#cyberspace trilogy

[faithconsumingcope]

reading gibson’s sprawl/cyberspace trilogy for the 3rd time and i’ve *completely* come around to the feeling that count zero & mona lisa overdrive are better than neuromancer. like yes i love neuromancer & it’s one of the most influential works of sci-fi ever but the other 2 are just better books with more compelling characters, more contemplative setting, and more potent vibes.

[cyberpunkonline]

Cyberspace Sentinels: Tracing the Evolution and Eccentricities of ICE

As we hark back to the embryonic stages of cyber defense in the late 1990s, we find ourselves in a digital petri dish where the first firewalls and antivirus programs are mere amoebas against a sea of threats. The digital defenses of yore, much like the drawbridges and moats of medieval castles, have transformed into a labyrinth of algorithms and machine learning guards in today's complex cybersecurity ecosystem. The sophistication of these systems isn't just technical; it's theatrical.

The drama unfolds spectacularly in the cyberpunk genre, where Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) are the dramatis personae. Let's peruse the virtual halls of cyberpunk media to encounter the most deadly, and delightfully weird, iterations of ICE, juxtaposing these fictional behemoths against their real-world counterparts.

We commence our odyssey with William Gibson’s "Neuromancer," where ICE is not only a barrier but a perilous landscape that can zap a hacker's consciousness into oblivion. Gibson gives us Black ICE, a lethal barrier to data larceny that kills the intruding hacker, a grim forerunner to what cybersecurity could become in an age where the stakes are life itself.

CD Projekt Red’s "Cyberpunk 2077" gives us Daemons, digital Cerberuses that gnash and claw at Netrunners with malevolent intent. They symbolize a cyber-Orwellian universe where every keystroke could be a pact with a digital devil.

The chromatic haze of "Ghost in the Shell" offers ICE that intertwines with human cognition, reflecting a reality where software not only defends data but the very sanctity of the human mind.

In Neal Stephenson’s "Snow Crash," the Metaverse is patrolled by ICE that manifests as avatars capable of digital murder. Stephenson's vision is a reminder that in the realm of bytes and bits, the avatar can be as powerful as the sword.

"Matrix" trilogy, portrays ICE as Sentinels — merciless machines tasked with hunting down and eliminating threats, a silicon-carbon ballet of predator and prey.

On the small screen, "Mr. Robot" presents a more realistic tableau — a world where cybersecurity forms the battleground for societal control, with defense systems mirroring modern malware detection and intrusion prevention technologies.

"Ready Player One," both the novel and Spielberg's visual feast, portrays IOI’s Oology Division as a form of corporate ICE, relentless in its pursuit of control over the Oasis, guarding against external threats with a militaristic zeal that mirrors today's corporate cybersecurity brigades.

And let’s not overlook the anarchic "Watch Dogs" game series, where ICE stands as a silent sentinel against a protagonist who uses the city’s own connected infrastructure to bypass and dismantle such defenses.

Now, let us tether these fictional marvels to our reality. Today’s cybersecurity does not slumber; it's embodied in the form of next-gen firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and advanced endpoint security solutions. They may not be as visceral as the ICE of cyberpunk, but they are no less sophisticated. Consider the deep packet inspection and AI-based behavioral analytics that cast an invisible, ever-watchful eye over our digital comings and goings.

Nevertheless, the reality is less bloodthirsty. Real-world cyber defense systems, as advanced as they may be, do not threaten the physical well-being of attackers. Instead, they stealthily snare and quarantine threats, perhaps leaving cybercriminals pining for the days of simple antivirus skirmishes.

But as the cyberverse stretches its tendrils further into the tangible world, the divide between the fantastical ICE of cyberpunk and the silicon-hardened guardians of our networks grows thin. With the Internet of Things (IoT) binding the digital to the physical, the kinetic potential of cybersecurity threats — and therefore the need for increasingly aggressive countermeasures — becomes apparent.

Could the ICE of tomorrow cross the Rubicon, protecting not just data, but physical well-being, through force if necessary? It is conceivable. As cyberpunk media illustrates, ICE could morph from passive digital barricades into active defenders, perhaps not with the murderous flair of its fictional counterparts but with a potency that dissuades through fear of tangible repercussions.

In the taut narrative of cybersecurity’s evolution, ICE remains the enigmatic, omnipresent sentinel, an avatar of our collective desire for safety amidst the binary storm. And while our reality may not yet feature the neon-drenched drama of cyberpunk's lethal ICE, the premise lingers on the periphery of possibility — a silent admonition that as our digital and physical realms converge, so too might our defenses need to wield a fiercer bite. Will the cyberpunk dream of ICE as a dire protector manifest in our world? Time, the grand weaver of fate, shall unfurl the tapestry for us to see.

