Flutterby™! Cyberpunk 2002-05-30 16:50:49+00

I finished Pat Cadigan's Synners on the bus this morning. Remember cyberpunk? Breathless prose delivered through a half-inch fuel line with no restrictor plates, prose so lean we risked melting our brains with the nitrous? Anyway, I got to thinking about the future that Cadigan and Gibson and Sterling et al imagined. Remember...

...when "the net" was going to spontaneously create intelligence that would help us fight off the encroachment of the conspiracy?

Instead we discovered that when our collective unconscious comes alive the resulting being sits on the couch watching TV and drinking PBR, belching, farting and hollering "m3 t00!!!" any time we try to communicate.

...when Wired was a crude rip-off of Mondo 2000 which was a popularization of the drug-addled Reality Hackers, but that was okay because anyone who actually knew read InterTek?

Then Steve Steinberg went off to work for Wired, and Wired became the next Cosmo, and the only magazine left with any technical insight is Forbes, which used to be derided as a lifestyle rag.

...when patents were going to be about who controlled the PetaBaseT jack into your thoughts?

Now they cover ways we could swing on a swing or calling writev() with a pointer list that changes.

...when piracy was about stealing the plans for that jack and building the devices in your parents basement?

Now it's about going to the bathroom during commercial breaks (original article costs $3), or Finding ways to consume the latest consumer crap before anyone else.

...when rebellion meant breaking into the computers of the megalopoly, finding out that all of the friends you could turn to for help have been "disappeared", being pursued through the underground by agents of the conspiracy?

Today it's giving one super-hyped effects movie a bigger opening weekend than another which happens to be a sequel to one of the worst movies ever that still did $400M, as if opening weekend could possibly be about anything but blindly succumbing to hype.

Now that the punk hero has sold out his band-mates I guess it's fitting that cyberpunk has lost its luster, but damn-it I want technology to be fun and edgy and maybe a little bit dangerous again, rather than just another commodity for the half-wit MBAs to pimp. I want heroes that go beyond the BOFH and Sluggy's Bun-Bun, because taking pleasure in slapping around the incompetent when we're bailing their sorry asses out yet again is just a little too close to reality.

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