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Comment by axblount | Hacker News Reader

Ballard, like William Gibson, is one of those people that despite having zero technical know how, seems to intuitively understand how people interface with technology.

Crash is often seen as completely outlandish, but it's hard to see echoes of Robert Vaughan in today's culture. We watch A24's Civil War the same way that Vaughan and Ballard would watch a car crash.

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Gibson's "Burning Chrome" casually predicts lifestreaming ("simstim"). We don't have the sci-fi tech, but as a social phenomenon it's exactly Instagram, parts of Twitch, etc.

Also Idoru. AI Virtual celebrity Popstar.

You say zero technical know how, but Ballard spent some of his formative years making his way in a Japanese prison camp in China. If you believe the novel (Empire of the Sun), part of his survival was attributed to combinations of a way with language, people, and youthful endurance. But the backdrop was very much technical know how - working to obtain increasingly scarce necessities, like shoes, and observing first hand the impacts of lack thereof. So while his engineering expertise may not have been elevated from a theoretical perspective, it certainly was deeply and personally grounded in urgent, first hand, experiential concern - and all of this across three languages or more - perhaps a perfect raw humanist basis for the exploration of technology through literature?

That's a good point. I meant "technical" in the narrow sense of working with modern or cutting edge technology. For example, to my knowlege he was not an avid or early user of the internet, yet he seems to have a good sense of the effect it has on us. Technologists are constantly trying to predict the future but the humanists usually hit closer to the mark.

> We watch A24's Civil War the same way that Vaughan and Ballard would watch a car crash.

Civil War was a very interesting movie. The three main characters are all photographers, and the movie turns them into both the observer and the observed. This creates a distancing effect when we are confronted with the violence of war. But the movie also challenges the way we interact with war movies as a genre (many critics picked up on the Full Metal Jacket call-outs, they were so obvious).

I'm just saying, a lot to unpack in that movie.

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