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New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
- phreeza 2mo agoI agree, it is easy to miss just because we get used to things quickly. I remember this thought hitting me vividly when I saw this picture during COVID https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MUBajBy-350E5JAjtntEhAYzWVQ=/900x617/media/img/photo/2020/03/coronavirus-spraying-tk/s03_1206499227/original.jpg https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MUBajBy-350E5JAjtntEhAYz...
- lofaszvanitt 2mo agoIt's more like a deliberate, manufactured future by the bigdiks that slowly takes place in certain countries.
- rbanffy 2mo agoThe unevenly distributed future is a William Gibson thing. A couple months back I had at a Chinese place in the western parts of Dublin (Ireland) and we could see the operating base of the Mana food delivery drones. Ireland was never known to get early issues of whatever the current dystopian future is being distributed, so it was an interesting sight - drones autonomously locating landing platforms and waiting to be loaded, and then launching to their next delivery.
- lofaszvanitt 2mo agoNah, I wasn't talking about WG and his quote.
- newsclues 2mo agoYes, the diversity of Gibson is amazing “in an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”
- Der_Einzige 2mo agoThe only reason I know who J.G. Ballard is is because of Jean Baudrillard. I'm convinced it was the similarity of their names which convinced Jean to read J.G's work.
- tolugenius 2mo agoWhere would you recommend I start with J.G.? I got into Baudrillard and have been meaning to go further down the train of thought.
- languagehacker 2mo agoCrash, Concrete Island, High Rise
- JKCalhoun 2mo ago"Crash" I know of by reputation. I can't see the dystopian music of John Foxx's Ultravox! (or Gary Numan for that matter) without seeing it through the Ballard/Crash Zeitgeist of the "New Romantics". (Although I see now that "Crash" was published first in 1973—wow.)
- compass_copium 2mo agoSuper Cannes should be a perfect place to start for anyone reading this site.
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- atombender 2mo agoDepends on what you're after. Ballard had several modes in which he wrote. The early works were generally overtly sci-fi, but mostly earthbound, fitting into the British New Wave of the 1960s, alongside John Brunner. The Drowning World and The Crystal World are both fantastic and unusual for the genre. The short stories are often excellent, and in my opinion some of his most original work is in this period. The major transition came with The Atrocity Exhibition, a "cut up" novel that was more Cronenberg/Borroughs/Lynch than what came before, and magnified themes that had been emerging in his short stories. Alienation, pop culture fetishism, clinical descriptions of injuries, war (the book was originally called Love and Napalm), the horror lurking under placid suburban utopia. Crash, High-Rise etc. followed in that vein. Crash is probably the best from this period. He wrote two autobiographical mainstream novels: Empire of the Sun is the famous one. The late 90s/2000s novels like Super-Cannes are all rethreads of earlier stuff; the Freudian pop-psych view that we are basically animals denied the outlet of violence got a bit tired at this point. They're really well written, but I felt Ballard had lost his edge and didn't have anything insightful to add. His last novel is quite average. So: The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, maybe The Crystal World or the collected short stories.
- api 2mo agoAnother thing they got right was the merger of governments, large corporations, finance, intelligence agencies, and globalized organized crime into one big sprawling mass of Machiavellian nihilists scheming for power. None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play. Gibson in particular nails this, especially in his original Sprawl trilogy. This sprawling mass is what he calls "biz." It's "just biz." I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable. Any kind of principle, rule of law, or sense of national or cultural identity requires that coherence. Without it the system dissolves into this random churning stew of scheming, money, and power. On a personal level it means you have to find these things in your personal life and the family and community you build around you, and you should not look for or expect these things from larger scale social structures. They can't deliver them, and the reasons might not just be "corruption" or "people are assholes." They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate. Gibson depicts this too. His world of the Sprawl was bleak but there were pockets of people who had created what amounted to intentional communities within it. I'm thinking of the Afro-American-futurist arcologies in Count Zero or the orbital subcultures like the Rastafarians. Some of the subculture around the "console cowboys" also counts. EDIT: Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data, Enterprise's AI, droids in Star Wars) or malevolent (Colossus, Skynet, Dune's prehistory).
