The world of tomorrow

The poetic meaning of the line still works. The sky, the symbol of boundless optimism, the place of open infinite wonder and possibility...reduced to meaninglessness, closed possibilities, and failed promise.

I tend to think that the 90s actually did see its analogue to psychedelics in the internet. No need to be a psychonaut and fry your brain anymore; just surf the web. It's the same sort of ideal of connecting with universal knowledge.

There's even a heuristic to track these kinds of awakenings, roughly, and I'm absolutely certain you're not going to guess it. Got it in your head? Okay, wrong, it was "landmark black cinema." The Wiz came out in 1978 after 4 years of the musical. In 1995, we had The Lion King, followed by the Broadway play in 1997. If you look for something repeating the pattern, you find Black Panther in 2018 (alongside a glamour around a specific component of the web, social media and the mature smartphone).

I don't mean to make any sort of causative connection, but perhaps there is something about a widespread desire to "move forward" and "embrace openness" that also benefits the funding of these sorts of productions (and then the subsequent public enthusiasm for them upon release). And there's always a collapse back to conservatism shortly thereafter (Disco Demolition Day and Reagan; Bush and 9/11; COVID and its backlash, and the subsequent failure of Bernie Sanders to beat Joe Biden, and then Joe Biden/Kamala Harris to beat Donald Trump).

> the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

To me, that meant "showing random static," and implied meaninglessness, or at least unknowability.

> used to mean grey, but now could mean bright blue (or even black?) due to the march of progress...

Issues (and maybe possibilities) about reading works out of context and time. There's often a need / tendency to place those ideas relative to your own.

On the issues: Downloaded and started looking through Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636, Catholic Patron Saint of Computers and Internet). [1] The striking part reading through the later year discussions and critique though was how often writers needed to place their own later meaning and rearview criticism on an archival encyclopedist from ~1300-1400 years ago.

  > an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, glossed with his own derivations of the technical terms relevant to the topic in hand. Derivations apart, it was lifted from sources almost entirely at second or third hand ..., none of it checked, and much of it unconditional eyewash – the internet, in other words, to a T.
  > His reductions and compilations did indeed transmit ancient learning, but Isidore, who often relied on scholia and earlier compilations, is often simplistic scientifically and philosophically, especially compared to .. figures such as Ambrose and Augustine.

Except that wasn't the point. He was creating an encyclopedia. Isidore quotes from around 475 works from over 200 authors in his works, including those outside the Etymologiae. Several of the works quoted would have never survived or even been known about without Isidore's efforts. The goal (opinion) was preserving the knowledge. He wrote what was there, and 1300-1400 years later there's a criticism that he only gathered 475 works and didn't find first hand sources for every account?

On the maybe possibilities: Neuromancer's pretty great. In the first paragraph you're already transported to another world:

  > “It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke.  The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. [2]

On the opening line in 2024: could mean grey, could mean static, could mean blue, could mean black, could mean a screen saver. Could mean some future unknown "television" from the land of headjacks, AR web topologies, and xeno-sentient entertainment. Even 40 years later the meaning is already changed in reading based on the readers state, and the reader's prior experiences. And because it was a future-tech, cyperpunk image of a world yet to be, was it really meant to be a 1980's television sky?

By the third paragraph Gibson's already discussion "antique" seven-function force-feedback manipulator Russian military prosthesis' and who invented nerve-splicing beneath the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company.

[1] Etymologiae, WP, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae

[2] Neuromancer, Ch 1, penguinrandomhouse.ca, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/293994/neuromancer-b...

Taxing property on land, as well as the land, creates perverse incentives & disincentives.

If we only taxed land, renormalizing for the same total taxes:

1. It would be much more expensive to hold (absolutely or relatively) undeveloped land as an investment that parasitically increased in value due to surrounding investment.

Land is the exclusionary resource, so fully taxing it makes sense.

Renormalization would tax unused land hard, reducing its passive return, and the supply & availability of less used land will increase, and prices decrease.

2. It would be far more attractive to further develop land for economically rewarding use, since adding living spaces and other increased use would not directly raise annual taxes. Which today are essentially a heavy disincentive to development.

Ironically, property (excluding land) taxes, are a recurrent never ending wealth tax, inhibiting both the wealthy and non-wealthy from increasing their properties utility value.

We are so used to it we don’t really consider how much it warps our choices that putting in capital or labor into home improvements or increased multi-housing actually raises our taxes.

If they didn’t, improvements would be far more attractive for both utility and property value appreciation.

Ask any accountant.

