[HN Gopher] J.G. Ballard predicted the rise of social media (2016)
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J.G. Ballard predicted the rise of social media (2016)
Author : ecliptik
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-05-07 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| I _believe_ it was in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where a pair
| of 7 year old brother-sister twins used complimentary and
| contradictory postings -- sometimes assuming eachother's
| identities or creating new ones -- in newsgroups to influence
| public opinion. When disinfo on Facebook and Twitter went nuclear
| in 2015 -2016 those fictional siblings were first to mind
| labrador wrote:
| I think you have it backwards. Snow Crash was published in
| 1992. The article references things Ballard said in the 70's
| and 80's
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I don't think GP is making a point about which came first or
| whatnot. Just sharing a connection they made.
| labrador wrote:
| My apologies then
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| thanks, no problem
| mcculley wrote:
| I think you are thinking of "Locke" and "Demosthenes" in
| Ender's Game.
| notahacker wrote:
| The reality of which was best summarised by
| https://xkcd.com/635/
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| It's ironic how that comic aged far more poorly than the
| original premise it made fun of.
|
| By 2016, anonymous online political commentary was directly
| influencing major world events.
| julianeon wrote:
| I mean only in the aggregate, only if you got a big
| community to do it or got picked up and amplified by a
| political leader. I can't think of any anonymous blog
| posts which changed the world. Movements like Anonymous
| have had an impact, but there's a more to that than
| online screeds. The closest analog might be Q, aka an
| anon like Ron Watkins, but that itself was swept up in a
| larger movement that pushed and pulled in all sorts of
| different directions.
|
| To me the idea of kids posting on Internet forums and
| becoming major political leaders through their
| pseudonyms, through logical language like a modern-day
| version of the Federalist Papers, does seem pretty silly
| in 2024.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Heck, book-length political treatises by anonymous
| insiders barely got any traction
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Hubris
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| Fair point about it being in aggregate would what an
| aggregation it was back in 2014, 2015 and 2016. And it
| was a mix of groups and goals -- some were partisans who
| intentionally disinformed while others were apolitical
| and driven by opportunism and greed. maybe there was some
| overlap, maybe some codependence. But they certainly
| changed the world imho by preventing what would've been a
| more responsible Clinton Administration from managing the
| pandemic in the US for example.
| notahacker wrote:
| By 2016, we'd realised that the way to influence people
| with anonymous political commentary was to do the _exact
| opposite_ of producing detailed, well-reasoned
| arguments...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I'm a huge xkcd hater, but I would give that strip credit
| for unintentionally capturing a snapshot of the internet.
| Most anonymous WordPress blogs languished in obscurity,
| truly people's live journals that no one cared to comment
| on, let alone add you to their blogroll. That era of
| discourse has been superseded by far louder (and dumb and
| obnoxious) Mediums.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| true
| tejtm wrote:
| In Orson Scott Card's "Enders Game" as well. Children had been
| bred and trained to be tactical so Ender's siblings applied
| their talents locally to manipulate geopolitics as a side
| story.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| I think that's actually what I'm thinking of. I think they
| were Ender's siblings, actually Thanks, you saved me from re-
| reading Count Zero too
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| I strongly recommend picking up a physical copy of The Complete
| Stories of JG Ballard [0]. Great to read through from time to
| time. Every story is weird and a little depressing, though, so
| don't read too many at once.
|
| [0] https://archive.org/details/completestorieso00ball
| labrador wrote:
| I love this quote:
|
| _Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We'll
| all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own
| soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will
| become their own TV programmes._
|
| _Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire
| spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-
| tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes,
| selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best
| profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions
| filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these
| together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of
| our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the
| privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually
| unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and
| children demoted to an appropriate supporting role._
|
| Jerry Seinfeld once did an episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting
| Coffee" where he showed the edited version of the day he spent
| with Bob Enstein and the unedited version. It was incredible to
| me how mundane and boring the unedited version was compared to
| the brilliant edited version. That was the point Seinfeld was
| trying to make. We live in a world a world of make believe.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >We live in a world a world of make believe
|
| Closer to we live in the world of simulacra and simulation. We
| see this edited version everywhere, think how actors look in
| TV, how makeup looks in magazines, how people behave in youtube
| videos.... then we collectively become that.