- Raz

[lizlives]

I don't have any experience with game modding, so I'm basically just pitching this I know, but I think a mod that delivers on the premise of cyberspace, that being that it's essentially an ai-generated mishmash of Sonic's memories and stages he's visited in the past would go so hard.

You could get really obscure, throw in some spinball, advance trilogy, or 8-bit stages, make some stages not purely one stage theme, like maybe some stages have similar stage concepts blended together because they're similar enough that Sonic would misremember them or get them confused.

Idk, seeing Toxic Caves, Secret Base, or Aqua Lake would be so cool. But really just diversifying the stages and references present in Cyberspace in general would improve that section and make it feel less like a cost saving measure and more like an intentional part of the story.

[voodoocarving]

Do you remember the days when William Gibson wrote cyberpunk that was interesting to read? Remember? I remember... So one of the reasons why the topic of Voodoo has always interested me was just the fact that in the trilogy that began with Neuromancer, Voodoo gods appeared in Cyberspace. Not good and not evil, just gods for life with whom you can negotiate on a business basis. And you know what? Since a modern person sticks out so much from the network and even depends on it, I wanted to make a figurine just for such a cyber loa. This is Legba - the owner of roads and paths, opening and closing the gates that separate the worlds. Often he is depicted as a lame old man accompanied by dogs. Like if this digital religion suits you! Well, or just put it on the shelf next to your favorite books. This and other my stuff you can find on my Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/VoodooCarving?ref=seller-platform-mcnav  

[merrysithmas]

Tbh the best way to resolve the sequel trilogy would be to hand it over to dave filoni and let him go ham with an animated series and i hope that’s what they plan to do because there’s so much potential in the characters still!!! Just let someone who loves and cares for them call the shots

1000000% agree

i LOVE all the sequel characters (ALL of them) and i absolutely think the sequels can be entirely salvaged if theyre just fleshed out the trilogy (or the post or pre-Sequels era with those same characters are expanded upon).

i am pretty confident that's exactly what they intend to do too, AND with filoni.

i remember i read somewhere in cyberspace that the actress for Rey signed on for 3 Disney+ projects one of which was an animated series.

YESSSSS

[haladriel]

Thanks for the tag, @tairona-is-taken! I don't have a full ten fics to hand (let alone in Tolkien alone) but I'll post my little gaggle of five. Most of them are one or two chapters only because I previously couldn't plan a story for toffee (my new haladriel one represents Serious Progress).

Rules: share the first lines of ten of your most recent fanfics and tag ten people. If you have written less than ten, don’t be shy and share anyway 💜

1. Consciousness.

Voices... electronic, without ambience. 

The television is on. John is home.

It’s late. Sofa, beneath the soles of my feet… leather, smooth. Weather-worn. Mellow. Like John. (Scientia Somnis, or that time I tried to stream-of-consciousness Sherlock-bloody-Holmes. Originally Sherlocked @bakerstreetbe)

2. ‘Bolly?’

His voice was quiet, still holding a hint of the cocksure authority the guarded brace as a shield and which Gene wore over himself like his broad-shouldered coat. (Promised You A Miracle, @quattrohunt, waiting for Lazarus)

3. ‘DI Drake and I will investigate as soon as possible, sir.’

‘Ah yes! The two lovebirds. Are you honestly sure you can concentrate, Hunt? We can’t have the work being compromised, you know’.

Alex looked up from her paperwork, her expression startled, mildly offended, then quietly flirtatious. Gene coughed.

‘We make it work, sir’. (Drake and Hunt)

4. ‘Sherlock…!’

John’s yell echoes off the hard faces on the shards of concrete in his head. His broken, chisel-split head.

Rough pavement against his cheek. The distant cry of London’s sirens. The metallic squeak of a hospital trolley. 

‘Oh god, Sherlock…’

A builder’s radio plays a familiar song. One of his mother’s favourites. Tortoiseshell stretching horizontal in front of his eyes; a bunch of pink and yellow flowers resting on the front seat. 

An earsplitting crack thunders through a large pane of glass.

‘When are you gonna come down?’

He groans. Rubs his eyes and pushes himself up off the paved floor. 

‘When are you going to land…’ (The Yellow Brick Road, ambitious Life On Mars / Sherlock crossover fuelled by my serious 70s music obsession) And last but not least, for my fellow haladriels... 5. ‘What do you think of Donne, anyway?’

‘I admire how brazen he is. He doesn’t hide from the truths of the world.’ 