It feels like we are instead bifurcating instead of regressing to a mean. The rich are getting richer and moving to one side together as a group, while the middle class and poor are merging the other way into their own "barely hanging on class", distributed around a point far on the other side.

The average going up doesn't mean it's a tide that raises all boats.

> For cars the US does have Tesla (...) We also have (...) a pretty great rocket company

And yet you all wish you didn't. Well, maybe not everyone, but it's the dominant view.

This brings back a memory of a HN comment from a little over a decade ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885128

I'll just quote it in full:

<quote cite='natural219'>

If you want to track the death of the cultural vision of Silicon Valley -- the belief that some people, at least, can rise above petty human squabbling and competition and are legitimately working to better humanity -- look no further than this thread. Every top comment is a skeptical one. "This is clearly a great PR move, but has no teeth." "How do you enforce this guarantee?" Etc.

These are reasonable questions, but as Shaw said, all progress comes from unreasonable men. I cannot help but be fundamentally depressed as I read these comments. In my view, Elon Musk has, moreso than any other human except maybe Bill Gates, given every absolute inch of human effort and genius to fight to solve the world's biggest problems. And all we have for him, after benefiting freely from the fruit of his labor, is skepticism. We want more. It's not enough. It's never enough.

Yes, Tesla Motors is a company operating in a media-hyped 2014 America. I know some of you are butthurt that he engages in the same "dishonest" PR tactics that other companies do. GET THE FUCK OVER IT. The end product he's producing will save humanity. That all of America has not rallied behind Musk and Tesla as the most important movement and achievement in the last 100 years of human history absolutely blows my mind.

Not only do we not recognize his goals or his achievements, we actively try and bring him down and shit on his accomplishments. "Well, they invented a pretty cool electric motor, sure, but they were kind of dishonest in that one press release that one time."

Go fuck yourself.

I want to say "I'm done with Hacker News", but we know that's not true. I'm supremely disappointed in all of you. Godspeed, Musk. I thought this was a great announcement, and I'm behind you 100%. I just hope you can finish your work before our shitty, myopic, destructive society tears you down. Here's to faith.

</quote>

Elon Musk may have changed for the worse since then, but nowhere near as much and as fast as our "shitty, myopic, destructive society", and in particular the Internet commentariat.

Nvidia is also American, so is AMD.

...which is apparent when you see the fertility rates of these countries.

That's a result of massive recent change. The US hasn't had that, since the basic infrastructure was built long ago.

When Motorola was acquired, a plant was purchased (a formerly Nokia one in Fort Worth, Texas) and the Moto X line was made in the US [0].

It was a short-lived experiment. Motorola was sold to Lenovo, and the plant shut down, within a few years.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/11/4717796/made-in-america-a...

Palm pilot was manufactured in the US.

Do you have a source for the US being a "leader" within trucks, SUVs and heavy equipment? Doesn't match my experience as someone not from the US who sees mostly brands not from the US.

> "The US writes most of the software that powers those devices."

For the moment. Have you noticed how many of those people building that software are immigrants? Most of the FAANGs and other significant tech companies have development centers worldwide and it's vastly easier to pack up and move a software development office elsewhere than it is to move a factory and all its equipment.

I hiked 1000 miles on the AT in the winter of '22, and to this day I marvel at potable water on tap, AND it gets hot! Too hot even! What a delight.

Also plumbing and a bidet! No catholes, no rashes, no norovirus! I wake up every day with gratitude in my heart for this abundance.

The internet. (Almost) all the world's information, when I want it, for free. I don't even have to go to a library.

Clean air.

Enough food. Enough food that the problem is obesity, not starvation.

Freedom to speak my mind.

When you add it all up... wow. It's immense.

We should have had this thread a couple weeks ago, at Thanksgiving.

You might be interested in https://www.givedirectly.org/

True, in my "third-world" nation, 98 degree water would be stupid as it would be burning hot.

Dystopian and horror-oriented science fiction have existed as long as the genre. Optimism is hard to do in a way that is both believable and interesting, which at the time TNG ran was fairly successfully achieved for a large audience.

I would argue that cynicism and fear-milking are easier paths (with certain exceptions for works which evoke multiple layered allegories and inspire contemplation), and I think this has become even more true in recent years for a host of reasons.

Alien (1979) predates ST:TNG (1987-), and as I remember it, it competed with E.T. (1982) in the popular consciousness.

Nah, dark or grim sci-fi were aplenty, many of them were just regular action movies (also popular then) but done in sci-fi setting.

I'm using Star Trek as a measuring stick, particularly TNG and later, because this was a very big, popular and long-running franchise, that happened to have baked in the idea of optimistic future for humanity as a core part of its setting. It's a measuring stick that spans almost six decades now, and you can see in it how sentiments changed over that time, and how the hope and optimism eroded.