| labrador wrote:
| My friends and family appreciate when I use language they can
| understand so it's a habit I've gotten into, but I do
| appreciate your distinction
| pixl97 wrote:
| In case you didn't know, simulacra and simulation is a
| book.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
| pavlov wrote:
| "My friends and family don't care for fancy words."
|
| "No, you see, it's actually Baudrillard"
|
| This is a neat distillation of a certain type of
| stereotypic HN exchange.
| labrador wrote:
| No stereotypic HN exchange would be complete without a
| meta comment about the comments
| euroderf wrote:
| As layers of metas accrete, the original reality recedes
| into the distance, becoming simulacrum.
| contingencies wrote:
| Larry: _Simulate crumbs? Let them eat bread!_
|
| Jerry: _What do you care if I eat crumbs?_
| whythre wrote:
| "These simulacra crumbs are making me thirsty!"
| lupire wrote:
| Did the edited version create jokes they weren't in the
| unedited?
|
| Or did it just skip over the unfunny parts of a day?
| labrador wrote:
| No new material in the edited version. They cut out the
| unfunny/uninteresting parts
| Yasuraka wrote:
| I wonder how many minutes (seconds?) would make the cut if
| they did the same with all episodes of Seinfeld
| Animats wrote:
| We need a browser add-on which does that to Youtube videos.
|
| The future may be AI generated blithering which is then
| removed by AI summarizers.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The text presented only talks about watching oneself, it doesn't
| mention watching _each other 's_ recording. So it does capture
| some of the self-centeredness, but it's not describing social
| media.
| exogeny wrote:
| Here's a totally random piece of trivia: "social media" as a term
| was coined by the then wife of Seth Goldstein -- who founded a
| few different companies, Turntable.fm being the most notable --
| and was originally the basis of a company he founded that was
| basically an ad network inside of games and apps built inside of
| the Facebook platform.
|
| Seth is an interesting dude and I haven't caught up with him in
| awhile.
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| It sounds like there is some disagreement about who first used
| the term. I wouldn't be surprised if they're all telling the
| truth.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2010/12/09/who-co...
| axblount wrote:
| Ballard, like William Gibson, is one of those people that despite
| having zero technical know how, seems to intuitively understand
| how people interface with technology.
|
| _Crash_ is often seen as completely outlandish, but it 's hard
| to see echoes of Robert Vaughan in today's culture. We watch
| A24's _Civil War_ the same way that Vaughan and Ballard would
| watch a car crash.
| TillE wrote:
| Gibson's "Burning Chrome" casually predicts lifestreaming
| ("simstim"). We don't have the sci-fi tech, but as a social
| phenomenon it's exactly Instagram, parts of Twitch, etc.
| contingencies wrote:
| You say zero technical know how, but Ballard spent some of his
| formative years making his way in a Japanese prison camp in
| China. If you believe the novel ( _Empire of the Sun_ ), part
| of his survival was attributed to combinations of a way with
| language, people, and youthful endurance. But the backdrop was
| very much technical know how - working to obtain increasingly
| scarce necessities, like shoes, and observing first hand the
| impacts of lack thereof. So while his engineering expertise may
| not have been elevated from a theoretical perspective, it
| certainly was deeply and personally grounded in urgent, first
| hand, experiential concern - and all of this across three
| languages or more - perhaps a perfect raw humanist basis for
| the exploration of technology through literature?
| kepano wrote:
| In searching for the primary sources for the quotes in this
| article I found that "Extreme Metaphors" (ISBN 978-0-00-745485-3)
| seems to be the best collection of J. G. Ballard interviews.
|
| Quite a few are collected here:
|
| https://www.jgballard.ca/media/interviews.html
|
| One of the interviews referenced in the OP can be found here:
|
| https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1987_november_i-d_magazine.ht...
| zwischenzug wrote:
| I wrote a similar piece on an earlier artist who I thought was
| similarly prescient, Nam June Paik
|
| https://zwischenzugs.com/2020/01/04/the-astonishing-prescien...
| colinflane wrote:
| And, of course, yesterday's Met Gala had as its theme Ballard's
| story "The Garden of Time". Timely.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| French director Tati's film "Mon Oncle" certainly made satire of
| the obsession with modernity that post WWII France was
| experiencing.
| Funes- wrote:
| >"I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for
| 'reality'--for ordinary reality. It's very difficult to find the
| 'real,' because the environment is totally manufactured."
