William Gibson: the prophet of cyberspace talks AI and climate collapse | Hacker News Reader

William Gibson: the prophet of cyberspace talks AI and climate collapse

ft.com

20 pointshhs7 comments

"Even today Gibson says he is puzzled by older readers who approach him at book signings to thank him for inspiring them to pursue a career in tech."

Yes, it is weird how the world of Neuromancer and his other early novels were dystopian, but many people didn't see it as "gee, we need to prevent this world from coming into being" but rather as "gee, the technology these characters have is amazing".

To crib from the man himself, dystopia is here, it just isn't evenly distributed.

Neuromancer is about cool people doing cool things, cyber-samurai hackers and razorgirls and space rastafarians, criminals and outcasts, and it's not surprising that techies would fetishize the image of the anarchist cyber-cowboy. But how dystopian would the setting be for most people who aren't criminals getting mixed up with the mafia and paramilitary black-ops groups?

We supposedly live in an Orwellian techno-fascist nightmare of omnipresent surveillance and thought-control now, but most people don't feel the boot stamping on their heads. Is that because they're just sheep whose minds are dulled by fluoride and the adrenaline burn of social media, or because it isn't stamping on everyone?

Piece available on non-paywalled site here: https://dnyuz.com/2020/02/13/william-gibson-cyberspaces-prop...

I'm suspicious about sites like DNYUZ that offer no information about themselves. There's an About link at the bottom but the endless autoscroller is so aggressive I can't click it, and /about/ just leads to an article.

You were not kidding about that aggressive auto-scroller. Tested it with find in page for about fifteen minutes trying to coerce the about link to stay on page long enough to click or inspect, no dice. I'll have to try catching it with devtools on my regular system.

Even when I managed to click on the link itself it only brought me to the page I was already reading (the Gibson article)... were you able to find anything else about them?

He’s so whole minded and generally awesome

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