- giraffe_lady 2mo agoSprawl is where he originally started exploring these ideas but Jackpot is where he really focused deep into them and it's even more prescient. It's also bleaker, he has clearly recalibrated his estimate of how much power and control these new entities will have and what they will choose to do with it. Unfortunately I think it's a better representation of the path we're on.
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- keiferski 2mo agoI 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.
- micromacrofoot 2mo agowriting often romanticizes everything, reality feels stupid by comparison
- xnorswap 2mo agoI 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.
- devin 2mo agoAnchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
- zer00eyz 2mo agoThis comment feels like it's from the early 90's when people were being critical of bands for selling out.
- BaseBaal 2mo agoReminds me of Tool's reaction to that trend, "Hooker with a Penis" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooker_with_a_Penis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooker_with_a_Penis
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- newsclues 2mo agoDystopian fiction was supposed to be a manual but a warning that was ignored.
- thataccount 2mo agoI'm not sure it was ignored, so much as people are apathetic.
- rightbyte 2mo agoEven worse it gave the wrong people ideas. Some sort of Poe's law spin off.
- krapp 2mo agoI disagree. Gibson's dystopias are too competent, too well organized, too serious. I feel like we're headed somewhere between the satire of Neal Stephenson and the lunatic delirium of Philip K. Dick.
- hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago100% I know that "Idiocracy" gets thrown around all the time, but the reason I think it does is that they do have advanced tech but at the same time everyone is a blathering idiot. That's what gets me about our present reality - on one hand we supposedly have all the world's information at our fingertips, but the absolute dumbest, most bullshit theories get real traction and cause real damage. When they had the UFC fight on the White House lawn I thought it couldn't be a better example of life imitating art.
- pixelready 2mo agoI think a lot of this is the cultural force of the US being the gravitational center of world politics and finance for several decades. It’s always had a strong anti-intellectual faction, and now as we enter it’s “decaying Roman Empire” phase, it will behave increasingly erratically as it’s elite strip it for parts and the citizenry watch in shock. As China rises to become the new gravitational center, it will be interesting to see how they reshape things in their image. On the one hand, they seem to be more engineering-brained than lawyer-brained, which bodes well (might be a more viable path to cyberpunk). But just as the west has been haunted by its history of white supremacy, China will be haunted by its history of Han supremacy, so I am not holding my breath that we net out to some sort of multi-cultural utopia.
- hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago> As China rises to become the new gravitational center I don't think you can just state something like that as some sort of axiom without providing any rationale. Obviously China has become much more powerful and important over the past 4 decades, but I highly doubt they will be the new "gravitational center", for two primary reasons. First, their demographics are horrible - their population peaked 5 years ago and will continue to decline, meaning they will need to look inward to dedicate more resources to supporting their aging population. While fertility rates are well below replacement in nearly all of the developed world, the extreme ethnic homogeneity and near complete inability to assimilate immigrants long term make East Asia's demographics much more problematic. Second, nobody wants a conformist autocratic society to be the "center of gravity" of the world. For decades following WWII, the US, despite all of its problems, really was looked up to as a beneficial force by many (yes, again, I know we did some extremely shitty things during the Cold War, but just looking at surveys of different countries' views of the US it was overwhelmingly positive in the Western world). Whereas today, despite China being essentially "the world's workshop", basically all of their trading partners look at them with suspicion and reticence. I think we're looking at a near and mid-term future where there is basically no (or a crumbling) center of gravity. And this is basically what existed in the areas of the former Western Roman Empire for centuries after its collapse until the rise of Charlemagne, so I think your comparison to "decaying Roman Empire" phase is apropos.
- thataccount 2mo agoThere is a fine line between science fiction informing reality, and straight up delusion. We are living in delusional times—like a fever dream. Sooner or later, the patient either heals or dies.
