5 ms·

This is a such a cyberpunk story. A malevolent Library of Babel.

WorldMaker 9y ago
My own thinking on this has twisted from cyberpunk to lovecraftian lately. The best analogy I've been able to make lately is the warnings in classic fairy tales that fairy places are dark and full of horrors, and it is easy to be trapped within them if you aren't careful. (I even wrote a short story in a couple of days just recently trying to capture some of my thoughts and concerns/fears in this space [1]. I don't have much in the way of answers, either, just existential dread that I hope may lead to answers eventually.) [1] http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorology/ http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorolo...
- vilhelm_s 9y ago
  Indeed! But then again, I think the genre boundary between cyberpunk and fairy tale was always permeable. In Count Zero, evolved AIs posses people like vodoo deities. In Serial Experiments Lain, dead people live on as ghosts in cyberspace. While Snow Crash plays it for laughs, the idea that Ancient Sumerian gods live on as latent patterns in our brains (ready to override and erase our consciousness if the right word is spoken) is pretty Lovecraftian too. Maybe one of the purest exponents of this "Lovecraft-via-cyberpunk" aesthetic is Nick Land; his early works are very influenced by 1980s cyberpunk science fiction, and (as far as I can make out from his rather opaque writing) his main thesis is that the combination of AI and Capitalism will evolve into an entity literally beyond human understanding, which will get rid of us all as it goes on to pursue its own inscrutable goals...
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Absolutely, did not mean to imply I wasn't standing on the shoulders of giants in that genre cross-over, more that the existential dread seems to get more dreadful today [0] than in early cyberpunk. In addition to examples you list, certainly Charles Stross' Laundry series is a particular influence for me here as well. (One book of which was so close to home I felt a need to only read it outside during daylight.) [0] ETA missing splice: as opposed to "punk"/DIY/rebellious/creatively-destructive. It's almost hard to imagine we've crossed some blurry line where early cyberpunk seems almost positively hopeful compared to reality.
  - gasbag 9y ago
    Your last sentence also sounds a lot like Economics 2.0 (and some other things) from Charles Stross's magnificent book Accelerando.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      That work is rumbling in the back of my head in every bitcoin discussion.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dogecoinbase 9y ago
  John Curran (ARIN CEO) read this post at a conference in the spring: http://astercrash.tumblr.com/post/157419046864/did-anyone-notice-how-quickly-the-internet-turned http://astercrash.tumblr.com/post/157419046864/did-anyone-no... Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  Read/watch Coraline by Neil Gaiman if this sort of thing tickles your fancy.
- timthelion 9y ago
  Just some irrelevant feedback. I was unable to read the text of the story without inverting screen colors. The contrast was too low and lines too narrow.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Thanks for the feedback; narrow lines should help the contrast issue in theory (less eye movement to read a paragraph), but I know there's a wide range of visual acuity, and I can't account for it all on my own. That said, I realize the current contrast level of the main body text is an uglier compromise than I would like, so I've filed an issue on my little CSS library to remind me: https://github.com/WorldMaker/lcars-moderne/issues/2 https://github.com/WorldMaker/lcars-moderne/issues/2 Also, I've tried to make sure that the Reader View in both Firefox and Edge works well with my blog. I'm still surprised Chrome has not enabled its Reader Mode by default like the other browsers.
United857 9y ago
Another good short story along these same lines that was on HN a while back: http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-man http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-man
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> The example above, from a channel called Bounce Patrol Kids, with almost two million subscribers, show this effect in action. It posts professionally produced videos, with dedicated human actors, at the rate of about one per week. This is basically lifted straight from The Diamond Age. Stephenson foresaw something weirdly like this, except it wasn't automated.

My own thinking on this has twisted from cyberpunk to lovecraftian lately. The best analogy I've been able to make lately is the warnings in classic fairy tales that fairy places are dark and full of horrors, and it is easy to be trapped within them if you aren't careful. (I even wrote a short story in a couple of days just recently trying to capture some of my thoughts and concerns/fears in this space [1]. I don't have much in the way of answers, either, just existential dread that I hope may lead to answers eventually.) [1] http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorology/ http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorolo...

vilhelm_s 9y ago
Indeed! But then again, I think the genre boundary between cyberpunk and fairy tale was always permeable. In Count Zero, evolved AIs posses people like vodoo deities. In Serial Experiments Lain, dead people live on as ghosts in cyberspace. While Snow Crash plays it for laughs, the idea that Ancient Sumerian gods live on as latent patterns in our brains (ready to override and erase our consciousness if the right word is spoken) is pretty Lovecraftian too. Maybe one of the purest exponents of this "Lovecraft-via-cyberpunk" aesthetic is Nick Land; his early works are very influenced by 1980s cyberpunk science fiction, and (as far as I can make out from his rather opaque writing) his main thesis is that the combination of AI and Capitalism will evolve into an entity literally beyond human understanding, which will get rid of us all as it goes on to pursue its own inscrutable goals...
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  Absolutely, did not mean to imply I wasn't standing on the shoulders of giants in that genre cross-over, more that the existential dread seems to get more dreadful today [0] than in early cyberpunk. In addition to examples you list, certainly Charles Stross' Laundry series is a particular influence for me here as well. (One book of which was so close to home I felt a need to only read it outside during daylight.) [0] ETA missing splice: as opposed to "punk"/DIY/rebellious/creatively-destructive. It's almost hard to imagine we've crossed some blurry line where early cyberpunk seems almost positively hopeful compared to reality.
- gasbag 9y ago
  Your last sentence also sounds a lot like Economics 2.0 (and some other things) from Charles Stross's magnificent book Accelerando.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    That work is rumbling in the back of my head in every bitcoin discussion.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dogecoinbase 9y ago
John Curran (ARIN CEO) read this post at a conference in the spring: http://astercrash.tumblr.com/post/157419046864/did-anyone-notice-how-quickly-the-internet-turned http://astercrash.tumblr.com/post/157419046864/did-anyone-no... Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.
wmeredith 9y ago
Read/watch Coraline by Neil Gaiman if this sort of thing tickles your fancy.
timthelion 9y ago
Just some irrelevant feedback. I was unable to read the text of the story without inverting screen colors. The contrast was too low and lines too narrow.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  Thanks for the feedback; narrow lines should help the contrast issue in theory (less eye movement to read a paragraph), but I know there's a wide range of visual acuity, and I can't account for it all on my own. That said, I realize the current contrast level of the main body text is an uglier compromise than I would like, so I've filed an issue on my little CSS library to remind me: https://github.com/WorldMaker/lcars-moderne/issues/2 https://github.com/WorldMaker/lcars-moderne/issues/2 Also, I've tried to make sure that the Reader View in both Firefox and Edge works well with my blog. I'm still surprised Chrome has not enabled its Reader Mode by default like the other browsers.

United857 9y ago

Another good short story along these same lines that was on HN a while back: http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-man http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-man

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> The example above, from a channel called Bounce Patrol Kids, with almost two million subscribers, show this effect in action. It posts professionally produced videos, with dedicated human actors, at the rate of about one per week. This is basically lifted straight from The Diamond Age. Stephenson foresaw something weirdly like this, except it wasn't automated.