cyberpunk, cypherpunks and my broken keyboard
I feel like a cyberpunk, except that feeling is much less cool than I once imagined it would be.
My keyboard died, you see.
Living in a humid, tropical country, and in a studio apartment which only has a bed in it, and being a mega nerd, my computer takes a royal thrashing. When I get home from work, I turn on my computer. When I wake up in the morning, I turn on my computer. My computer is my TV, my games console, my notebook, my newspaper, my library, my flash cards, my post office, my everything. That is how I live a minimal lifestyle. Everything I need aside from food, clothing and shelter is in my computer.
My computer is a Surface Pro. Which is to say it's not a desktop. It's not even a laptop. It's a tablet, albeit a tablet running a full-blown desktop operating system. It is my cyberdeck.
When we read cyberpunk novels in the 1980s and 1990s, we imagined cyberdecks to be something like the portable computers of the era - big chunky keyboards that you plugged into stuff. Plug into one of the ubiquitous monitors or flashing video screens around the neon-drenched metropolis to hack the planet, or plug directly into your brain so you can go into cyberspace... which at the time meant an actual, three dimensional virtual reality, and not just military jargon for the internet.
Well that never happened. Virtual reality was a flop. It was a flop in the 1990s, then it was a flop again in the 2000s, then it was a flop again in the 2010s and if it doesn't flop again in the 2020s I will eat my hat. (Joke's on you, I don't own a hat! Ha!) Yes, I still dream of getting a sexy metal socket installed in my skull so I can literally "jack in" to the matrix, but I've accepted that's one of those sci-fi fantasies that's likely to forever remain a fantasy. Turns out the human body doesn't really like to have its optical (or even auditory) inputs hijacked for hours on end. We stupid bags of meat prefer to grab shiny objects and poke at them with our fleshy appendages. ME OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEADS WITH OPEN SOURCE CD etc etc.
So instead of getting cyberdecks that were all keyboard, no screen, we got cyberdecks that were all screen, no keyboard. They're almost cool, except nobody using them is wearing leather jackets and sunglasses at night. In fact, your grandma uses one. That's cool in a Star Trek way, but definitely not in a cyberpunk way. Oh well.
But why, amw, why are you tapping away at your screen like a demented woodpecker?
Well, a drip of water fell from my water bottle onto the touchpad of my stupidly expensive Surface Type Cover, and I brushed it away like normal, and then it stopped working. I have had a lot of gear stop working over the years due to humidity, moisture and getting dropped in the toilet. CRT monitors and televisions, spinning hard disks, mobile phones and now keyboards. It's actually the second keyboard that has died since moving to Taiwan, but the previous one only lost a few keys so I used software to map them around and struggled on valiantly for several months. This time it went full dead, instantly. Dead as a dodo, dead as DOS.
The hacking began earlier, when I activated my handy dandy emergency backup Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse app on my phone, which I keep around for exactly these situations. It allows you to type on your Android keyboard and have the text magically appear on your computer, but it also allows you to build tiny custom keyboards with only the keys you need on them, like a remote control. Of course I had to make one for MPC, which is the app I use to watch downloaded TV shows. F11 full screen toggle. F1 shift subtitles back 500ms. F2 shift subtitles forward 500ms. D download subtitles. Left and right arrow to skip forward and back. Space to pause/play. Add volume controls and a touchpad on the bottom and you can access pretty much anything.
And I thought myself, well this is rather useful. This is even better than my actual keyboard, because when I put my tablet back on the bed at the end of cooking dinner and then turn round to serve up the bowl and rinse the pan, I can use my phone to rewind something I missed while my back was briefly turned.
This is the cyberpunk bit, where technology is so ingrained in our lives that it's just there, permeating everything we do, and we don't even really think about it. Pause the show, alt-tab, look up something on wiki, go back to the show, grab a coffee, rewind, continue. That's just how life works now, it's not remarkable, it just is.
