2010: Cyberpunk World | Hacker News Reader

2010: Cyberpunk World

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81 pointspietrofmaggi23 comments

As a huge Stephenson fan (specifically Snowcrash here) I often tell people how unlike his world our world turned out to be.

In Snowcrash, the rapid pace of technological change has basically splintered the world and caused the empowerment of men and small organizations and the collapse of central governments. In the real world, governments learned how to effectively use mass media to get their message across. From going to war in Iraq, to going after wikileaks to building Great Walls, governments are doing great, with a great future ahead of them.

Nassim Taleb isn't a perfect prognosticator, but he is an interesting one. In his latest interview with The Economist he predicts the downfall of the nation state and the rise of the city state in the next 25 years. He is making an argument from instability - nation states are large, inefficient enterprises that have a habit of taking on unprofitable projects like wars. Also, he sees national currencies like the Euro and the Dollar as too unstable to survive.

I apologize for the long link:

http://downloads.economist.feedroom.com/podcast/t_assets/201...

I'm pretty young and uneducated (which means don't listen to anything I say), but it seems to me that wars are profitable. Arms and heavy vehicle manufacturers create jobs which stimulate our economy, and the foreign nations and international banks that control our debt get to dig a little deeper in our pockets. It sort of helps everyone but the enemy. After the war we get more money by "winning" contracts to rebuild what we've blown up - but slower and more inefficiently than is necessary, with lots of extra cash mysteriously disappearing once it reaches foreign soil (the equivalent of a CEO bonus, but instead for CIA and whoever else need a payday for ensuring the war goes off without a hitch).

But I could be wrong.

(Also, what's the alternative to the Dollar and Euro? Micro-economies? Maybe an economy built out of dealing with a massive number of differing currencies and economies?)

You're committing one of the oldest and most common Economic fallacies, the "Broken Window Fallacy". Bastiat's "That which is seen and that which is not seen"[1] or Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" would help clear up your confusion, or just a good treatment of the Broken Window Fallacy[2].

[1]http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

[2]http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...

william gibson, not neal stephenson. whippersnapper.

Actually, the OP's argumetn is then point Gibson has been making for some years now: there future is here already.

Charismatic cyberpersonalities operating principally on the ‘Net live as permanent residents of no nation

Bruce Sterling has gone out of his way to become one of these, minus the calls for his arrest and other negative things. (His calls to digitize everything you own that you possibly can. His and his wife's problems with no longer having an actual address.)

Yes, but too bad Gibson's latest books read as if they're from the past...

HN should automagically +1 every comment containing the word "whippersnapper". If you ask me. Which you didn't, but hey.

He forgot one thing: a cryptocurrency called bitcoin. A cypherpunk dream of digital cash come true.

Of course, wired said, "just another cypherpunk fever dream destined for the same dustbin as digital cash..."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/internet-war/

They are...WRONG!

Bitcoin? Call me when I don't have to forward ports through a firewall to handle currency, and when I don't have to keep a local copy of every transaction ever made by anyone on the whole system.

Well if IPv4 runs out soon enough and we successfully jump to IPv6, port forwarding in general has the potential to become a thing of the past.

That port forwarding is required isn't a bitcoin bug, it's a NAT bug.

>when I don't have to keep a local copy of every transaction ever made by anyone on the whole system.

How about this part? That sounds like a pretty big flaw in the system.

You would need to correlate that information with other type of information to be able to identify the user. As long as you take certain precaution, you should be fine.

Well sure, but it sounds like it would require a lot of storage.

There are proposal that make it possible for nodes to not have to download all that files.

However, it's ain't much of a problem as long as HD keep in pace with Moore's Law.

Moore's Law doesn't apply to a single given machine...my hard drive isn't magically doubling in size every X months. You see the problem?

2010 was very cyberpunk. All that was missing was Wintermute.

> All that was missing was Wintermute.

I'm here!

More seriously, the formation/actions of Anonymous remind me of the stand alone complexes (more formally termed "second-order simulacra," in semiotics) from Ghost in the Shell, one of the greatest cyberpunk anime series out there. It's astonishing that Shiro Masamune was able to predict this occurence as a result of the growth of the internet, and even more astonishing that it happened ~20 years before he predicted, prior to the existence of cyberbrains or synthetic "ghosts."

4chan was the perfect environment for something like Anonymous to occur. With no (official) archive, individual posts don't survive long. But you can get "ripples" of comments to persist for a while by a) re-posting it incessantly or b) creating an idea that other people want to repeat (basically a meme). Over time, the surviving memes created a sort of "standing wave" or self-replicating system out of channers' brains.

I guess what I'm saying is, Anonymous is the cumulative effect of these strong memes on human brains. The Ghost in the Shell is on a substrate of part-internet, part-human.

A being such as Wintermute would be too intelligent to let on it exists, to the point where it would be mentioned on a social news site like HN.

That, and Straylight. The world will have to acknowledge that it has reached The Future when the world's space agencies start talking seriously about L5 again.

Knowing the world, I expect it to completely miss The Future when it's taking a Christmas vacation at L5.

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