In my natural life, I'm on the other end of the techno spectrum... I grew up on horses with a mother obsessed with The Old West (which was convenient, since we live in what is LEFT of the Old West...) it was all cowboys and powwows and stagecoaches and rattlesnakes for me.
It wasn't until I dated a 100% techno geek that I got my first peek into the **present** let alone the future. A coding savant who didn't know how to talk to people, but one of his hobbies was building, managing, and sustaining a networked series of V machines and Z machines to archive and support a whole history of early gaming programs especially ones written in quirky coding languages that never really grew legs.
It was a whole other world and I was fascinated by the culture, the jargon, and the ethical divides in the culture, especially watching it in the 2004-2008 era which really did feel like the front-facing internet being turned over to the capitalists for real.
What I can say is my heart goes out to everyone who still donates their time/ingenuity to keeping Ladders up, I'll tell you that much!
I read Neuromancer only a couple years ago... the neon dreams of black leather cool jacking in through cybernetic implants had already lost it's halcyon glow, its fans too caked with oily dust to truly blow our minds away anymore. After my dance with the digital now (of the time... 2004-2008 era), I admit I ran right back to hay seeds and clunky desktops for doing nothing more than visiting livejournal and avoiding Amazon ever since.
Laaaaame! But I remain fascinated (from a distance) of the privacy-focused technogeeks and hacking futurists who have their fingertips touch-typing the code of what will be...
If you're talking about Z-machines from the text adventure days, I have a game recommendation that might be up your alley: Kentucky Route Zero. It is a surrealist adventure where you wander through rural America meeting interesting people. It has a lot of references (both in how it plays and in the content) to classic text-based adventure games. http://kentuckyroutezero.com/
I have to admit, i am not really much a fan of Neuromancer, perhaps also because i read it long after its influence had permeated the rest of popular culture. I always think about Philip K Dick as defining the genre, but going back and reading his books that's only really the case if you pass it through the visual lens of Ridley Scott, who himself was influenced by Moebius. The genre ended up a weird mash-up of hardboiled crime fic with druggy paranoid ravings set against a hyper-urbanized corporate dystopia filled with gratuitous sleaze and computer nerds reimagined as impossibly cool antiheroes.
I suppose it's that latter aspect that has given it lasting appeal. The way the genre fed back into the real life tech community is perhaps similar to how sci-fi like Star Trek influenced real life scientists. Doesn't matter if the stories were silly, or if the tech didn't pan out quite the way it was imagined, we got to see ourselves as heroes, and that meant something.
The irony is that most of us just grew up to be cogs in the corporate machine, and the ones who imagine themselves disruptors invariably turn out to be bog standard libertarians and/or apologists for fascist regimes. The real "cool hackers" turned out to be those old, bearded university grumps who just continued doing their own thing without trying to change the world at all. I guess that wouldn't make a very good story, though.
Kentucky Route Zero sounds cool.. and I will try it out! Any decent text adventure seems surreal/fantastical in general. There is a real conundrum in trying to find The Right Thing To Say/Do to make something happen. Not just smashing boxes looking for treasure in video games... but trying to think of a problem from the inside out and actively using the language of the gameworld itself.
I read Philip K. Dick long before I read Gibson... and his are the dystopian techno worlds I recognize, although I picture them in more a Terry Gilliam style (Brazil, 12 Monkeys) than Ridley Scott's visions around Blade Runner.
Just last week I listened to a college student confuse the words "utopian" and "dystopian"... in fact, she seemed UNAWARE that "utopia" was a word at all and considered all future-facing future-worlds to be, in fact... dystopias, and that that word means good OR bad communal futures, which felt like the most dystopian thing I'd ever heard in real life.
Mike Judge said in an interview once that when he wrote Idiocracy, he was thought he was looking 100+ years in the future... only to realize 15 years after the movie was made that maybe... he wasn't talking about the future at all. And he has worried ever since that his art and humor actually are changing culture, rather than reflecting culture especially when he realized that people took his dark humor seriously, as if it were an empowerment and approval, rather than the cautionary tales he actually feels he writes.