So I want my gadgets to support that life, and if they die when some water drops on them, then they fucking fail the cyberpunk test. Which is why I am now pondering if I should get another overpriced Type Cover, or if I could actually adapt to typing on this screen permanently.
I mean, no. No I fucking can't because in order to get a decent sized keyboard on the screen, you take up half the screen space, so while it's fine for drafting a journal entry in Notepad, it's bollocks for using keyboard shortcuts in other apps, or popping open a terminal window to do a dictionary lookup, or whatever other nerd thing I do that makes me different to the average tablet user. It also will never work for gaming, although I would really like to test out the little WASD layout I built on my phone one day.
Thus, I will buy a keyboard next week, but maybe I will buy a full ass detachable bluetooth one that could also work as a keyboard for my phone. Then I could control my cyberdeck maxi and cyberdeck mini side by side. And weep at the grotesque gigantitude of the corporate non-cyberdeckness that is my work laptop.
Anyway, I was thinking about cyberpunk because the other day a bunch of emails got published online from a then-kid who worked with Satoshi Nakamoto in the early days of Bitcoin. Of course it got posted on all the usual nerd websites and it reignited the debate over who the enigmatic creator of Bitcoin actually was. It's a fabulous mystery because the dude made this bodgy little cryptocurrency app, maintained it for a couple of years, and then when it started to get popular, he disappeared. Nobody ever met him in person, or if they did they never told. If he were still alive today, and still had access to his keys, he would own billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin.
There are a million theories about who it was, and one of the better articles on the topic is this one: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf Even that one plays up the "genius" angle and the numerology links a bit too much, I think. Satoshi is like the new Jesus to some people. Most likely he was just a postgrad in Europe who had hung around in the so-called cypherpunk (cryptography/privacy) online community and was more interested in peer-to-peer networking, open source and mathematics than scamming people, laundering money and getting rich. By 2011 his hobby project was drawing attention from the US government and turning into a tool for all kinds of shady activity, so it doesn't surprise me he just said fuck it and gave up in despair. (One candidate for Satoshi's identity committed suicide in 2011, which could explain why the mystery has never been publicly solved.)
Every time this mystery comes up again a new generation of gumshoes hop on the case. "Satoshi uses two spaces after a period! That proves he was American!" Say what now?
It's funny to see young internet sleuths try to guess at what two spaces after a period really means. Never mind the fact that it was quite normal for people to type that way well into the 2000s, several text email clients and popular UNIX-based text editors and text processing tools defaulted (and still default) to auto-justification with two spaces after dot. "But he used Windows, you can tell from the PDF metadata! He's obviously a Windows guy, otherwise why would Bitcoin be a Windows app?" And the nerdly speculation continues. The point is that this shit only happened 15 years ago and already there is an entire generation of people who imagine what life was like back then based on early childhood memories or internet legends and hearsay, and sometimes it will bring them to dumb conclusions.
In the case of figuring out the identity of some probably dead guy on the internet, doesn't really matter, that's just a fun mystery for a Sunday afternoon. But sometimes people make serious decisions based on ignorance of stuff that literally happened in the lifetimes of other people who are still around, and that makes me wonder what stupid stuff I assumed and acted on while my elders were rolling their eyes. And maybe the real marker of getting old is when you see people getting stuff wrong and then just think... oh well. It's not worth it.
And that makes me feel even punker. Like, when you're so punk you can't even be bothered arguing over punkiness.
So, to all those who would say that my tablet is not cyberpunk enough and actually I should have a ridiculous mechanical keyboard spraypainted in custom colors and a fucking video card that sounds like a vacuum cleaner to run my GPT models, I say phuq you, with a ph because that's elite. Also I was there, I lived that time, and the computers weren't as good as you imagine, tablets are a million times better. Except for the annoying spell correction which fucks up my deliberate non-capitalization of "i". You know, 15 years from now someone will read this and look at the upper case "I"s and conclude I must be the real Satoshi. Fuckin...
