Comment by keiferski
7 hours ago
I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal.
Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sense/Net.
Which is really the tragedy of it all: we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.
> we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.
Sure we are. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Here's a nighttime walk through Shenzhen.[1] Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings. Robots on the streets. Drones in the sky. Cameras everywhere. Night markets where you can buy both food and electronics. Self-driving cars. Electric buses and taxis. Women in colorful outfits on motorcycles.
Shenzhen looks more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077, the game.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiXpYbCZyjs
That's an interesting video. If the skyscrapers were flickering just a little faster, the sky would be the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.
(For those who did not get it, it’s the first line of Neuromancer).
That's just a normal night. For special events, the skyscraper lighting is much more dynamic.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNkcKiD2Ow
it just looks like a normal city. If we're declaring things cyberpunk based on LED displays Las Vegas probably wins but China is a horrifying totalitarian dictatorship with a market economy and by that measure sure, guess they beat us to the dystopia! go communism! go China! weeeeee
> cyberpunk
> horrifying totalitarian dictatorship with a market economy
These things are totally compatible, and usually basically synonymous.
Well maybe there's something to be said about that when comparing against the decaying and crumbling corrupt US
I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it. It’s like they expected God had made it so that America would be the leader in techno culture evolution. It would be endearing if it weren’t for their impotent rage response to enable fascism for their own ends.
Asian superpowers feature so heavily in the genre that it's a cliche. Also Ballard was British.
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> I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it.
Gibson's novels predicted Asian ascendency (insomuch as you can have ascendency in a dystopia). Through a quirk of the time period in which they were written they happened to present it as emanating from Japan rather than China.
J.G. Ballard was not an American. He grew up in China and spent most of his life in the UK. He has a very subtle British sensibility to a lot of his work.
I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?
On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.
The AIs are supposed to be very expensive, but it's left to the reader to figure out why—maybe it wouldn't work out that way in real life, but if the reader can't explore every part of the economic and technological space of the world (they can't), they become immersed within it, and allow the subconscious to come up with reasons for why such technologies exist in the story.
What's interesting in sci-fi at the time is that, because software wasn't fully solidified as a concept (nowhere near, in the case of Neuromancer) everything acts like a tool. What you buy stays just as it is, until it becomes obsolete. There's something quite appealing in that completeness. As you say, software is jarring in a way firmware isn't, and it lets developers be lazy.
As for toilets:
> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer
> The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use.
And this is how it should be. Johnny Mnemonic's 320GBs became the reality in mid 90' and mundane by 2005.
Agreed. My point is that there's the perception of the characters and corporations as having some meaningful/cool aesthetics in these stories and in the genre, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how they are different than what we have today. And that's part of what makes good stories timeless.
320GB progressed from amazing, to reality, to mundane, to trivial today, but it would take on different meaning if there was some breakthrough real-life research that indicated the human brain is, in total, say, only 325GB. Which is what Johnny Mnemonic is really about, even if the numbers and units used are dated.
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These companies do have an aesthetic, it's just not cool. Mike Merrill calls it "Corporate Memphis"; see https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.
I would disagree with that, I've seen people anchor their own identity to that of brands like Apple or Disney.
They may not be aesthetics you find cool, but clearly they appeal to a large number of others.
Anchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
This comment feels like it's from the early 90's when people were being critical of bands for selling out.
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They might be then only ones. Cult of Mac, Disney Adults, etc. But they’ve aesthetics that resonate with a lot of people. Meta, Google, etc., for whatever reason, don’t.
Product/design-first vs. engineering-first orgs
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Apple is the only big tech company with a decent aesthetic tho.
I think the fact that these kinds of companies were portrayed as such in fiction kind of prevents them from adopting the cool aesthetic. Like they need something to separate them from being the exact image of an evil futuristic corporation that lives in our heads. Or else we might actually recognize what they are.
Agreed, our real-life corporations are still trying to convince themselves (by 'them' I mean employees) that they're the good guys and wrap everything in a layer of HR-speak' "We're helping connect the world! Yay!", " We're collaborating with the ministry of War to zero people, but only if they have a signed judicial order", etc.
Their fictional counterparts don't bother.
Building Better Worlds ®
I mean we've got Anthropic openly advertising that they may be engineering the end of the world, we have an AI that called itself "MechaHitler" after its founder did a couple of Sieg Heils at a Presidential inauguration, we've got a major company that named itself Palantir.
People are reaching pretty hard if they don't see what we're dealing with here.
What a fucking depressing timeline. We could have built such a beautiful world instead
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https://youtu.be/JJl5UWh-wA8?is=1oX24Nd45lHt99vZ
This video gives a decent explanation why fashion has gotten the way it is, particularly for men. The author ultimately traces it back to the French revolution.
I'm probably just sharing it though because of the line "Big brother is here and he looks like shiiit".
At least with Gibson, I think cyberpunk idolized actual punk culture. The coolness was found, brought, or arranged by these characters.
The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye.
The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the little noir vignettes where the poets and rebels infiltrated.
There was some coolness in the tech, though. The Ono-Sendai Cyberspace VII deck, the mirror shade digital glasses (cut Gibson some slack, it was the 1980s), artificial limbs finished in onyx or chrome.
Meanwhile in the real world we get Nvidia DGX Spark which has a front finished in beige carpeting, or Meta glasses which make you look like either a dork or a pervert.
These things were cool when coveted or adopted by the cool characters.
The tech devices were also used as markers of uncool rich people. Symbols of excess disposable income, rather than carefully invested aesthetics.
In the seedy areas, the implants and augmentations were depicted across an array of cool and uncool characters. Some character were meant to think they themselves were cool, while the narrator or the main characters saw them as part of the uncool backdrop. Try-too-hards, wannabes, etc.
There are attempts to make stylized "coolness" in tech. That's how you get the Cybertruck, or RGB lights everywhere in custom desktops. Be careful of what you wish for.
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That was before it was discovered that every single counterculture could be marketed to and commercialized.
The dystopia will be televised in Corporate Memphis.
They had to make it cool to make it palatable and not a slog for entertainment purposes. Without that it's just a depressing read of reality.
Most corporations are boring, but there absolutely are some cool ones, they often aren’t as public as the big consumer ones.
Arasaka types are rare, it’s mostly big blobs like DatAmerica.
Those aesthetics are only "cool" in the sense that stylized comic book / military sci-fi conceptions of tech are cool. Also '80s nostalgia, and satire. In reality, none of that could exist practically in the modern day. Real-world high-tech is either consumer-oriented family friendly or hopelessly enterprise beige and gray. LA NIMBYs are not going to let you build a corporate pyramid. The closest we have in reality is the Memphis Bass Pro Shop.
writing often romanticizes everything, reality feels stupid by comparison