internet went bigger than expected but VR did take a lot more time than I initially expected. The start of a very interesting non the least! :-)
On a semi-related note: I was watching some movie or TV show recently, and there's a scene that goes approximately like this:
Character A: "something, something, something, Doors of Perception."
Character B: "Okay, Timothy Leary."
Character A: "Huxley."
Character B: "What?"
Character A: "Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, not Timothy Leary."
The thing is, I can't remember now what that was from and it's bugging the shit out of me. Any chance anybody here is familiar with the work in question and could tell me what it was?
The funny thing is, while I have seen that, it was a long time ago (right after Bandersnatch came out). But I have the nagging notion that I saw this recently.
I suppose either somebody else riffed on that scene, OR (perhaps more likely) something I was doing led me to go back and watch a brief clip from Bandersnatch on Youtube or something, and it was in fact that very scene. Funny that I can't recall the details now though. I just recall the "OK Timothy Leary" and "it was Huxley, not Leary" thing. Weird.
Edit: Aaaah... maybe what I'm remembering is this relatively recent HN thread which actually mentioned that scene.
Also, I had forgotten about Mondo 2000 - nice blast from the past.
Also part 2: Gibson, if you ignore a few classic writers like James Joyce, is my favorite author. I may be really wrong, but I expect that the social structures in his cyber punk books (like the Sprawl, Corporate Ecologies, etc.) may actually be our future.