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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 a
by keiferski 1mo 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.
- micromacrofoot 1mo agowriting often romanticizes everything, reality feels stupid by comparison
- xnorswap 1mo 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 1mo agoAnchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
- zer00eyz 1mo agoThis comment feels like it's from the early 90's when people were being critical of bands for selling out.
- BaseBaal 1mo 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
- antonvs 1mo agoThat's a very different situation. An individual "anchoring their identity" to a brand isn't doing so to earn money, which is why bands "sell out". It's just a choice they make about who they are, and I have to agree with GP that that seems tragically uncool.
- BoingBoomTschak 1mo agoIs there something wrong with being critical of bands for selling out, though?
- bryanrasmussen 1mo agothe concept of selling out often seems seriously under-specified, and thus, like many things in our society, it becomes a tool for one set of people to improve their own status by attacking another set of people. It is in the end a moral stance on what are the proper aesthetics, which is the kind of thing that manages to make both morality and aesthetics extremely suspect.
- 3636yey 1mo agohow can someone say morality is suspect and expect to be treated like a human being
- HashHishBang 1mo agoNah, the aesthetics argument is a distraction. Engaging with art is engaging with another human being. Finding out that the other human being is, in fact, a corporation in a trenchcoat sucks. I would go so far as to label it a feeling of betrayal that leaks into everything else the artist touches. Does anyone think The Rock has anything of substance to say about anything anymore? Do we think Post Malone isn't just trying to make a few more bucks after selling out entire genres? Seeing Iggy fucking Pop shill insurance is genuinely painful.
- ompogUe 1mo agoHear, hear! Cadillac using Led Zeppelin broke something in me. I'm on the fence with the Beastie Boys getting used in movie fight scenes. They said they'd never do ads. Elevates the scenes, but it also elevates the IP of Disney and Paramount.
- harimau777 1mo agoI think that is because it is a social value. It isn't meant to be a rigid rule; it's meant to be a guideline that can adapt to the needs of the situation. There has to be nuance in social values.
- thwarted 1mo agoExcept this is being critical of the popularity and fans, not the band.
- InsideOutSanta 1mo agoAKA the good old times when it wasn't as culturally accepted to be openly evil if it made money.
- ArekDymalski 1mo agoBut it wasn't in the early cyberpunk works. When you consume them you can notice how important was the concept of "style", that characters were excited by the specific brands (implants, weapons, shaders, venues), associated them with social status etc. It was the 90s that brought contempt for brands to (paradoxically) mainstream.
- slopinthebag 1mo agoApple is the only big tech company with a decent aesthetic tho.
- cocacola1 1mo agoThey 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.
- Apocryphon 1mo agoProduct/design-first vs. engineering-first orgs
- kergonath 1mo agoI don’t think that’s really it. Plenty of engineers care about elegance and functionality. I think calling them engineering-led is a disservice to engineers in general. Everything out of Google is Rube-Goldberg machines held together with duct tape. It is engineering in a way, but by squirrels on crack. It’s alien to how engineering is done in the real world. Everything out of Meta is pure evil. It is engineering-led if you could behavioural psychologists designing Skinner boxes as engineers. Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products. The exception in the Borg.
- Apocryphon 1mo agoGoogle was also characterized by their infamous data-first 41 shades of blue A/B test. It seems like they went into an extreme where design was informed by user behavior, by empiricism, rather than by the taste of the designer. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-google-engineers-designers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-googl... > Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products. Oculus was an acquisition, so maybe that's why.
- staplers 1mo agoThey 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.
- newsclues 1mo agoMost 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.
- adonovan 1mo agoThese 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/ https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.
- saltcured 1mo agoAt 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.
- antonvs 1mo agoThere 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.
- saltcured 1mo agoThese 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.
- Apocryphon 1mo agoThere 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.
- antonvs 1mo agoYou get the Cybertruck because we are far too accomodating of nepobabies.
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- tuvix 1mo agoI 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.
- svachalek 1mo agoI 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.
- dgellow 1mo agoWhat a fucking depressing timeline. We could have built such a beautiful world instead
- over_bridge 1mo agoToday's billionaires aren't like yesterday's. They could be doing cool shit but they are just padding their own private real estate and stock portfolios. Yawn. Why not make an epic bridge or tower with gargoyles on it? Why not a museum or park? You can walk around Europe and see buildings from centuries ago. Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?
- generic92034 1mo ago> Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at? Maybe they do not believe that there will be a human civilization in 2426.
- ajmurmann 1mo agoIsn't it better that Bill Gates instead pumped huge amounts of money into philanthropy? Meanwhile SF has the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. A cathedral would be nice to look at but preventing malaria or helping sick kids seems preferable. In the past money couldn't have easily be deployed for good like this and helping fund cathedrals was likely done to increase the donors likelihood of getting into heaven. But I guess George Lucas is a billionaire who has you covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_Museum_of_Narrative_Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_Museum_of_Narrative_Art
- CuriouslyC 1mo agoThe dystopia will be televised in Corporate Memphis.
- thwarted 1mo agoI 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.
- justsomehnguy 1mo ago> 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.
- thwarted 1mo agoAgreed. 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.
- justsomehnguy 1mo ago
- Animats 1mo ago> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiXpYbCZyjs
- o-mo-ka-saaaay 1mo agoI 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.
- georgemcbay 1mo ago> 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.
- sporadicism 1mo agoAsian superpowers feature so heavily in the genre that it's a cliche. Also Ballard was British.
- Caracas288 1mo ago...And he grew up in Shanghai, China
- Apocryphon 1mo agoThose 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.
- robotresearcher 1mo agoThe dominant computer form factor in the world is a smooth slab of black glass.
- ajmurmann 1mo agohttps://youtu.be/JJl5UWh-wA8?is=1oX24Nd45lHt99vZ 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".
- righthand 1mo agoWhat are meta camera sunglasses or Apple airpods but aesthetic? It’s here.
- prettyblocks 1mo agoI disagree. iPhones, EVs, and a lot of architecture is really slick looking.
- jmilloy 1mo agoI think in Gibson, most people and most corporations are boring. Capitalized and homogenized slop. The plots revolve around individuals and nooks and crannies that are cool, against the grain, hence the pink in cyberpunk. I think that exists in reality, too, but of course you have to go find it.
- DeluluDon 1mo agoYou've never worked for FedEx, have you? We have wearable propietary tech to do a necessary job, scanning 100lbs+ boxes to load into trailers by hand. It's an extremely rough job as belt pick-off, you're no more human than a machine is at that point. They don't advertise their tech, either. It would just draw unnecessary attention.
- robotresearcher 1mo agoYou skipped Apple, the megacorp that does have a carefully curated aesthetic. Like the future, the aesthetics are not evenly distributed.