- teddyh 2mo agoSomething recently occured to me. The plot of the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain (the less-successful followup to the more famous 1965 The Ipcress File and 1966 Funeral in Berlin, all starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer), while I though the movie plot kind of stupid when I first saw it years ago, the plot is today actually completely plausible, and it is odd that no modern James Bond or Impossible Mission-style movie has done it.
- metalman 2mo agothe future is here, it's just not evenly distrubuted conversly, there is no human technology that isn't still bieng practiced in it's original form, ie: there are still people knapping stone tools that learned it from there parents and grandparents going on strait back to the first members of our "species" who learned it from there hybrid parents, in an unbroken chain, which is directly connected to ALL modern technology, in that early metal working was done with stone tools, as metal was far to precious for mundane or general use, and still at this moment ALL technolgy is powered by fire, wheels and levers at it's base and is instantly understandable and intuitive in it's use, but as others are pointing out, that matters little in relation to the setting and the style of our gadjets and tools, which as some others point out, may be impossible to understand from a certain asthetic back ground or as I am always happy to find out that something is in fact a WHOLE THING which a bunch of people are realy realy into, or even better when someone has a THING thats just for them. all fine by me.
- GolfPopper 2mo agoOr, as the quote attributed to the late Paul Harvey goes, "Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
- bitwize 2mo agoIt's telling that The Ghost in the Shell, the 2026 adaptation, is still set in 2029-2030.
- lokimedes 2mo agoWe get the future that sells the most novels?
- Alephinitesimal 2mo agoOld dystopias were too neat. Even the evil systems had a plan. Reality is messier and more absurd. Maybe aliens are the only thing left that's still safely fictional.
- hypfer 2mo agoAaah don't jinx it aaaaah
- Alephinitesimal 2mo agoMaybe they'll be cute though. Like Grogu.
- Tangurena2 2mo agoI'm cheering for the San Ti. They can't be worse than what we currently have.
- Alephinitesimal 2mo agoAt least San Ti are transparent about what they're thinking.
- speed_spread 2mo agoI liked the aliens in District 9. It was a really messy and rich universe.
- 0ckpuppet 2mo agoCommanding Heights by Yergin & Stanislaw
- eithed 2mo agoI love that Gibsons cyberpunk is "realistic" and mundane (at this point): a girl replaces a virtual singer (Mona Lisa Overdrive), another girl steals glasses containing plans for urban redevelopment (Virtual Light), virtual world is as inhabited as real one and you only need helmet to access it (Pattern Recognition). We already are living with these stories and dystopia is already here, to a degree.
- svachalek 2mo agoLife certainly feels like the "Troubles" of The Peripheral have started.
- commieneko 2mo agoGibson had a hell of a time getting the second book, _Agency_, out the door because the real world kept leap frogging him. I fear we may never get _The Jackpot_ because we'll get Jackpotted for real before he can finish it.
- palmotea 2mo agoAnd some idiots actually want to live in a cyberpunk dystopia (some dude literally said to me one he would "do anything he could to bring it about"), because they were so enamored with the tech the dystopia part flew over their heads.
- o-mo-ka-saaaay 2mo agoWhy would someone who has never experienced systemic oppression fear systemic oppression? Techbros and techbrowannabes live in a magnitude-10 reality distortion field.
- folkrav 2mo agoBecause anyone rational with very minimal education on history knows how little separates a free society from systemic oppression. I do realize "rational" and "tech bro" doesn't jive too well.
- tancop 2mo agoMost of them just want neon lights, dense and chaotic cities, space stations, advanced VR, robots and superpowered implants. None of that requires a corporate dystopia, and I think they would make our lives better. Then you have the sociopaths who see Night City as a model for a perfect world. They see themselves as someone who can rise to the top quick and become a benevolent dictator ruling the equivalent of a country with none of the inconvenience that comes from being accountable to the people. Someone who can make all the right decisions to maximize shareholder value. They don't care that it ruins other peoples lives or that it doesn't even benefit them personally because there's only so much you can spend in a lifetime. Life for them is like a video game where the goal is to have more money and power than everyone else. Capital is both the means and the end in a loop that chases fake growth. Which is exactly how corpos in cyberpunk stories think. And the real-life executives in SV boardrooms.
