[HN Gopher] High Tech High Life: William Gibson and Timothy Lear...
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High Tech High Life: William Gibson and Timothy Leary in
Conversation (1989)
Author : prismatic
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-02-19 05:48 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mondo2000.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mondo2000.com)
| axydlbaaxr wrote:
| What a blast from the past! Mondo2000...we had such glorious
| hopes for the future....
| mindcrime wrote:
| Had?
|
| I mean, yeah, OK, obviously things have gone off the rails in a
| lot of ways. And a lot of our expectations didn't work out the
| way we expected.
|
| The question is, is this situation recoverable? Maybe the
| sentence above should end with the word "yet" as in
|
| "And a lot of our expectations didn't work out the way we
| expected, yet".
|
| We don't have to lean into defeatism and give up. Maybe it's
| just time to step back, think really hard and long, do some
| strategizing, and figure out a way to get the train back on the
| rails?
| narag wrote:
| _We don 't have to lean into defeatism and give up._
|
| I think the problem is _we_. Was there a _we_ before? Maybe
| but there is no _we_ anymore for sure.
|
| The Net used to be kind of a different world that escaped how
| the offline world worked. But the old powers have crawled
| back into.
| mindcrime wrote:
| True, if you interpret "we" as "the community of people on
| the Internet" (who in the early days were mostly hackers,
| academics, and technologists of various sorts), then that
| interpretation is no longer valid. Now "The Internet" is
| roughly synonymous with "everybody".
|
| But the group of people that made up the "old we" (to the
| extent that such a thing ever existed) still exists. That's
| the "we" I'm referring to now. So the question, to my mind,
| is whether or not there is still a distinct "we" who had
| grand visions of what the Internet and technology could do
| for society (in a good way) and whether there are still
| actions we could take to encourage development in a
| positive direction.
|
| I _think_ the answer is "yes", but that may just be
| wishful thinking. But I try to be an optimist.
| narag wrote:
| _But the group of people that made up the "old we" (to
| the extent that such a thing ever existed) still exists._
|
| I'm afraid that even if that's true, the us vs. them
| mindset is polluting the air.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Nice. Two really interesting people. A new friend of mine
| directed the movie "Timothy Leary's Dead", which coincidentally I
| bought this morning before I saw this HN link. My Dad's
| girlfriend also knew Leary and I plan on watching this movie with
| her and my Dad.
|
| Also, I had forgotten about Mondo 2000 - nice blast from the
| past.
|
| Also part 2: Gibson, if you ignore a few classic writers like
| James Joyce, is my favorite author. I may be really wrong, but I
| expect that the social structures in his cyber punk books (like
| the Sprawl, Corporate Ecologies, etc.) may actually be our
| future.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Those social structures are certainly salient, but do -
| sincerely - hope we see some positive alternative become
| prominent in the public mind.
| donorman wrote:
| Hehe, I'm old enough to have read the sprawl trilogy in my youth,
| good read indeed. I also remember seeing Gibson interviewed in
| pretty much every single paper and magazine out there in the
| begining of the Internet era because of he's writing regarding
| Cyberspace. Internet went bigger than expected but VR did take a
| lot more time than I initially expected. The start of a very
| interesting non the least! :-)
| mindcrime wrote:
| On a semi-related note: I was watching some movie or TV show
| recently, and there's a scene that goes approximately like this:
|
| Character A: "something, something, something, Doors of
| Perception."
|
| Character B: "Okay, Timothy Leary."
|
| Character A: "Huxley."
|
| Character B: "What?"
|
| Character A: "Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, not Timothy
| Leary."
|
| The thing is, I can't remember now what that was from and it's
| bugging the shit out of me. Any chance anybody here is familiar
| with the work in question and could tell me what it was?
| [deleted]
| johndoughy wrote:
| I think it's from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch:
|
| https://transcripts.thedealr.net/script.php/black-mirror-ban...
| mindcrime wrote:
| That sounds like it. Thanks!