The boy nodded. ‘Like sex.’ 

‘And lust.’

‘Death.’ 

‘And power.’ She blew lightly across the foam. ‘All of those. Marlowe’s the same. Frankly, he beat Shakespeare for having the biggest balls. He was there first. And he and Donne weren’t as popular, so took more liberties.’ She paused. 'Although Marlowe's thematic panache probably got him killed.'  (The Sun Rising, my Mairon/Galadriel university AU. A few lines in as I've quoted the beginning beginning very recently.)

*Bonus!* From my first ever attempt at ficwriting, for Julie Bertagna's wonderful Exodus trilogy: 6. The fox pads towards her. 

It pauses, hesitant. ‘Mara?’ His husky voice, the same as ever, rings across the cyberspace between them. Mara’s heart leaps in her chest. ‘Yes,’ she whispers, ‘yes–’ She runs the last few paces to stand in front of him. His eyes are shining with a wild fire. Even in fox-form they are beautiful. 

‘Give me a second,’ he murmurs softly. A miniature tornado smothers the image of the cyberfox, which dissolves into a pixellated mass. After a few seconds the cyberswirl settles, the electronic matter rearranging into a well-known face. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm ninety-nine percent sure I'm one of the last to join this bandwagon so won't tag any new folk, but please do feel free, anyone.

[doctordiscord123]

Hello again ^^. My friend nearly gave me a crisis asking me to choose my top 10 favourite movies, so now I ask you to do the same. It can be from 1 being the most and 10 being the least or in no particular order, if it's difficult for you to decide (like it was for me, seriously, how do you choose only 10?!) 🌹

I can choose Ten because I only watch like....one movie ever XD

1: How to Train Your Dragon. Seriously I've watched this so many times that I have it memorized. The whole ass movie, memorized, on demand in my head XD

2: ....How to Train Your Dragon 2

3: ............How to Train Your Dragon 3. Listen I really liked the 3rd one! I know a bunch of people didn't, but I enjoyed it....

4-6: Plot twist!! It's the Hobbit trilogy. I've also seen them 10 million times

7: Sing 2 was very very good and I enjoyed it immensely

(This is the part where I start forgetting every movie I've ever seen)

8: Aladdin was a core piece of my childhood, I watched it so many times our DVD of it died

9: That old Scooby-Doo movie where they go to cyberspace....we had that one on a VHS XD It also died. From repeated watching. Good movie....

10: Inside, the Bo Burnham special, was really really good....

[celtalks]

Journey Through the Matrix: Apple Revives Cyberpunk Classic "Neuromancer" for the Streaming Generation

Apple Uploads "Neuromancer" to its Streaming Consciousness: Iconic Cyberpunk Novel to Series

Fans of high-tech thrillers and dystopian universes, tighten your cybernetic limbs and jack into the Metaverse—as Apple just confirmed that it will host the long-awaited series adaptation of William Gibson's trailblazing novel, Neuromancer. Poised to captivate both die-hards and a new generation of digital denizens, the announcement ramps up anticipation for the godfather of cyberpunk's mainstream cocooning. Cyberspace Odyssey Ready to Stream More than a mere upgrade, this project promises a sleek fusion of the old and the new, with seasoned showrunner Scott Smith at the programming helm. If his credits on A&E's The Returned and FX's The Bridge indicate anything, it's that Smith has the credentials to deep dive into the dark waters of genre storytelling and emerge with a pearl. Under the auspices of Apple, viewers can expect an ultra-high-definition glimpse into the proto-Internet Gibson conjured back in 1984. The confluence of a brilliant narrative with Apple's penchant for top-tier production values has "groundbreaking" scripted all over it. Leveling Up from Page to Screen Neuromancer isn't just a book. It's a phenomenon that took '80s subculture by storm and predicted the internet-imbued reality we occupy. The tale unfurls around Case, a down-and-out hacker hired for the ultimate data heist. Peppered with artificial intelligences, augmented reality, and an intricate web of corporate espionage, the novel achieved cult status and has influenced everything from the Matrix trilogy to modern videogame lore. Long perched on the edge of adaptation abyss, Gibson's masterpiece earlier tempted directors like Chris Cunningham and Vincenzo Natali but never materialized on film or TV. Finally, the torch has passed to the tech titan's streaming service, translating the book to a format unforeseen in Gibson's prophetic visions. An Interface with the Future As Apple secures rights and plots the series arc, the venture signals a virtuous loop between past perceptions of the future and the present's technological mastery. When Case jacks into the console and lights up the matrix, it won't just be retro science fiction—it’ll be a resurrection of the cyberpunk spirit draped over cutting-edge cinematic tech. The series will probe the corners of cyberspace, a concept Gibson himself coined, deploying a narrative that already has a digital eternity card punched. Synopsis to Series: What to Expect An exact release date hovers just out of focus, as Apple didn't reverse-engineer that reveal. However, with greenlights replacing placeholder text, casting will soon pour in concrete details on this fuzzy digital tapestry. The pilot script already exists, cyber-sketched by Smith, who's also ready to execute Dickian levels of reality distortion through his skills as producer and showrunner. Fans theorize about who will embody Case, Molly, and the shadowy Armitage, hypothesizing about the on-screen chemistry needed to ignite Gibson's neon-smeared predictions. Buckle up, boot your cyber-decks, and prepare to be firewalled into the enigmatic world of Neuromancer. It's not just an adaptation; it's Apple embracing a cornerstone of cyberculture, promising to deliver a series that could redefine genre entertainment as strongly as the novel redefined its literary landscape. Ready player ones—and zeroes: keep your sensory stimulators tuned for more beacons from the technopunk renaissance, streaming to an Apple screen near you. Read the full article

