> we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.

Sure we are. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Here's a nighttime walk through Shenzhen.[1] Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings. Robots on the streets. Drones in the sky. Cameras everywhere. Night markets where you can buy both food and electronics. Self-driving cars. Electric buses and taxis. Women in colorful outfits on motorcycles.

Shenzhen looks more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077, the game.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiXpYbCZyjs

I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?

On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.

I think the fact that these kinds of companies were portrayed as such in fiction kind of prevents them from adopting the cool aesthetic. Like they need something to separate them from being the exact image of an evil futuristic corporation that lives in our heads. Or else we might actually recognize what they are.

These companies do have an aesthetic, it's just not cool. Mike Merrill calls it "Corporate Memphis"; see https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.

I would disagree with that, I've seen people anchor their own identity to that of brands like Apple or Disney.

They may not be aesthetics you find cool, but clearly they appeal to a large number of others.

The dystopia will be televised in Corporate Memphis.

At least with Gibson, I think cyberpunk idolized actual punk culture. The coolness was found, brought, or arranged by these characters.

The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye.

The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the little noir vignettes where the poets and rebels infiltrated.

They had to make it cool to make it palatable and not a slog for entertainment purposes. Without that it's just a depressing read of reality.

writing often romanticizes everything, reality feels stupid by comparison

Most corporations are boring, but there absolutely are some cool ones, they often aren’t as public as the big consumer ones.

Arasaka types are rare, it’s mostly big blobs like DatAmerica.

Life certainly feels like the "Troubles" of The Peripheral have started.

Why would someone who has never experienced systemic oppression fear systemic oppression? Techbros and techbrowannabes live in a magnitude-10 reality distortion field.

I'm cheering for the San Ti. They can't be worse than what we currently have.

Aaah don't jinx it aaaaah

With CRISPR and AI, sapient pearwood is just a few years out.

100%

I know that "Idiocracy" gets thrown around all the time, but the reason I think it does is that they do have advanced tech but at the same time everyone is a blathering idiot. That's what gets me about our present reality - on one hand we supposedly have all the world's information at our fingertips, but the absolute dumbest, most bullshit theories get real traction and cause real damage.

When they had the UFC fight on the White House lawn I thought it couldn't be a better example of life imitating art.

You're still being very magnanimous. Feels more like a tech Ankh-Morpork without the humour to me.

Where would you recommend I start with J.G.? I got into Baudrillard and have been meaning to go further down the train of thought.

The unevenly distributed future is a William Gibson thing.

A couple months back I had at a Chinese place in the western parts of Dublin (Ireland) and we could see the operating base of the Mana food delivery drones. Ireland was never known to get early issues of whatever the current dystopian future is being distributed, so it was an interesting sight - drones autonomously locating landing platforms and waiting to be loaded, and then launching to their next delivery.

Or, as the quote attributed to the late Paul Harvey goes,

"Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."

I'm not sure it was ignored, so much as people are apathetic.

> Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data

Data painted and performed music: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Data#The_arts

To be fair, his motivation was to become more human. But at least he did have intrinsic motivations that didn’t appear to come from some training.

That aside, there are many examples that long predate Gibson:

Kurt Vonnegut’s EPICAC (1950): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPICAC_(short_story). It also has the motive of a human passing off the AI’s artistic creation as his own.

C. M. Kornbluth’s “With These Hands” (1951): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51531

Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1953): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatiza...

Incidentally, J. G. Ballard’s “Studio 5, The Stars” (1961): https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/some-dance-to-forget

Once the concept of “electronic brains” was there, the idea that they might also produce art like a human brain can wasn’t far.

Yeah it's really amazing how prescient these books are given when they were written. I wish I enjoyed them more, I'm reading Mona Lisa Overdrive now and other than intellectual admiration of it all I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through. I don't enjoy the prose, and how dense it is I guess cause I am not a careful reader.

> he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this

Plenty of forebears here. Orwell's 1984 has mass-produced trash novels generated by a machine. Stanislaw Lem''s Cyberiad has a poetry generator.

AI and creativity/art is actually explored through Data in Star Trek. He was a painter, played the violin, gave poetry readings...

> Another thing they got right was [...] None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.

I think it's worth asking whether "nobody really believes anything" is itself the result of a cynical manipulative play, one that occurs in the real world, and thus affects our judgement as we compare "today" versus a sci-fi book.

In particular I'm thinking of how certain regimes encourage a kind of "everybody is lying truth is pointless" nihilism, because it gives them a net-benefit in mentally exhausting their victims and deterring anyone without power from organizing.

In other words:

1. The dystopia-story may depict an amoral/post-truth fog and imply that it's an inevitable world-constant within the human hive. Not necessarily because the author believes that, but because it's not part of the story they're trying to tell.

2. We may feel like there's a similar fog around us today.

3. We could be harmfully-wrong if we assume our disempowering fog must likewise be an inevitable constant, while instead there are some beekeepers waving smoke-pots to generate it.

> I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable.

I think we might just not have run out of money yet. A lot of debt (social, structural, technical, financial, cultural, etc) is going to hit us like a freight train if AI turns out to not be the magic cure people desperately hope it is going to be.

The power of "the biz" rests on cash not running out. Certainly not on loyalty of the workers.

"They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate."

Sounds unlikely to me without the caveat "within this particular brand of politics and socioeconomics".

Sprawl is where he originally started exploring these ideas but Jackpot is where he really focused deep into them and it's even more prescient. It's also bleaker, he has clearly recalibrated his estimate of how much power and control these new entities will have and what they will choose to do with it. Unfortunately I think it's a better representation of the path we're on.

There's some Pynchon in these times too.