We are living in a version of the future out of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
A personal essay argues that the present is already cyberpunk, citing a Westfield mall IV drip clinic, a robotic dog falsely reported at a migrant hotel, and an AI-generated soul singer with 2.6 million monthly listeners. The author collects such clippings, noting the mundane acceptance of technologies like delivery robots and AI meeting bots, and reflects on how quickly we adapt to the future.
The human ability to resist stopping, to look away, to adjust to a new reality, absorb changes, and move on, is extremely useful.
- keiferski
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.
- MomsAVoxell
I 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 […]
- phreeza
I 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-350E5JAjtntEhAYz...
- eithed
I 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.
- nephihaha
Touch of Phillip K. Dick.
- Alephinitesimal
Old 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.
- teddyh
Something 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.
- palmotea
And 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.