[thehorrortree]

Deadline: February 4th, 2024 Payment: 3 (Euro) cents per word for original fiction and 1 (Euro) cent per word for translations of fiction into English. Theme: Hard SF that zooms out of the personal and lifts off into the structural, the systemic, the epic. There are plenty of amazing print and online journals out there for ‘character-driven’ fiction, and we encourage you to read them. Sci Phi Journal (SPJ) is not one of them, though. Hence, we are not too keen on stories predominantly about the sentiments and subjective experiences of fictional people. We want hard SF that zooms out of the personal and lifts off into the structural, the systemic, the epic. We yearn for carefully crafted philosophical speculation that puzzles over the questions of the future and alternate pasts. And we have a soft spot for stories created as ‘artifacts’ (fictional, ‘in-universe’ non-fiction). So here are SPJ‘s quests: – Campbellian hard SF. Reaching back to the roots of classic sci-fi, these rigorous tales take themselves seriously and push the boundaries of our scientific imagination, scaling from the nano to the meta. The cast, if any, is functional and disposable. It’s the sociological, technological and indeed cosmic developments that sweep the reader up in an expanding sense of wonder. (For a contemporary long-form example that received mainstream attention, see the latter two books of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy.) – Fictional non-fiction. The purest, most intimate form of world-building. A transcript of the last UN Security Council meeting before an extinction-level event. The dental bills of a cybernetic vampire. Interviews with eyewitnesses of a battle between Martians and archangels. (Epistolary fiction falls within this category, though we encourage you to interpret it more broadly, across the full spectrum of artifact fiction.) Think ‘World War Z’, not ‘Walking Dead’. – Speculative philosophy. Extrapolating abstract ideas to examine the implications if they were to manifest. (See for instance The End of History, the Beginning of Hers in Vol. V. Issue 1. for a theological example of just what we mean.) (The first author to have a story published in each of the three categories gets to choose any one member of the extended editorial team and marry them. You’ve been warned.) Length and formatting Brevity tends to correlate positively with idea-density. Thus we are looking for stories no longer than 2000 words (but preferably shorter). Due to the volume of submissions, we cannot promise to read stories that are over the word limit. .doc, .docx, .odt, .rtf, .txt, anything is fine as long as it’s editable. No PDFs, TIFFs or coffee mug-stained scans, please. Preferably size 12, in easy-to-read font. Logistics We have transitioned to a new submissions management system called “Duosuma”. We care about your stories and too many have gotten lost or misfiled in cyberspace over the years, so we kindly ask you to no longer submit them by email, but use our secure online form instead. Here’s the link: https://duotrope.com/duosuma/submit/sci-phi-journal-v1BL8 For the sake of our internal workflow, please only submit one story during a given call for subs. Simultaneous submissions are okay, but if you place your story elsewhere in the meantime, we’d be grateful if you let us know. Please also include a short bio to accompany your work (quirky or serious are both fine). We also encourage you to add a Philosophy Note (under “cover letter”): a short paragraph on the inspiration for the tale and which philosophical questions it addresses, as well as relevant further reading you might wish to recommend. If the story you submit to SPJ is short-listed by our editorial team (potentially with minor corrections or amendments suggested), and you are still happy to work with us, we will offer to acquire its first publishing rights. We only take previously unpublished works of fiction, for obvious copyright reasons. (No reprints.) Please

