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Comment by telmo | Hacker News Reader

The slogan was always cut short. Here's the entire thing:

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away."

Well, it's even slightly more complicated than that but you can read the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

Deep thinkers were always aware of these tensions. Cyberpunk writers in the 90s and even 80s correctly predicted a lot of what is going on right now, namely the use of technology to cover reality in gaudy advertisements (that could look back at you), as well as corporations gaining powers that used to be associated with nation states (for example, policing speech). People just hoped it would not turn out like this... I still have a feeling that it didn't have to.

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I sometimes wonder how much those things were “predicted” and how much it was a case of the people with lots of money having read the same books we did and being primed toward those outcomes.

I mean, we all read Snow Crash when we were teenagers and now the ones who grew up to be billionaires are all excited to build the Metaverse. Did Snow Crash “predict” that? Or is this just another (perhaps somewhat extreme) form of fandom?

Similarly, would there be as many scientists trying to figure out how to make a “warp” drive if Star Trek hadn’t popularised the concept? And if/when they eventually succeed in making warp drives practical, will we say that Star Trek “predicted” it?

It feels like there should be a better term for “making a fictional concept compelling enough that it is forced into reality by fans of the fictional work.” But I don’t know what that term would be.

>“making a fictional concept compelling enough that it is forced into reality by fans of the fictional work.”

visionary ?

“reality distortion field”-er ?

inspiring ?

Oo, yeah; "inspired" is precisely the word I was looking for! (I'm a little embarrassed I couldn't draw it to mind by myself!)

I'm much happier with saying (for example) "Star Trek inspired the modern warp drive" (I mean, if/when a real-world practical warp drive exists) than "Star Trek predicted the modern warp drive".

Doesn't imply that Star Trek actually invented the thing, but does assign at least a certain causal link to it; not mere prognostication of it like "predicted" implies.

The notion that scientists wouldn't try to make cutting edge drives without seeing Star Trek is absurd. Similarly, VR and other Metaverse-related concepts are a somewhat natural thing to try once tech advances.

Thinking this requires some heavy anti-multiple discovery beliefs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

You're going to have a hard time pointing to utopian novels from the same period.

It's not that something closer to utopia was never possible. A lot of CS from the 70s was explicitly utopian. Even the Jobs "bicycle for the mind" idea was far more utopian than "Let's create a monopolistic monoculture with adtech and noise."

For some reason the cyberpunk writers chose not to imagine it or promote it.

Warp drive is similar. It seeded the idea of FTL in the popular consciousness and made it something almost everyone has heard of. Without that, it might have remained an abstract curiosity.

In Propaganda, Bernays says that instead of preaching at the public you need to dramatise the behaviours and beliefs you want to see the public adopt. The ad industry is based on this, but of course it runs through fiction and other media too.

Star Trek is one of the few attempts to dramatise a utopian future. Everything else is a wasteland of darkness.

And it has certainly had an effect.

It's not over yet.

We're cheering and/or allowing stepping stones moving us in those directions, without realizing the long-term implications for the web. (Controversial list incoming) Things like: HTTPS everywhere, SSL, DOH, certificate pinning, trusted-computing, DRM, CDNs, proxies have disappeared, single HTML rendering engine, subscription (SAAS) models, moving all desktop programs into the browser, extinction of caching, etc.

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