- throw310822 2mo ago"The future should look like the future" said someone, before putting on the market a steel-armored SUV that looks like it came from a 1980s dystopian nightmare.
- avereveard 2mo agoDon't forget also Screamers is happening
- maxglute 2mo agoTotally lame without the megastructures.
- fierycatnet 2mo agoThe Bull's Hour by Ivan Yefremov comes to mind and its closer to reality.
- 0xB0D 2mo agoPaper clippings Mmm, delicious
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoI was young, and needed the money. A week-long contract in San Francisco, to do some contract work. Instead of a vacation. Well, so I flew to the Embarcadero center, some late fall. The task was to work on some audio code, and maybe networking, for a popular multiplayer cyber- tank battle game. It was a great gig. I onboarded with another dev, who sat with me for the first 30 minutes after a few rounds, while we watched dark shapes out in the bay and tried to determine if they were submarines or whales. Then, when it got dark, we decided to stop testing and do some work, looking out over the bay as our machines rebooted into developer modes. After our sprint and midnight pizza, the boss came in, introduced himself, and asked me a question that kinda changed my life: “have you read Snow Crash yet?” .. it had just been released, I hadn’t gotten there yet. “No, I brought the new 2600 with me though, you wanna .. “ .. “Stop”, he said. Walks to his office, digs through a box, gives me a brand new, fresh copy, first edition. Because of course he had a box of them. “Don’t work on anything else until you’ve read this cover to cover”, was the directive. “Really”, yes really .. My onboarding colleague looked at me with an amused smirk, shrugged, and said “yeah, you gotta ..” So I spent 3 work days and a weekend, reading it. Get to Monday, I’m good to go. I’ll make this audio code listen to reason. 37th floor, Embarcadero like I said, I get out of the lift and .. there’s a dark mood in the room. DOOM had just hit. Well, I’ve been living Snow Crash since the day I read it, is all I’m saying.
- simonebrunozzi 2mo agoI've read your comment, almost waiting for the line that was going to finally disappoint me... and it wasn't there :) Somehow you recount a memory in an imperfect way, but it is so... apt, so in sync with Snow Crash. Good reminder that I want to re-read it again now. Oh, forgot to ask: can you tell us more about that experience? More details?
- Eric_WVGG 2mo agoI bet a nickel he worked on Spectre — a copy of Snow Crash shipped with certain editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game)
- Apocryphon 2mo agoMore of a John Brunner future, really.
- downut 2mo agoStand on Zanzibar was so prescient it gave me goosebumps when I read it 5 years ago.
- TheWrongGuy 2mo agoHere I am, reading about the homeopape on the homeopape
- nephihaha 2mo agoTouch of Phillip K. Dick.
- larodi 2mo agoWe entered cyberpunk completely the moment OpenAI released chatGPT. We are already deep into it and flying cars soon will follow. Maybe it started even earlier with bitcoin, but definitely is on.
- ltbarcly3 2mo agoIf it was William Gibson everyone would be wearing black jeans, hardly ever use a computer, going on adventures all around the city and talking to members of the opposite sex. For sure that's not where we are.
- fennecfoxy 2mo agoTalking to members of the opposite sex only? How narrow-minded. Cyberpunk/sci-fi often explores futures where sex/gender is less of an issue (especially Ian. Banks' works). Clearly we're not there yet.
- khangtong988 2mo ago[flagged]
- black_13 2mo ago[dead]
- gumby 2mo agoThe better prescient reference is John Brunner’s triad of The Shockwave Rider (origin of the computer virus, too!), The Sheep Look Up, and Stand on Zanzibar. They very much foreshadow the shallow pop star president, contempt for expertise, mass poverty, and incoherent direct action scenarios of technocracy/mass surveillance/prediction markets (shockwave), climate and pollution (the sheep), and population (Zanzibar). Great, if chilling stories. They were written in the 60s and 70s but felt disturbingly predictive when I first read them in the 80s and even more so today. (Big fan of both Ballard and Gibson too, though they are very different)