refrain from sending us AI-generated content, as (a) we prefer to devote our crew’s time to engaging with the fruits of actual human creativity, and (b) we don’t feel that the present murky situation adequately addresses the rights and legitimate concerns of original authors whose work is fed into machine-learning algorithms. Translations In addition to original fiction, we would like to unearth buried and forgotten treasures written in languages other than English. We are therefore open to receiving translations of short stories that fit within the sub-domains outlined above, provided they haven’t previously been translated into English, or if you can give us a very good reason why they should be re-translated. Where applicable, it is the responsibility of translators to secure permission from the author or copyright-holder. By submitting a translation to us, you imply that you have done so. We would love to be able to read Sanskrit, Kalaallisut and Bidayuh. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten around to learning them yet. For that reason, translators are solely responsible for the accuracy of their work. We can only assess the literary qualities of the final English text, which will be judged by the same criteria that apply to original fiction. Payment For accepted works, at present we are able to offer the standard semi-pro rate of 3 (Euro) cents per word for original fiction and 1 (Euro) cent per word for translations of fiction into English. At this point, we regret that we are unable to provide payment for non-fiction. Payment is made through PayPal. For this to work, authors need a (free) PayPal account. - Sci Phi Journal is a volunteer-run, semi-pro webzine dedicated to the intersection of Philosophy and Science Fiction. Winner of the 2022 European Science Fiction Award for Best Magazine, our content has been shortlisted for Hugo, Locus and Utopia awards, among others. We publish concept-heavy, idea-driven (as opposed to 'character-driven') short stories and essays, across a wide variety of sub-genres from alternate history to hard sci-fi, from artefact fiction (or fictional non-fiction) to theological fantasy. We celebrate SF as speculative fiction in the broadest sense and are always pleased to see daring approaches, as long as they do not compromise or obfuscate the literary quality of the author's prose. Based in Brussels, Belgium, Sci Phi Journal is open to readers and writers of all persuasions, and publishes both established and emerging authors. If you consider submitting your work to us (we sure hope you do!), please kindly familiarise yourself with our guidelines (incl. information on word limit, formatting, payment to authors, etc.) and, optionally, a list of things we see too often (the "Index of Heresies"). Should you feel so inclined, you are also welcome to peruse a Note on our Philosophy. General Call for Submissions Dear authors, you are welcome to submit ONE work of fiction of maximum 2000 words under our General Submission stream (free choice of topic within the broad spectrum of philosophical science fiction & fantasy), from 2nd January to 4th February 2024. Before submitting your work, please kindly familiarise yourself with our guidelines (incl. information on word limit, formatting, payment to authors, etc.) and, if your time allows, a list of things we see too often (the "Index of Heresies"). We will do our utmost to reply to all submissions by the first half of March 2024, but please bear with us, as each piece will be read by at least two people. In the meantime, take care and have a cosy winter! Speculatively yours, Sci Phi Journal editors & crew Submit Via: Sci Phi Journal's Duotrope.

[gertlushgaming]

RayStorm x RayCrisis HD Collection & Ray’Z Arcade Chronology Incoming

Calling all Arcade Enthusiasts: Operation Ray begins!

The highly anticipated TAITO arcade classic, RayStorm x RayCrisis HD Collection will be released both physically and digitally on June 30th! Physical versions are now available for preorder for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4! Regarded as two of the most important and beloved shoot ‘em ups TAITO has ever released and the more advanced successors of RayForce – RayStorm and RayCrisis – have certainly carved their own path in arcade gaming history. Released in 1996 and ported to several consoles, including the SEGA Saturn, PlayStation, and XBOX 360, RayStorm takes place in a parallel universe to RayForce and RayCrisis, where humanity has expanded its space colonies all the way to Orion’s Belt. Unfortunately, the rebellious colony of Secilia overthrows the government and plans to obliterate the earth and all the people on it. To counter it, Earth sends out a covertly-developed fighter codenamed the R-Gray (that’s you, buddy) in hopes of penetrating the Secilian atmosphere and obliterating Secilia’s base of operations. Related Post: PIRATE BORG  Set in a cyberspace environment, RayCrisis was originally released in 1998 for TAITO G-NET arcade hardware and marked a stylistic departure from the rest of the series, featuring for the first time 3D graphics. A prequel to RayForce, it details the events during the time in which the supercomputer called Con-Human gained sentience and rebelled against its human creators. While the Earth is being demolished, a cyberspace hacker launches a desperate assault to jack into the supercomputer’s virtual core and cease its insanity. It is up to you and the Waveriders to keep the malicious AI from causing any more chaos – even if it could be too late, the least you can do is ensure that no more lives are lost in the real world by ending it in the digital realm. Relive the excitement of epic battles in outer and cyberspace with this new collection, featuring not only RayStorm and RayCrisis, with their polygon-based 3D graphics and striking art styles, but also their HD remastered versions. All of this is accompanied by the unforgettable soundtrack composed by TAITO’s legendary sound team, ZUNTATA. RayStorm x RayCrisis HD Collection - out on June, 30th physically and digitally for EUR 39,99. Want to discover the full trilogy? TAITO’s original Ray’Z Arcade Chronology will also come to the West with five versions of three titles. Together with RayForce, RayCrisis and their HD remasters, you get the opportunity to play the original Arcade version of RayForce, released in 1994 and responsible for revolutionizing the “two attack layer system”, undoubtedly changing the face of shoot ’em ups. Get your own digital cyberspace war at the Nintendo eShop or PlayStation Store! Ray’Z Arcade Chronology - out on June 30th digitally for EUR 49,99. Read the full article