Various dystopian shows and movies that appeared in that time, they were pessimistic by design, and thus work as spot measurements of what people thought would sell best at a particular time. Star Trek wasn't - the weight of an established franchise meant it could've kept selling optimism even as others would find it too financially risky; so Star Trek going darker measures a deeper change in the mindsets of writers and studio executives.

That’s what they want us to believe. But at the end of the day, we can always fight. There’s little they can do to stop a massive violent uprising.

> I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, or 2050, but what I do know is that the benefits and wealth from them will be captured by the same class that is capturing everything today.

I have good news and bad news. The world doesn't stand still. There are some iterations that destroy the structure of society, after which a new structure must be built. The oligarchies of today will meet their end at some point. And, no amount of preemptive effort can prevent that. That's as the good news go, in as much as they are good news.

These are not my ideas exclusively. If you want to hear them from people that has dedicated a fair amount of time at exploring this subject and gathering data, I recommend these books:

- Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for an overview of historical change. You will find that the author agrees with you in many accounts.

- The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Josph A. Tainter.

- Principles for dealing with the changing world order.

The bad news is that the most likely iteration coming around the corner is human's lost of control of our societies in favor of machine intelligence. It's not going to be as "peaceful" as the rise of the post WWII world order, but I hope that we survive.

As if all us peasants are using rotary phones while the plutocrats and oligarchs have these expensive iphones.

What is actually interesting is while the plutocrats and oligarchs have more leg room and better food on their private jet, the airplane itself doesn't move that much faster than me in coach.

You simply underestimate the financial mass of the mass market. These plutocrats and oligarchs only exist as part of a system with an even bigger mass market.

This time is not different.

> I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, or 2050, but what I do know is that the benefits and wealth from them will be captured by the same class that is capturing everything today.

Due to the laws of diminishing returns, the inventions aren't going to be that great and in fact actively destructive as we are basically running the world on innovation, rather than creating innovation for the world.

> Billons died from communist wet stream in the 20 century but the lessons are still not learned

Billions didn't.

USSR census population in 1989 was only 286 million total, while the Holodomor and the Cambodian genocide combined were between 4.4-8 million.

And the Holodomor (and broader famine in the rest of the USSR) looks suspiciously similar to the failure mode of the British government with the Irish potato famine and the Indian famines under British rule, each of which played a part in those people wanting independence, as does the Chinese great leap forward's 15-55 million.

Even with those, and the Chinese famine happened so soon into a transition away from agrarian society that to me it seems more like a tragedy than a consequence, it's still not billions.

No, what saved billions from starvation is fertiliser, and policies of subsidising over-production so that the bad harvest years food is merely expensive rather than insufficient.

If it was "capitalism", then the Lassiez faire British empire wouldn't have had the Irish potato famine nor would the East India Company have been in charge for so many famines in India.

As if Democrats aren't owned by oligarchs.

Look at who funds them. Look what they do, instead of what they say.

> It's so easy to blame it all on the feet of oligarchs, but it is ultimately our collective responsibility. The democrats lost the popular vote. Think about that.

Democrat or republican; both support the oligarchy in separate ways because both support the advancement of technology. And increasingly powerful technology supports oligarchy and that power structure cannot be stopped by democracy because democracy functions within technology.

Yup and it happened purely because of elitism.

Just an illustration of this https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-wor...

"nearly 38 percent of the world's population lived on less than 2.15 U.S. dollars in terms of 2017 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) in 1990, this had fallen to 8.7 percent in 2022"

> Don't let a determination to believe everything is bad force you to ignore when things get better.

A decrease in poverty in this case though is traded by an increased addiction to what the oligarch provides. Is an entire society in a dystopia that provides the basic physical comforts but strips us of meaning in life a good end? I think not.

No, people hate modern society because they understand that although things are better than they were they aren't nearly as good as they could be if it wasn't for rampant and unchecked corruption.

What's worse is that people know that whole ecosystems and stable climate patterns are slipping away and will likely never come back.

Do you think cost of living today is lower than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago? Do you think the average person today works more or less than before?

Because I’m really curious what you mean when you say we’re more free than ever. Free time especially is what eludes most people of my peer group; endless tv shows to stream is meaningless without free time for example.

We've also destroyed a lot of social norms that used to help people make good decisions.

Continuously making good choices is really difficult, especially when we have so many incredibly alluring distractions. Having some guard rails is a good thing for almost everyone.

Uf, thanks, a copypaste brain fart.