This seems relevant to what you are saying... a culture lifted as heroes/anti-heroes... gives license to see themselves (or actually be) heroes/anti-heroes, but the problem is being a hero isn't that easy and being a villain is entirely too easy. So the Neuromancer world of the blasted-out technogeek blasting enemies, balls deep in vinyl-dressed cyborgs, and rocketing from pleasure planet to pirate planet to save his own skin (and the world) is absolutely ENTRANCING to the culture that has been waiting to have it's power recognized.
But like with most things... its usually the people who don't WANT incredible power who are decent (and kind) at handling power when/if it arrives in their hands. But the people who crave and chase power are the people who usually fuck everything up for everybody, no matter their original ethical beliefs.
The Steve Wozniaks versus the Steve Jobs of the world?
What is it about the libertarians/fascists/etc... the draw of "I'm an OUTSIDER! I cannot be CAGED OR CONTROLLED OR INFLUENCED!" so they seeing if they can cage/control/influence everyone else. I've never quite understood that flip... but I definitely saw the way that culture chews all around the edges of the techno/programming world for some reason.
Mike Judge really nails modern culture in a way that hits closer to home than most satiricists. Silicon Valley is so close to the reality of working in the tech industry that people who don't work in it can't believe it when i tell them it's practically a documentary.
This issue of people not really getting the point that bad guys are supposed to be bad is something i've seen in a lot of media. Like, in wrestling you're supposed to have faces [goodies] and heels [baddies], but more often than not nowadays the heels end up getting more over [popular] than the faces.
I wonder if it is really a new trend, though? Like Scarface is popular amongst actual criminals, even though it's clearly a story trying to show how awful criminals can actually be. Westerns already went grimdark in the 1960s. And then i think further back - and i have to admit there is a gap of around 2000 years where i don't know anything about literature - but even in antiquity there were stories of gods and "heroes" who murdered and raped and committed all kinds of heinous crimes contrary to the laws of the time, and yet these figures were still feared and revered.
This is why i think sometimes that we haven't changed very much as humans. I mean, satirists were writing about bread and circuses 2000 years ago. There seems to be a certain corner of society that just does not give much of a fuck about ethics or morality, or maybe they just don't think through the consequences of what life would be like if everyone embraced that sort of nihilism. Odds are they would not be the post-apocalyptic badasses coming out on top, they would either be the ones crushed under the boot of the richest scumbag with the biggest army, or they'd remain his cowering peons. So why is the idea so appealing to people? Surely the fantasy of being rich and carefree in a world that doesn't fucking suck is a better fantasy?
I wonder if it's genetic, if some people are just wired that way. Or flip it around, if other people like me are wired to be anxious about stuff that perhaps we shouldn't be so anxious about? I mean, seeing as thousands of years later we are all still here... Maybe humankind needs both kinds of people to balance each other out?
Even the melodramas of Greek/Roman mythology... there were lines that were not to be crossed, and although characters were complicated (and very fallible) no god was seen as "perfect". Zeus was the salvation of his divine siblings, but he wasn't seen as "good" even though he WAS worshipped for his power/authority over the weather.... but it's not like his devotees were like, "That Zeus really makes sensible decisions and therefore we pay tribute!" it was more like, "I'm afraid Zeus will flatten the crops if I don't pay tribute." He wasn't a role model, he was a god.
Satire generally hits closer to the truth than almost anything else can, even straight truth. I love this clip of GWAR on Sally Jesse Raphael in the early 1990s. SJR was a daytime exploitation show masquerading as a talk show, in the same way GWAR is a satirical performance art+metal band masquerading as a group of bloodthirsty rock-aliens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8wwxYrMOvE
"Everywhere you look, you see horrible things. People are being run over by tanks, people are being beaten by the cops, there are new sexual diseases. Obviously the human race is in love with self-destruction, we're just fulfilling a CONSUMER NEED, Joan!"