|
| I'd say just "reality", not necessarily "ordinary". Other than
| that, I agree with Ballard's sentiment. We're starved for
| genuineness, and instead we're compulsively throwing ourselves
| into hyperstimuli-ridden mockeries of essential needs: sex,
| friendship, love, food, stories, competition, playtime,
| spirituality, exploration. It's honestly baffling. And going only
| for their genuine counterparts is such an incredibly lonely
| experience, given the state of the world that we live in
| nowadays, that you'd need incredible willpower to withstand it.
| dbshapco wrote:
| The power of narrative made personal. If we aren't plucked
| chickens we are storytellers. The venue and media have changed,
| from oral tradition around a fire to photons sliding down fibers
| and fingers dancing on keyboards.
|
| Narrative is a powerful and primitive force for humans, how we've
| always sought to impose structure and sense on events, from
| history to religion, to the mundane everyday and the trip abroad.
| Our brains crave narrative and invent it in a vacuum or as the
| interstitial bond between disconnected random events.
|
| We can now own our public narrative and mythologize a heroic and
| extraordinary existence divorced from banal reality of paying
| bills and waiting in queues and going to the washroom and
| changing lightbulbs. Only the highlight reel makes it to prime
| time.
|
| Social media are campaigns to seize control of narrative, to
| bring structure and synthetize relationships, to make sense of
| the world.
|
| Predates print and electronic media, predates recorded history, a
| paradigm shift through Mcluhan's lens (always preferred his
| precursor, Innis).
|
| Fascinating on a meta level, this comment being an example of its
| own thesis.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| I always recommend his short story "Report On An Unidentified
| Space Station":
|
| https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Fellow British dystopian futurist John Brunner sort of did this
| in _Stand on Zanzibar_. Though now that I re-read it, it almost
| seems like VR, or rather the proxy-interactivity of VR, crossed
| with the filter bubble of social media: MR. &
| MRS. EVERYWHERE: CALYPSO "Like the good Lord God in
| the Valley of Bones Engrelay Satelserv made some people
| called Jones. They were not alive and they were not dead -
| They were ee-magi-nary but always ahead. What was
| remarkably and uniquely new - A gadget on the set made them
| look like you! "Watching their sets in a kind of a
| trance Were people in Mexico, people in France. They
| don't chase Jones but the dreams are the same Mr. and Mrs.
| Everywhere, that's the right name! Herr und Frau Uberall or
| les Partout, A gadget on the set makes them look like you.
| "You can't see all the places of interest, Go to the Moon
| and climb Mount Everest, So you stay at home in a
| comfortable chair And rely on Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere!
| Doing all the various things you would like to do, A gadget
| on the set makes them look like you. "Wearing parkas
| and boots made by Gondola You see them on an expedition
| polar. They're sunning on the beach at Martinique
| Using lotion from Guinevere Steel's Beautique. Whether
| you're red, white, black or blue A gadget on the set makes
| them look like you! "When the Everywhere couple crack
| a joke It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk.
| When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose It's the with-it
| view as everyone knows. It may be a rumour or it may be
| true But a gadget on the set has it said by you!
| "English Language Relay Satellite Service Didn't do this
| without any purpose. They know very well what they would
| like - A thousand million people all thinking alike.
| When someone says something you don't ask who - A gadget on
| the set has it said by you! "'What do you think about
| Yatakang?' 'I think the same as the Everywhere gang.'
| 'What do you think of Beninia then?' 'The Everywheres will
| tell me but I don't know when.' Whatever my country and
| whatever my name A gadget on the set makes me think the
| same."
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Every day Ballard gets more right. I suggest you seek out
| interviews with him on Youtube, there are several there.
| haunter wrote:
| >Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We'll all
| be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own
| soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will
| become their own TV programmes.
|
| Tangentially related but I've watched the film La Terra Trema
| (1948) recently. It was made post WW2, shot in one of the poorest
| region of Italy. The most interesting thing about the film that
| 1, everything was shot on location 2, all characters were played
| by locals, all amateur actors 3, we don't know which scenes are
| staged or real (documentary).
|
| And everything works. I never felt that I was watching amateur
| actors. Yes it's an old film but still more fresh than anything
| you see nowadays. And made me think that is it even possible to
| shoot a film like that today? We are all "poisoned" by TV,
| internet, social media, even radio. Would we able to act
| naturally at all? Probably impossible to do a film like that in
| Europe anymore and pretty much in all developed countries too.
| Maybe if it were in Africa or in some remote village in SEA.
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