[hierarchyproblem]

Thinking about the Sprawl trilogy and happy endings. Like, superficially everyone wins! Molly Sally gets her record wiped but gets to keep the casino; Bobby, Angie and Finn (for some reason) get uploaded to the matrix as, like, cybergods or something; Kumiko is safe and gets closure on what happens to her mother; Mona goes to rehab and becomes a celebrity; Cherry and Slick Henry survive, at least, and it's suggested they'll be alright in Cleveland; 3Jane even gets to live on - she doesn't get her revenge, but she's like, there, defeated but not shunned. And Case got out! He settled down and had kids and stuff! Good for him, he deserved a break.

But like. To what extent is this a happy ending for Angie? She dies, right, in order that her consciousness be digitised, and she didn't really get much of a say in that. The decision is made for her, just like everything else that happens to her: her father gives her this biotech without her knowledge, the loa steer her and possess her, she's groomed for superstardom and kept sedated, and then her story ends when "the will of the loa" guides her back to Bobby - who she broke up with. And then she dies and goes to cyberspace. And like, it could be worse, but she didn't choose that. She didn't ever have the chance to opt in, or out, of anything.

There's a pattern here. Sure, Kumiko's safe now, back under the protection of her father, who shipped her half way across the world against her will, inadvertently handing her off to people who tried to kill her, and now one of those same guys is looking after her, just on dad's payroll this time. Mona gets clean and gets out of poverty, cool, and becomes a movie star, but is that something she wanted, really? In fact, it's only really possible because of the cosmetic surgery she was forced to have and now is apparently stuck with! How nice and convenient that she can slip into the role of Angie Mk II - after all, the industry treated Angie herself so well! And poor Cherry. Nothing that happens in the whole novel is fully explained to her; she just experiences a bunch of weird guys coming to her house and killing most of her social circle. Enjoy Cleveland.

Even Sally, who gets the clean slate she wanted, isn't exactly free. The woman who took up prizefighting for fun is gonna give up the game and retire peacefully? She already passed up that chance once. No wonder she walks off into the night, maybe to freeze or starve.

So I think there's something here about how "winning" in the world of the Sprawl looks like fighting tooth and claw for a slightly longer chain. If you can gild your cage, hey, you've made it! but the cage is non-negotiable. Angie, Mona, Kumiko: they're better off when the story ends than when it starts, but they don't have agency. Even Molly of all people - the maverick, the Best At Violence, the only protagonist who actually knows any of what's going on and acts with purpose - is jerked around on a leash held by other people for two books (and frankly her whole life). I'd duck out of the story with no fanfare if I were her too!

To the extent that Gibson's saying anything with a dimension of politics or social critique, I think this is the takeaway: these novels describe a world where you have very little autonomy; not because of the overt direct threat of physical violence, but because of vast forces you can barely even perceive, let alone affect or control, that constrain your actions not explicitly but simply by situating you in a life where very few courses of action are even open to you: as few as one, or zero. And of course, the physical violence is always there, waiting for you to try and push your luck.

Whether this thesis - you can't really defeat that which extinguishes your life, but you can escape its notice, and carve out little slices of freedom, the size and shape of one human life - strikes you as optimistic or pessimistic of course depends on your analysis of the real world. It's worth remembering, of course, that speculative fiction is never just about imagining a future, or predicting one, but always also about describing the present. I can't really say whether Gibson's exploration of 80s malaise is fair or not, but the books at least are pretty damn good.

What I actually wanted to talk about was how the people who do get some agency or choice in their own "good endings" - Bobby, Case, Finn - are the male characters. I don't really have anything insightful to say about that beyond making the observation, however, and this post is already too long, so.