Man this era of trash talkshow TV was the best, wasn't it? Sally, Joan, Geraldo, Donahue, Jerry, my sister and i watched them all, whenever we had a day off school or came home just early enough to catch the last ones. And you'd get all these "freaks" showing up, everything from club kids to metalers, and occasionally you get a segment as hilarious as this one! Fantastic!
By the way, just to finish on this thread and making a PBS connection, did you see Mike Judge's new stop-motion show In The Know? It's a satire of a cringey PBS interviewer and the other folks at the local station. Fairly amusing, if not as laugh-out-loud funny as some of his other stuff.
No, I've never heard of "In the Know" but I'll be looking for it!
Strangely enough, it's only this outsider daytime low-loss talk shows that would even talk to the various "freaks" and it turns out most of the time they were just people... who cared about different things than "everybody else", right?
It wasn't until I dated a 100% techno geek that I got my first peek into the **present** let alone the future. A coding savant who didn't know how to talk to people, but one of his hobbies was building, managing, and sustaining a networked series of V machines and Z machines to archive and support a whole history of early gaming programs especially ones written in quirky coding languages that never really grew legs.
It was a whole other world and I was fascinated by the culture, the jargon, and the ethical divides in the culture, especially watching it in the 2004-2008 era which really did feel like the front-facing internet being turned over to the capitalists for real.
What I can say is my heart goes out to everyone who still donates their time/ingenuity to keeping Ladders up, I'll tell you that much!
I read Neuromancer only a couple years ago... the neon dreams of black leather cool jacking in through cybernetic implants had already lost it's halcyon glow, its fans too caked with oily dust to truly blow our minds away anymore. After my dance with the digital now (of the time... 2004-2008 era), I admit I ran right back to hay seeds and clunky desktops for doing nothing more than visiting livejournal and avoiding Amazon ever since.
Laaaaame!
But I remain fascinated (from a distance) of the privacy-focused technogeeks and hacking futurists who have their fingertips touch-typing the code of what will be...
Reply
I have to admit, i am not really much a fan of Neuromancer, perhaps also because i read it long after its influence had permeated the rest of popular culture. I always think about Philip K Dick as defining the genre, but going back and reading his books that's only really the case if you pass it through the visual lens of Ridley Scott, who himself was influenced by Moebius. The genre ended up a weird mash-up of hardboiled crime fic with druggy paranoid ravings set against a hyper-urbanized corporate dystopia filled with gratuitous sleaze and computer nerds reimagined as impossibly cool antiheroes.
I suppose it's that latter aspect that has given it lasting appeal. The way the genre fed back into the real life tech community is perhaps similar to how sci-fi like Star Trek influenced real life scientists. Doesn't matter if the stories were silly, or if the tech didn't pan out quite the way it was imagined, we got to see ourselves as heroes, and that meant something.
The irony is that most of us just grew up to be cogs in the corporate machine, and the ones who imagine themselves disruptors invariably turn out to be bog standard libertarians and/or apologists for fascist regimes. The real "cool hackers" turned out to be those old, bearded university grumps who just continued doing their own thing without trying to change the world at all. I guess that wouldn't make a very good story, though.
Reply
I read Philip K. Dick long before I read Gibson... and his are the dystopian techno worlds I recognize, although I picture them in more a Terry Gilliam style (Brazil, 12 Monkeys) than Ridley Scott's visions around Blade Runner.
Just last week I listened to a college student confuse the words "utopian" and "dystopian"... in fact, she seemed UNAWARE that "utopia" was a word at all and considered all future-facing future-worlds to be, in fact... dystopias, and that that word means good OR bad communal futures, which felt like the most dystopian thing I'd ever heard in real life.