My keyboard died, you see.
Living in a humid, tropical country, and in a studio apartment which only has a bed in it, and being a mega nerd, my computer takes a royal thrashing. When I get home from work, I turn on my computer. When I wake up in the morning, I turn on my computer. My computer is my TV, my games console, my notebook, my newspaper, my library, my flash cards, my post office, my everything. That is how I live a minimal lifestyle. Everything I need aside from food, clothing and shelter is in my computer.
My computer is a Surface Pro. Which is to say it's not a desktop. It's not even a laptop. It's a tablet, albeit a tablet running a full-blown desktop operating system. It is my cyberdeck.
When we read cyberpunk novels in the 1980s and 1990s, we imagined cyberdecks to be something like the portable computers of the era - big chunky keyboards that you plugged into stuff. Plug into one of the ubiquitous monitors or flashing video screens around the neon-drenched metropolis to hack the planet, or plug directly into your brain so you can go into cyberspace... which at the time meant an actual, three dimensional virtual reality, and not just military jargon for the internet.
Well that never happened. Virtual reality was a flop. It was a flop in the 1990s, then it was a flop again in the 2000s, then it was a flop again in the 2010s and if it doesn't flop again in the 2020s I will eat my hat. (Joke's on you, I don't own a hat! Ha!) Yes, I still dream of getting a sexy metal socket installed in my skull so I can literally "jack in" to the matrix, but I've accepted that's one of those sci-fi fantasies that's likely to forever remain a fantasy. Turns out the human body doesn't really like to have its optical (or even auditory) inputs hijacked for hours on end. We stupid bags of meat prefer to grab shiny objects and poke at them with our fleshy appendages. ME OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEADS WITH OPEN SOURCE CD etc etc.
So instead of getting cyberdecks that were all keyboard, no screen, we got cyberdecks that were all screen, no keyboard. They're almost cool, except nobody using them is wearing leather jackets and sunglasses at night. In fact, your grandma uses one. That's cool in a Star Trek way, but definitely not in a cyberpunk way. Oh well.
But why, amw, why are you tapping away at your screen like a demented woodpecker?
Well, a drip of water fell from my water bottle onto the touchpad of my stupidly expensive Surface Type Cover, and I brushed it away like normal, and then it stopped working. I have had a lot of gear stop working over the years due to humidity, moisture and getting dropped in the toilet. CRT monitors and televisions, spinning hard disks, mobile phones and now keyboards. It's actually the second keyboard that has died since moving to Taiwan, but the previous one only lost a few keys so I used software to map them around and struggled on valiantly for several months. This time it went full dead, instantly. Dead as a dodo, dead as DOS.
The hacking began earlier, when I activated my handy dandy emergency backup Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse app on my phone, which I keep around for exactly these situations. It allows you to type on your Android keyboard and have the text magically appear on your computer, but it also allows you to build tiny custom keyboards with only the keys you need on them, like a remote control. Of course I had to make one for MPC, which is the app I use to watch downloaded TV shows. F11 full screen toggle. F1 shift subtitles back 500ms. F2 shift subtitles forward 500ms. D download subtitles. Left and right arrow to skip forward and back. Space to pause/play. Add volume controls and a touchpad on the bottom and you can access pretty much anything.
And I thought myself, well this is rather useful. This is even better than my actual keyboard, because when I put my tablet back on the bed at the end of cooking dinner and then turn round to serve up the bowl and rinse the pan, I can use my phone to rewind something I missed while my back was briefly turned.
This is the cyberpunk bit, where technology is so ingrained in our lives that it's just there, permeating everything we do, and we don't even really think about it. Pause the show, alt-tab, look up something on wiki, go back to the show, grab a coffee, rewind, continue. That's just how life works now, it's not remarkable, it just is.