|
| The funny thing is, while I have seen that, it was a long
| time ago (right after Bandersnatch came out). But I have the
| nagging notion that I saw this recently.
|
| I suppose either somebody else riffed on that scene, OR
| (perhaps more likely) something I was doing led me to go back
| and watch a brief clip from Bandersnatch on Youtube or
| something, and it was in fact that very scene. Funny that I
| can't recall the details now though. I just recall the "OK
| Timothy Leary" and "it was Huxley, not Leary" thing. Weird.
|
| Edit: Aaaah... _maybe_ what I 'm remembering is this
| relatively recent HN thread which actually mentioned that
| scene.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29631782
|
| That thread itself being a discussion of Huxley and The Doors
| of Perception.
| criddell wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. I had no idea that Mondo 2000 was all
| online now. I think about that publication often and now I can
| check my memories.
|
| I was always fascinated reading about nootropics and smart drugs
| but never had the opportunity to give any a try. Drinking a cup
| of coffee is the closest I've been to that scene. It would be
| interesting to talk to some people who were deep into that 30
| years ago and see what they think about it now.
| EL_Loco wrote:
| Ah, fond memories of reading Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing, and
| there was also 2600 and a few smaller ones, and BBSs made you
| feel like an early resident of the future sprawl. I'll just link
| here to a cool comic that sometimes pops up on HN, and is pretty
| good regarding the whole vibe of the period:
|
| https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Mondo2000 - how decadence, ego and extreme parties led us to
| forget the fear of totalitarian uses of technology, while said
| uses became the Palantir darling of Peter Thiel's vast money club
| of clubs.
|
| source: organizing committee for pre-Mondo, did not get busted in
| that raid, you know which one I mean
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I am grateful for this interesting thread -- I did write that
| knee-jerk bit above, out of some amount of anguish, I also had
| fun party dreams of the future at that time. The original
| artwork in pre-Mondo (not naming it here) was some of the best
| I had seen in print, and I have seen a lot of print. "stay
| curious" and I will try too..
| api wrote:
| Different time. It wasn't a totalitarian zeitgeist. The 80s and
| 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left)
| vibe. The art and music was darker and edgier on the surface
| but the view of the future was optimistic.
|
| Today you have authoritarian populist nationalism on the right
| and authoritarian technocracy on the left. The mood is
| pessimistic and everyone is arguing about who should be forced
| to think or do what. The music is trite and superficially happy
| and everyone is seething with hate.
|
| Machines are tools. Technology follows the zeitgeist.
| Everything is being bent toward totalitarianism and
| surveillance because that is what we are doing with it.
| e40 wrote:
| _> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less
| authoritarian left) vibe._
|
| Huh? The 80's were all Ronald Reagan. The 90's were Bill and
| Hillary Clinton sparking the rise of Newt Gingrich and the
| GOP we have today. Yes, Bill was a Dem, but he was very much
| not a lefty. He got stuff done (the notorious Crime bill)
| done because he was right of center.
|
| Please explain what you mean. I'm guessing I don't get it
| from the words you used.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I am betting that meant that the tech scene had a stronger
| libertarian vibe then (a la John Perry Barlow, say). Of
| course, some critics (I'm thinking of Curtis'
| Hypernormalization[1]) would say that was more like a
| retreat from reality.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
| api wrote:
| You can find counterexamples, but the big difference is how
| people reacted. Almost everyone thought Waco was unjust and
| excessive. Today many people (especially on the left) would
| say they had it coming. Meanwhile the right now openly
| talks about the need to regulate business more and Trump's
| whole message was more about cracking down on others than
| freedom for his base.
|
| Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary
| freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors. Today
| nobody cares. The right would never have tolerated January
| 6th. Now half of them think maybe democracy is a bad idea
| anyway.
|
| If you'd released an expose back then of Facebook and its
| shadow profiles, people would have almost universally
| freaked out and boycotted Facebook. Today nobody cares.