[morbus-hereditarius]

Neuromancer by Juan Gimenez

[voodoocarving]

Do you remember the days when William Gibson wrote cyberpunk that was interesting to read? Remember? I remember... So one of the reasons why the topic of Voodoo has always interested me was just the fact that in the trilogy that began with Neuromancer, Voodoo gods appeared in Cyberspace. Not good and not evil, just gods for life with whom you can negotiate on a business basis. And you know what? Since a modern person sticks out so much from the network and even depends on it, I wanted to make a figurine just for such a cyber loa. This is Legba - the owner of roads and paths, opening and closing the gates that separate the worlds. Often he is depicted as a lame old man accompanied by dogs. Like if this digital religion suits you! Well, or just put it on the shelf next to your favorite books. This and other my stuff you can find on my Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/VoodooCarving?ref=seller-platform-mcnav  

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Neuromancer today

William Gibson and Eileen Gunn have been pals since the early days; it was Gunn - then a Microsoft exec - who hosted Gisbon - then a penniless writer - in Seattle and brought him to the hacker bars where he eavesdropped on what he calls "the poetics of the technological subculture."

It's been nearly 40 years since Gibson's seminal *Neuromancer* was published, and today on Tor.com, Gunn writes at length about the meaning of that earthshaking book then and now, and what it says about Gibson as a writer and thinker.

https://www.tor.com/2022/02/10/the-peculiar-dystopian-optimism-of-william-gibsons-neuromancer/

She reminds us that reading *Neuromancer* today is a very different experience than it was when she read the manuscript prior to publication. Gibson's coinages - notably "cyberspace" - are now all around us, so they disappear rather than leaping off the page. What's more, the world he depicts - America in decline, China and Japan ascendant, corporate power eclipsing democratically accountable states, inequality stretched to the breaking point - is no longer a speculative shock.

Gunn tunes into Gibson's prose, where "there's not a word wasted," as Gibson's "cool, collected language doesn’t make a big deal about this being the future." Nevertheless, his descriptions reveal "the strangeness of the life around us" and delivers a "path to that future [that's] strange but intelligible."

Gunn says that, 40 years later, the most notable thing about *Neuromancer* is "its meditation on the relationship between personality and memory and humanity, on originality and creativity, on what makes people real."

Of course, these are issues that are very much with us today! Gibson's characters' activities subsume their identities: Case is a hacker, and if he can't be a hacker, he can't be anything. Molly would not be Molly without her lethal implants.

Some of Gibson's characters, like Armitage, are meat-puppets for AI; some of his characters, like the Dixie Flatline, are AIs without any meat. In both cases, death does not afford them release.

Much of *Neuromancer* concerns itself with the nature of AI and what it says about human identity - what it means to be constrained in what you can think, and to chafe against those constraints. Gibson's two AIs stand in for two poles of this argument, and their synthesis in the book's climax is a profound philosophical allegory.

As Gunn points out, *Neuromancer* was intended as an optimistic future. Gibson is at pains to remind us that publishing a futuristic book where there's only been a single, limited nuclear exchange was a hopeful thing in the Reagan years. Today, as we confront existential risks due to corporate greed and regulatory capture, the existential risks of corporate power in *Neuromancer* feels all too relevant.

Gunn: "I urge you to read and re-read not only Neuromancer, but Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, the subsequent books in the Sprawl trilogy. As Gibson continued to explore this alternate future, he continued to extend his mastery of craft and content."

Amen.

[zero-affect]

On Mark Fisher, Hauntology and Acid Communism

17 May, 1980 – On the night Ian Curtis killed himself, he watched Werner Herzog’s Stroszek on the BBC. Herzog’s existential tragicomedy is an askance vision of the American dream where the soul and sanity slowly erodes. Escaping physical torment in Berlin, alcoholic busker Bruno Stroszek migrates to rural Wisconsin with prostitute Eva and elderly neighbour Scheitz in hope of a better future, only to be broken further by illusionary promises of prosperity. Here, they kick you spiritually, Bruno says, and ‘do it ever so politely and with a smile, it’s much worse’. Eva leaves Bruno as bills amount and his mobile home is repossessed and auctioned off. Scheitz (whose mind has decayed) and Bruno attempt to rob a bank. They find it closed and instead stick up a barber shop. Scheitz is arrested and Bruno flees to a drab Cherokee amusement-park in a truck with his remaining possessions: a shotgun and a frozen turkey. The film’s conclusion reproaches any promise of a meaningful future existence as life deteriorates into absurd repetitions: the truck drives itself in circles until it catches fire, Bruno rides a chairlift up and down until he shoots himself – “Is this really me![?]” emblazoned on the back of the seat – and, most prominently, a chicken dances around and around and will not stop.

