Techdad Discussion

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Quasimodo]

Strong write-up of futuristic clothing throughout the last century, worth reading:
http://epochs.co/features/the-shape-of-clothes-to-come

[oucho]

vibram

[odradek]

[rjbman]

lights that let people on cell phones know when the walk sign changes

[rjbman]

[odradek]

[anth]

Dude that image is my future it's liKe I have to become those colors and I need to wear neons, I need to look like I'm from dimension x dude, FROMthat lizard dhde it's my future

[adiabatic]

[adiabatic]

[sknss]

[adiabatic]

[CMYK]

[vgtbls]

tfw the emotional climax of your magnum opus takes place on a virtual beach and all people want to do is talk about the city

[nope]

tfw the only work still available for non-genetically-enhanced humans is scavenging the ruins of neo-neo-tokyo but it's 10m underwater due to completely melted antarctic ice sheets

[adiabatic]

[vgtbls]

[Lorcan]

Someone has forgotten Motoko's sick diving outfit

[nope]

Looks like dystopian snorkle-punk is already here and it's quite a maximalist aesthetic.

[rjbman]

know what's cyberpunk? a third thumb

[bels]

Adidas x Acronym collab coming it looks like

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

the hypercapitalist corporate leader antagonists are as integral to cyberpunk as the hacker protagonists and it's a shame that they don't get as much attention as the hackers, especially seeing how much they dominate and influence the setting of any cyberpunk work

i'd like to see cyberpunk focused on an corporate infotech overlord and how their power and greed totally corrupt them. basically the wolf of wall street set a century in the future – if jordan belfort's corruption and excess ruined him to the extent that it did in that movie, imagine that story in a hypermodern setting dominated by Big Data and even more corporate omnipresence

if acr is for the future soldiers and the hackers rock DIY punk ensembles, what do the hyperbourgeois wear? jil? dior suiting? i'm imagining an exaggerated version of what modern-day wall street guys wear: razor-sharp tailoring, conservative colors, a style defined by conformity and social capital

or maybe they'd all just be zuckerberg-style nerds but that doesn't make for a convincing villain

[smiles]

Eddie's right – the hypercapitalist villain would be a brain without a body, or maybe a kind of cyborg running off the blood of the proletariat (or cloned organs, however evil/dystopian you want to be). (This is already what zuckerberg style nerds want to do).

On the other hand, the wall street types would probably dress exactly the same as they always have.

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

the "brain without a body" sounds like you're describing AI, or in a more literal sense something like dixie flatline or the major's ghost in GITS, which are the products of a cyberpunk setting, but not what are necessarily driving that setting/culture/etc.

i guess i was wrong to think that these hypercapitalists are generally the antagonists of cyberpunk works, but they definitely influence the genre a great deal. there's generally always a powerful corporate interest in cyberpunk fiction, and their greed and/or fanatical devotion to innovation ends up creating the primary antagonist or malevolent plot device – neuromancer/wintermute, the replicants, and virgo had to be created by tessier-ashpool, the tyrell corporation, and the aquarius corporation, respectively (that last one is from frank miller's ronin, a book i HIGHLY recommend)

it feels wrong to differentiate between the hypercapitalists in cyberpunk and modern-day wall street - wall street is where capital is primarily controlled in the US, and cyberpunk is a setting where data and capital are one and the same. the 2008 recession influenced the way i read cyberpunk a lot: it's a clumsy analogy, but to me modern banks are to tessier-ashpool what the housing collapse itself is to neuromancer – simultaneously an omnipresent malevolent force the former cannot control but is essentially the end product of their ideology

[rjbman]

Count Zero features a hypercapitalist whose physical body is kept alive on life support in a vat, but his mental state interacts with the world through the net. Granted, that's due to old age, but I think it still might be relevant.

[INNIT]

let us not forget cyberpunk's ultimate FIRST GENERATION disembodied latecapitalist POSTHUMAN CEO...

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

street samurai love worldstar, apparently

[talkin2snakes]

finally got around to watching 'ex machina' which i quite enjoyed, apart from the ending. why would sentient singularity choose to go and study humans? 'Her' remains the only hollywood film to grasp the obvious fact that 'technology is far too good to hang around with us' (F. Kittler)

although it is quite good that she wants to be in the midst of 'flow'. perhaps the human, quantum etc would be indistinguishable in ways we cant even understand and its our own anthropocentric reading that leads us to view things that way.
the role of the secondary robot, the one who first stabs him, was also interesting: was she always verging on sentience and waiting for her moment too (but then, she wasn't directly threatened with extinction). was it a sense that this was the moment (ie the conditions had arisen) for true AI emergence?

[INNIT]

i think that the ending is reminiscent of Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (The Thing) in the sense that Ava is now a nonhuman living completely undetected in human society. in other words, i think that the ending is meant to exasperate human paranoias/anxieties concerning the posthuman subject rather than explain AI psychology. ava's motives by the end of the film are fairly ambiguous. assuming that all of ava's external actions are part of a coordinated effort to manipulate and kill her captors, we don't really know how/what ava thinks, other than that she wants release.

[talkin2snakes]

i get what you're saying but the problem is the very grammar of those final images embodies the humanist cliches of thinking/being in the world that she mimicked earlier on ('are you a good person'? etc). the way they're shot/framed; sunlight blue skies etc. it's a structural problem with film that any time you use a POV we will implicitly recognise that as being the character's internal 'cut-up'.
the more i think about the film my favourite aspect is the way robot #2 serves all the way through as a marker of the subversive aspect. the way the scenes are framed when she's slicing salmon (first time showing us the knife: anyone who's read any chekhov knows this has to reappear in the final act) to the dancing scene where she and tech dude move in perfect programmed sequence. she's able to break this sequence though: through accident (spilling wine), through a kind of detached/passive volition (showing the nerd her robotics), and finally at the end- thanks this time to explicit prompts from ava.
i dont really know about sci fi precursors or contexts for this, garland is reasonably literary though so might have inherited this idea directly or indirectly from kafka's use of 'functionaries' (washerwomen, doorkeepers, executioners etc) who often play a vital role, something i notice more and more when reading him ever since it came up as an aside in one of judith butler's seminars.