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Comment by turnip1979 | Hacker News Reader

turnip1979

I think you are right but wonder if it is just some kind of bias. Do you have other authors in mind who are leading the way today?

I've heard of Verner Vinge being spoken of in similar term btw.

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The writers and commentators of today tend to fall into niche categories or just write fiction. There is Nicholas Carr's and Douglas Rushkoff. The latter even wrote a book called Present Shock.

Most people I can think of are also of the past such as Vinge, Marshall McLuhan or Freeman Dyson (who came up with the idea of the Dyson sphere, not the vacuum) who were also brilliant. McLuhan is a joy to read or listen to. He has several interviews on YouTube.

Esther Dyson (Freeman's daughter) and Nicholas Negroponte were others I read growing up along the lines of Toffler. I remember the latter's Being Digital as being profound at the time but passe in today's world since all of the marvels of the future he talks about came to fruition. Negroponte also came up with the One Laptop Per Child which lost it's relevance in a world of smartphones.

Others I thought of were Neal Stephenson (his non-fiction works are awesome, especially In the Beginning... was the Command Line and that book-long article he wrote for Wired about wiring Cambodia). Stephenson's fiction is great too and puts William Gibson to shame when it comes to cyberpunk, but Gibson wrote his prior to the PC era. Rudy Rucker was also quite good at the time but his best non-fiction works such as Infinity and the Mind (a must read for you math geeks) are out of print. I also liked The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra a lot growing up.

I looked on Goodreads for authors that are similar to Toffler and while I recognized a couple of them I didn't see anyone worth mentioning.

Toffler's works were mostly dated after the mid 2000's, but predicted the consumer as producer (pro-sumer) culture we live in today and Revolutionary Wealth described how we would make a living with services like Patreon and GoFundMe in such a society.

I recommend everyone read The Third Wave. It provides great historical context for the present machinations of society, the media, and the political machine controlling the masses. Powershift discuss the shift of power to the masses and is also good if you like the idea of the death of the establishment.

Other people that come to mind are Nicholas Carr, Douglas Rushkoff, and Ray Kurzweil.

On the topic of Stephenson, i can't help wonder if his "cyberpunk" was more satire. After all the guy actually knew computers, and thus was perhaps irked by the "imagery" used by cyberpunk authors. He also basically pureed the prototypical cyberpunk during the opening chapter of Diamond Age.

And the opening of _Snow Crash_, too, was clearly a loving parody of an already-florid imagery. Cyberpunk as a fiction genre originated in the mid-80s and by 1990 people were calling it dead.

Gibson did not write "prior to the PC era", whether you mean PC either to be "personal computer" or IBM's brand. I was using both by 1984. He was writing prior to the Internet as we know it existed, though (although its precursor ARPANET already did).

As for Stephenson, he was writing parodies of cyberpunk, not cyberpunk itself, and unlike Gibson, his work required no foresight of the future because he just had to look around existing geek culture to get his ideas -- online communities and multi-user dungeons already existed by 1992.

Like ideonexus says, Vinge for sure. You might also try Minsky, particulary Society of Mind (http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/index.html).

I think Vinge deserves to be spoken of in similar terms. "A Fire Upon Deep" was so incredibly ahead of its time, and the virtual-reality-real-world mashup of "Rainbow's End," written almost 10 years ago, sounds like the inevitable way we will experience the world in the future with augmentation... At the same time, he made some outright silly predictions... so it's a matter of what you choose to focus on.

Toffler's the same. I've only read "Future Shock," but his predictions in that book can either seem completely ridiculous and off-base or like someone outside of our present culture giving you the perspective only an outsider can give. Here's some quotes from the book. Remember, these were written in 1970, but I leave it to the reader to decide if these quotes a prescient, insightful, or absurd:

The techno-societies, far from being drab and homogenized, are honeycombed with just such colorful groupings—hippies and hot rodders, theosophists and flying saucer fans, skindivers and skydivers, homosexuals, computerniks, vegetarians, bodybuilders and Black Muslims... Today the hammerblows of the super-industrial revolution are literally splintering the society. We are multiplying these social enclaves, tribes and minicults among us almost as fast as we are multiplying automotive options. The same destandardizing forces that make for greater individual choice with respect to products and cultural wares, are also destandardizing our social structures. This is why, seemingly overnight, new subcults like the hippies burst into being. We are, in fact, living through a "subcult explosion."

.....

One response to the loss of control, for example, is a revulsion against intelligence. Science first gave man a sense of mastery over his environment, and hence over the future. By making the future seem malleable, instead of immutable, it shattered the opiate religions that preached passivity and mysticism. Today, mounting evidence that society is out of control breeds disillusionment with science. In consequence, we witness a garish revival of mysticism. Suddenly astrology is the rage. Zen, yoga, seances, and witchcraft become popular pastimes. Cults form around the search for Dionysian experience, for non-verbal and supposedly non-linear communication. We are told it is more important to "feel" than to "think," as though there were a contradiction between the two.

.....

If a smaller number of families raise children, however, why do the children have to be their own? Why not a system under which "professional parents" take on the childrearing function for others? Raising children, after all, requires skills that are by no means universal. We don't let "just anyone" perform brain surgery or, for that matter, sell stocks and bonds. Even the lowest ranking civil servant is required to pass tests proving competence. Yet we allow virtually anyone, almost without regard for mental or moral qualification, to try his or her hand at raising young human beings, so long as these humans are biological offspring. Despite the increasing complexity of the task, parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

I have more quotes here if anyone is interested in reading more. I apologize for the website style and formatting. It's an old application I wrote for myself to keep notes:

http://mxplx.com/reference/1525/

Very Nice. Thank You.

>>" Why not a system under which "professional parents" take on the childrearing function for others? ...."

We already have these. We call the system 'schools' and the professionals 'school teachers'

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