So I want my gadgets to support that life, and if they die when some water drops on them, then they fucking fail the cyberpunk test. Which is why I am now pondering if I should get another overpriced Type Cover, or if I could actually adapt to typing on this screen permanently.
I mean, no. No I fucking can't because in order to get a decent sized keyboard on the screen, you take up half the screen space, so while it's fine for drafting a journal entry in Notepad, it's bollocks for using keyboard shortcuts in other apps, or popping open a terminal window to do a dictionary lookup, or whatever other nerd thing I do that makes me different to the average tablet user. It also will never work for gaming, although I would really like to test out the little WASD layout I built on my phone one day.
Thus, I will buy a keyboard next week, but maybe I will buy a full ass detachable bluetooth one that could also work as a keyboard for my phone. Then I could control my cyberdeck maxi and cyberdeck mini side by side. And weep at the grotesque gigantitude of the corporate non-cyberdeckness that is my work laptop.
Anyway, I was thinking about cyberpunk because the other day a bunch of emails got published online from a then-kid who worked with Satoshi Nakamoto in the early days of Bitcoin. Of course it got posted on all the usual nerd websites and it reignited the debate over who the enigmatic creator of Bitcoin actually was. It's a fabulous mystery because the dude made this bodgy little cryptocurrency app, maintained it for a couple of years, and then when it started to get popular, he disappeared. Nobody ever met him in person, or if they did they never told. If he were still alive today, and still had access to his keys, he would own billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin.
There are a million theories about who it was, and one of the better articles on the topic is this one: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.10257v14.pdf Even that one plays up the "genius" angle and the numerology links a bit too much, I think. Satoshi is like the new Jesus to some people. Most likely he was just a postgrad in Europe who had hung around in the so-called cypherpunk (cryptography/privacy) online community and was more interested in peer-to-peer networking, open source and mathematics than scamming people, laundering money and getting rich. By 2011 his hobby project was drawing attention from the US government and turning into a tool for all kinds of shady activity, so it doesn't surprise me he just said fuck it and gave up in despair. (One candidate for Satoshi's identity committed suicide in 2011, which could explain why the mystery has never been publicly solved.)
Every time this mystery comes up again a new generation of gumshoes hop on the case. "Satoshi uses two spaces after a period! That proves he was American!" Say what now?
It's funny to see young internet sleuths try to guess at what two spaces after a period really means. Never mind the fact that it was quite normal for people to type that way well into the 2000s, several text email clients and popular UNIX-based text editors and text processing tools defaulted (and still default) to auto-justification with two spaces after dot. "But he used Windows, you can tell from the PDF metadata! He's obviously a Windows guy, otherwise why would Bitcoin be a Windows app?" And the nerdly speculation continues. The point is that this shit only happened 15 years ago and already there is an entire generation of people who imagine what life was like back then based on early childhood memories or internet legends and hearsay, and sometimes it will bring them to dumb conclusions.
In the case of figuring out the identity of some probably dead guy on the internet, doesn't really matter, that's just a fun mystery for a Sunday afternoon. But sometimes people make serious decisions based on ignorance of stuff that literally happened in the lifetimes of other people who are still around, and that makes me wonder what stupid stuff I assumed and acted on while my elders were rolling their eyes. And maybe the real marker of getting old is when you see people getting stuff wrong and then just think... oh well. It's not worth it.
And that makes me feel even punker. Like, when you're so punk you can't even be bothered arguing over punkiness.
So, to all those who would say that my tablet is not cyberpunk enough and actually I should have a ridiculous mechanical keyboard spraypainted in custom colors and a fucking video card that sounds like a vacuum cleaner to run my GPT models, I say phuq you, with a ph because that's elite. Also I was there, I lived that time, and the computers weren't as good as you imagine, tablets are a million times better. Except for the annoying spell correction which fucks up my deliberate non-capitalization of "i". You know, 15 years from now someone will read this and look at the upper case "I"s and conclude I must be the real Satoshi. Fuckin...