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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

He wants a glider. Not a problem. There are quite good hang gliders. There are also plenty of trolleys around, although most new ones use pantographs instead of trolley poles.

Very few saw a world dominated by giant advertising firms. Or computing becoming a branch of advertising. Even in science fiction. There was Fowler Schocken Associates, in The Space Merchants (1952). The company behind the simulated world in Simulacron-3 (1964) builds it so they can do market testing and opinion polls. As late as "AI" (2001), the tie between search and ads hadn't appeared. In "AI", the "Dr. Know" search service is an expensive pay service.

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It’s a little unrelated but I always thought it was odd that people looked to things like science fiction for glimpses into possible futures rather than into the more social and political genres such as cyberpunk.

Because cyberpunk basically got everything right. Unfortunately.

Not only from the cyberpunk movement, but also from history and the classics! Societies should rethink formal education entirely and focus on connecting the dots between different sciences and activities.

I'll play the contrarian here regarding the article: it's likely that many people did actually predict the future, but they lacked the platform to broadcast their message.

Personally I started reading hard SF in the early 70s so it was all I had then for glimpses of the future, and a lot of near-future SF then was based around post-nuclear situations, or robots, or similar, albeit with some superb exceptions from authors such as Roger Zelazny, John Brunner and others.

Cyberpunk didn't really get consolidated as a genre until the 1980s although dystopias had been written about before then. It was in the 80s that the core cyberpunk themes of computer hackers and evil corporations really came together in their current dystopian form.

What examples of getting everything right do you know of?

Not GP, but Cryptonomicon stands out as predicting a lot about markets around cryptography, and the relationship between nations and technology. Stephenson didn't predict Blockchain and Bitcoin specifically, but he got closer than anyone I know of.

More generally, the Gibson style of "independent hackers versus the corporate overlords" seems increasingly accurate.

William Gibson - Neuromancer (1984)

Writing in F&SF in 2005, Charles de Lint noted that while Gibson's technological extrapolations had proved imperfect (in particular, his acknowledged failure to anticipate the impact of the cell phone), "Imagining story, the inner workings of his characters' minds, and the world in which it all takes place are all more important."[18]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#Literary_and_cultu...

Bruner's "Stand on Zanzibar"from the 60s and "The Shockwave Rider" from the 70s predicted a lot of social trends. Most millennials and younger won't be able to stand them though because of the different cultural norms of those eras embedded into the books

SF has always been about the present time of the writer, and is usually most interesting when it perturbs some element of reality to expose something interesting about the present.

"He wants a glider. Not a problem. There are quite good hang gliders."

Off-topic I know, but 100% this. Modern hang-gliders are amazing: easy to learn, unbelievable glide performance and handling, cheap to buy and learn. The 'whoosh' of energy retention as you pull in and push out has to be felt to be believed.

The same goes for paragliders: their speed and glide makes a mockery of my intuition as a ex-physicist and they fit in a rucksack. I'm a rubbish pilot and I've still managed to fly over a hundred kilometres on a paraglider.

I'm not sure what the right terminology is, but there are also gliders like this:

https://youtu.be/OpemglwS8XA?feature=shared

Which are a step up from even the most sophisticated "hang glider", assuming that hang glider refers to the kite type thing that you hang underneath and steer with body weight shifting.

I'm pretty sure even the best paragliders aren't anywhere near 40:1 L/D ratios.

Maybe not the exact workings of the modern ad industry, but I'd say that as early as Metropolis and possibly some time before, a feared future of mass production and consumption had entered the public eye. It is fascinating though, how little (ad) space advertising itself was warranted in fictional works till relatively recent (late 70s/early 80s) -- Blade Runner made it look as beautiful as it would be inescapable.

By the time Alien came out, corporate evil was certainly well established. Everything on the space ship had Weyland branding, and the corporation treating its employees as expendable was par for the course.

I'm struggling to come up with an older example of prominent ads in sci fi, but I'm drawing a blank.

1984 has a fair few advertising concepts IIRC, not least everything was "Victory" branded, and the ubiquitious Big Brother.

"Tuesday is Soylent Green day.."

And not to forget how "colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on screen.."

So what you are saying is... "even the most dystopian Sci-Fi didn't predict modern Silicon Valley led advertising & surveillance capitalism"!

I guess we as a species (and sci-fi writers) underestimate the banality of evil and its cumulative effect. Nearly 25 years ago, I ran a couple of banner ads on my website to help pay for the hosting costs. Back then it didn't cross my mind that such a trivial bit of HTML would eventually lead to surveillance capitalism. I wonder if any sci-fi writers predicted where this could/would lead...

For another glimpse at the feared future of mass production and consumption watch the "Out of the Unknown" series 1 episode "The Midas Plague" from 1965:

https://archive.org/details/come-buttercup-come-daisy

It's episode 12 in the zip file. A lot of the stories for the series came from well known science fiction writers of the time. All four years of the series are on the Internet Archive. The Midas Plague is a comedy, some of the other episodes are truly frightening.

Philip K. Dick predicted it in Ubik.

Great book, although I'm not sure 'predicted' is the right word. By that logic 'Flow my tears the Policeman said' is a prediction that by 1988 the US would have had a second civil war.

'Prescient', perhaps?

> Or computing becoming a branch of advertising.

wow. such a succinct way of putting it. ugly too. and probably at least mostly truthful.

Plenty of computing happens without any advertising whatsoever.

They just don’t get noticed by the general public or mass culture, this is practically a tautology.

Thats odd because I remember people saying "when will Google start ads". Although probably thinking of the Yahoo style slow loading mess.

Or AOL, I remember breakfast TV hosts mentioning AOL keywords a lot

Commercials too. Every TV spot would end with "AOL keyword poptart" or something.

John Varley had pervasive inyourface hologram advertising on his hypercapitalist Pluto, but I don't recall any online ads.

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