Mike Judge said in an interview once that when he wrote Idiocracy, he was thought he was looking 100+ years in the future... only to realize 15 years after the movie was made that maybe... he wasn't talking about the future at all. And he has worried ever since that his art and humor actually are changing culture, rather than reflecting culture especially when he realized that people took his dark humor seriously, as if it were an empowerment and approval, rather than the cautionary tales he actually feels he writes.
This seems relevant to what you are saying... a culture lifted as heroes/anti-heroes... gives license to see themselves (or actually be) heroes/anti-heroes, but the problem is being a hero isn't that easy and being a villain is entirely too easy. So the Neuromancer world of the blasted-out technogeek blasting enemies, balls deep in vinyl-dressed cyborgs, and rocketing from pleasure planet to pirate planet to save his own skin (and the world) is absolutely ENTRANCING to the culture that has been waiting to have it's power recognized.
But like with most things... its usually the people who don't WANT incredible power who are decent (and kind) at handling power when/if it arrives in their hands. But the people who crave and chase power are the people who usually fuck everything up for everybody, no matter their original ethical beliefs.
The Steve Wozniaks versus the Steve Jobs of the world?
What is it about the libertarians/fascists/etc... the draw of "I'm an OUTSIDER! I cannot be CAGED OR CONTROLLED OR INFLUENCED!" so they seeing if they can cage/control/influence everyone else. I've never quite understood that flip... but I definitely saw the way that culture chews all around the edges of the techno/programming world for some reason.
Reply
This issue of people not really getting the point that bad guys are supposed to be bad is something i've seen in a lot of media. Like, in wrestling you're supposed to have faces [goodies] and heels [baddies], but more often than not nowadays the heels end up getting more over [popular] than the faces.
I wonder if it is really a new trend, though? Like Scarface is popular amongst actual criminals, even though it's clearly a story trying to show how awful criminals can actually be. Westerns already went grimdark in the 1960s. And then i think further back - and i have to admit there is a gap of around 2000 years where i don't know anything about literature - but even in antiquity there were stories of gods and "heroes" who murdered and raped and committed all kinds of heinous crimes contrary to the laws of the time, and yet these figures were still feared and revered.
This is why i think sometimes that we haven't changed very much as humans. I mean, satirists were writing about bread and circuses 2000 years ago. There seems to be a certain corner of society that just does not give much of a fuck about ethics or morality, or maybe they just don't think through the consequences of what life would be like if everyone embraced that sort of nihilism. Odds are they would not be the post-apocalyptic badasses coming out on top, they would either be the ones crushed under the boot of the richest scumbag with the biggest army, or they'd remain his cowering peons. So why is the idea so appealing to people? Surely the fantasy of being rich and carefree in a world that doesn't fucking suck is a better fantasy?
I wonder if it's genetic, if some people are just wired that way. Or flip it around, if other people like me are wired to be anxious about stuff that perhaps we shouldn't be so anxious about? I mean, seeing as thousands of years later we are all still here... Maybe humankind needs both kinds of people to balance each other out?
Ugh, i dunno.
Reply
Satire generally hits closer to the truth than almost anything else can, even straight truth.
I love this clip of GWAR on Sally Jesse Raphael in the early 1990s. SJR was a daytime exploitation show masquerading as a talk show, in the same way GWAR is a satirical performance art+metal band masquerading as a group of bloodthirsty rock-aliens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8wwxYrMOvE
"Everywhere you look, you see horrible things. People are being run over by tanks, people are being beaten by the cops, there are new sexual diseases. Obviously the human race is in love with self-destruction, we're just fulfilling a CONSUMER NEED, Joan!"
Reply
By the way, just to finish on this thread and making a PBS connection, did you see Mike Judge's new stop-motion show In The Know? It's a satire of a cringey PBS interviewer and the other folks at the local station. Fairly amusing, if not as laugh-out-loud funny as some of his other stuff.
Reply
Strangely enough, it's only this outsider daytime low-loss talk shows that would even talk to the various "freaks" and it turns out most of the time they were just people... who cared about different things than "everybody else", right?
Reply
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