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The Sprawl trilogy and its fashion/world is formed a lot by politics. Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated critique of Reaganomics and the pro

The Sprawl trilogy and its fashion/world is formed a lot by politics. Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated critique of Reaganomics and the problems it exasperated (or, at the very least, failed to address). The rampant drug abuse, sovereign corporations, the ever increasing gap of poverty and technology -- I think a lot of derivative media adopts these elements to look cool (without actually understanding their context or meaning).

ethbr0 4y ago
I'd imagine looking back, a lot of Neuromancer and pre-ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written in an information-scarce world. Versus the information-excess world we now live in. In the former, I remember concepts being so much bigger and more concrete. E.g. the "War on Drugs" or "Reaganomics". These were things that existed because powerful people said they did. And there was debating, but ideas were still clearly defined. So even though CP authors were imagining our future, it was a pretty fundamental shift to go from books-at-libraries to everything-anywhere-all-of-the-time. Now, every concept seems to have much fuzzier conceptual edges. Because there are a million opinions about it circulating publicly and loudly.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "I'd imagine looking back, a lot of Neuromancer and pre-ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written in an information-scarce world." There's just as much scarcity of valuable information today... it's just that now it's buried under a mountain of garbage which is more accessible than ever before.
  - rektide 4y ago
    That information glut, if it does so exist, leads more towards dis-belief imo & skepticism, especially in the main. Yeah there's a lot of meme-viruses, num shrubs, other ways to go wrong or really wrong. Radicalization happens. Before we didnt used to be connected enough to see this shit, and the asymetric nature of the loud & shitty versus the peaceful/coherent/quiet/skeptical mainstream means the delusional & extremists have outsized visibility. The disbelief keeps growing. We dont need Adbusters as much because the thin transparency of the world, of being sold garbage mounds of low-grade content is well known, we understand how shallow things are. And disbelief keeps rising. In contrast to the higher trust, respected mainstream media, the limited availability of information which came before. Which gel'ed the world into place, which created shared beliefs & allowed agendas to be driven. Where-as now the all-defector anti-agenda is the default mode for many.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      I'd never thought about info virality (aka memeticness) that way, but it's a good perspective about the phase change that seemed to happen between past and present. I.e. That info memes have some inherent max to their virality, which has stayed constant throughout time. But the cost of transporting information from one person to another has plummeted (measured by time, money, and pretty much every conceivable metric). Consequently, things that would not have spread virally in previous eras are now easily able to do so, and do. It's really the ease of transport that's enabled this, not any fundamental shift in the info memes themselves. But I'm sure the same thought occurred to everyone when newspapers and radio were popularized as well.
brimble 4y ago
> Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated critique of Reaganomics The (now-)standard Cyberpunk settings strikes me as, in part, asking "what would it really look like if David Friedman's ridiculous capitalism fan-fic happened?" His The Machinery of Freedom was published in '73, and was a big part of the Reagan/80s zeitgeist.

ethbr0 4y ago

I'd imagine looking back, a lot of Neuromancer and pre-ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written in an information-scarce world. Versus the information-excess world we now live in. In the former, I remember concepts being so much bigger and more concrete. E.g. the "War on Drugs" or "Reaganomics". These were things that existed because powerful people said they did. And there was debating, but ideas were still clearly defined. So even though CP authors were imagining our future, it was a pretty fundamental shift to go from books-at-libraries to everything-anywhere-all-of-the-time. Now, every concept seems to have much fuzzier conceptual edges. Because there are a million opinions about it circulating publicly and loudly.

pmoriarty 4y ago
"I'd imagine looking back, a lot of Neuromancer and pre-ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written in an information-scarce world." There's just as much scarcity of valuable information today... it's just that now it's buried under a mountain of garbage which is more accessible than ever before.
- rektide 4y ago
  That information glut, if it does so exist, leads more towards dis-belief imo & skepticism, especially in the main. Yeah there's a lot of meme-viruses, num shrubs, other ways to go wrong or really wrong. Radicalization happens. Before we didnt used to be connected enough to see this shit, and the asymetric nature of the loud & shitty versus the peaceful/coherent/quiet/skeptical mainstream means the delusional & extremists have outsized visibility. The disbelief keeps growing. We dont need Adbusters as much because the thin transparency of the world, of being sold garbage mounds of low-grade content is well known, we understand how shallow things are. And disbelief keeps rising. In contrast to the higher trust, respected mainstream media, the limited availability of information which came before. Which gel'ed the world into place, which created shared beliefs & allowed agendas to be driven. Where-as now the all-defector anti-agenda is the default mode for many.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    I'd never thought about info virality (aka memeticness) that way, but it's a good perspective about the phase change that seemed to happen between past and present. I.e. That info memes have some inherent max to their virality, which has stayed constant throughout time. But the cost of transporting information from one person to another has plummeted (measured by time, money, and pretty much every conceivable metric). Consequently, things that would not have spread virally in previous eras are now easily able to do so, and do. It's really the ease of transport that's enabled this, not any fundamental shift in the info memes themselves. But I'm sure the same thought occurred to everyone when newspapers and radio were popularized as well.

brimble 4y ago

> Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated critique of Reaganomics The (now-)standard Cyberpunk settings strikes me as, in part, asking "what would it really look like if David Friedman's ridiculous capitalism fan-fic happened?" His The Machinery of Freedom was published in '73, and was a big part of the Reagan/80s zeitgeist.