|
| Nobody would have gone for locked down devices and app
| stores then. Look up the reaction to Microsoft's original
| "trusted computing" initiative and contrast it with today's
| acceptance of walled gardens. Nobody cares.
|
| Back then we built personal computers with the goal of
| serving the user. Now the shift is toward thin clients to
| get people into cloud silos to... uhh... serve the user in
| a different sense... more like that old "to serve man"
| Twilight Zone episode.
|
| The biggest difference I see today is general public
| acceptance of technocracy, surveillance, and
| authoritarianism.
| morelisp wrote:
| > Back then the left would have drawn the line at
| arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker
| protestors.
|
| Back then, truckers wouldn't have been suspicious of a
| basic public health program. Reagan & Clinton (and
| similar conservative-to-third-way politics in other
| countries) did a fine job putting a wedge between
| liberals and labor. That the allegiances have changed
| doesn't necessarily mean any part of the political
| program has.
|
| (Waco is also not as clear-cut as you make it; it was,
| let's say, bipartisanly popular at the time, then equally
| unpopular 5 years later which seems to be what you
| remember, and today I don't think anyone is thinking much
| about it at all.)
| e40 wrote:
| You make really good points, thanks.
|
| I think the apathy is because we've been bombarded with
| evil for so many years, and the rise of the quiet
| minority (30+%), who have very different values than what
| we saw every day on TV and in newspapers. Those people
| previously had little to no voice, but because of
| Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, etc, etc, they were able to
| band together and elect a criminal and start to take
| control of local and state elections, to remake the
| progressive world that we all thought we lived in.
|
| Btw, even back 20 years I was ringing the alarm bells of
| authoritarianism and surveillance, to my friends (most of
| whom are way smarter than I am) and not a single one of
| them gave any shits. I really don't understand it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this is interesting and I agree with some of it, however,
| please "Nobody cares." is more drama than fact. I care
| and so do you. Saying its opposite is dramatic, but maybe
| not constructive. tough days to be optimistic,these days,
| I agree with that. still making things here though!
| VictorPath wrote:
| > The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less
| authoritarian left) vibe.
|
| From 1993 on, Louis Rossetto heavily pushed the idea in Wired
| magazine that Silicon Valley was heavily libertarian[1]. I
| had not been to the Bay much at the time and actually
| believed this was true of the Valley.
|
| > authoritarian technocracy on the left
|
| Like who, the Kellogg's workers who were on strike? The GM
| strike in Mexico? Even the left in what remains of non-
| gentrified Oakland is different than the bubble of upper
| middle class Bay FAANG liberals.
|
| [1] By libertarian I mean libertarian in the American sense,
| which nowadays is right-libertarian.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| complicit with the "surveillance capitalism" model of
| profiling and tracking every adult with disposable income,
| and then some. That is in itself, enough to convict the
| American political class, to my mind. As said more than
| forty years ago in America and more true than ever, the
| "two party" system is not really.
| cheese_van wrote:
| >The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less
| authoritarian left) vibe.
|
| Looking back on it, it's hard to decipher. I explained to my
| son that once, a movie usher asked me to put out my cigarette
| at a midnight movie. This while the rest of the patrons were
| smoking pot, which was so commonplace at midnight movies that
| the authorities just ignored it. Those decades were a strange
| battleground between intellectual freedom (and hedonism)
| jousting with the establishment. This decade, I don't feel
| that promise of wholly unbridled intellectual freedom, and
| the excitement it caused. I suppose the establishment won.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| totalitarianism and authoritarianism should not be used
| interchangeably, they're opposites. Totalitarianism is mass
| mobilization and uninhibited violence, think Cultural
| Revolution, authoritarianism is, to quote Gibson given that
| we're in a thread about him, Singapore's 'Disneyland with the
| death penalty'. Radical depolitization.
|
| People are more apathetic than hateful (today's 'riots'
| hardly deserve the label by historical standards) and there
| is more of an indifference than a pessimism. You're not told
| what to think (or compelled to action), but rather told what
| not to say (or how not to act), and otherwise left alone.
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