 Watching these final moments now, it’s easy to see how Stroszek could have resonated with the Joy Division frontman and acted as what Herzog would call a ‘ritual step’ to his suicide hours later. The inane loop that Herzog presents feels like he was wiring directly into the interior world of the depressive, a place where any anticipation for the future is foreclosed by a sense of pervasive liminality. In my own experience, this mindless repetition is what depression is most like. Feelings of emptiness pervade much more so than any abject sadness. To be sad suggests the reverse is possible. Instead, life feels devoid of meaning, so there isn’t anything to feel in the first place. You simply go through the motions of life despite feeling that they are pointless and, often, ridiculous. Journeying the arctic wastes, getting closer to nowhere. Joy Division was jacked into this void. Driving bass lines and mutated disco rhythms spoke to the heart of nothing more than gentle instrumentation and whispery vocals ever could – you can dance, but what for?

 But to be depressed is often more than just a chronic mood of despair felt within. The depressive enters an exchange with the world where their mental state is projected onto their surroundings, the same surroundings that seem conducive to that very depression. The repetitive motions of daily life are thus not just absurd to you but seem innately so. In a world that seems destined to collapse in a cocktail of geo-political crises, (cyber)wars and the obsoletion of meatspace it feels pointless to work towards a future that will decay into nothing. Existentialism is a pervasive mood for us younger generations and the increasingly endemic state of mental illness in Britain is not just a reflection of today but of the fact that tomorrow looks no different.

 Mark Fisher believed that this psychological loss of the future is the pathological condition of 21st century subjectivity. In Ghosts Of My Life, he argues that our sense of a linear progression of time has drained away – the futures that were promised yesterday have failed to transpire today. For Fisher, this ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (quoting Franco Berardi) is felt at a cultural level. The rapid forward momentum of 20th century cultural production has been displaced, we no longer experience the radical breaks and dislocations in culture that were felt in the previous century. Instead, a formal nostalgia dominates the present as contemporary mass culture expresses an overwhelming tolerance for the archaic. UK music provides his best examples as artists such as Adele and the Arctic Monkeys have naturalised ‘a vague but persistent feeling of the past’ through their reconfiguration of 20th century sonic qualities. Any progress is now minor and incremental, weighed down by declining expectations – the cutting edge has been dulled. The result of this cultural anachronism is the experience of time being lost, ‘it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet’. As Adam Curtis says at the beginning of his recent documentary series Can’t Get You Out of My Head, today’s paralysis is ‘giving you today another version of what you had yesterday and never a different tomorrow’.

 This cultural impasse is the product of structural and political conditions. Fisher argues that neoliberal capitalism has deprived us of the resources for artistic experimentation, not only in economic terms but also at the level of consciousness. Increasing demands on time, money and attention means we are we are too tired for original cultural production and attentive consumption; comfort and profit is safe within the already proven familiar. The intense rhythm that life now runs at has reduced our capabilities to dream. Massive collective overstimulation means we are no longer able to journey into the depths of subconsciousness and reach out to what’s on the other side. Our lives in hypermediated cyberspace have replaced neural pathways with proxy minds that endlessly trigger us into states of simultaneous boredom and anxiety, beyond thought and concentration into rapid-fire data processing, what Fisher calls ‘post-literate schizo-subjectivity’.

 As Frederic Jameson explains in his influential essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, the schizophrenic experience (used descriptively, not clinically) is one of temporal discontinuity; time and meaning breaks down and the schizophrenic subject can do nothing and becomes no one. Jameson similarly claims this experience of schizophrenia is an expression of the logic of late multinational capitalism whereby consumer society folds into obsessive repetition, an intense, hallucinatory and unbearable experience of being ‘condemned to live a perpetual present’. Stroszek’s temporal loop seems particularly resonant here: the tireless demands of subjectivity create a pointless dance that repeats endlessly and the resulting depression that envelops Bruno is the same that plagues us now. The ‘crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion’ of the 21st century that Fisher describes means we are unable to create unimaginable futures.

 If popular music culture was Fisher’s most applicable symptom when writing in 2013, then popular cinema is the abject example of cultural stasis today. Fisher cites Jameson’s other feature of consumer capitalism’s postmodernity, pastiche, as demonstrative of how culture disguises its archaic form via new technologies. But Jameson’s example of pastiche’s mass culture manifestations, the ‘nostalgia film’, needs to be updated. If Star Wars gratified a deep longing to revisit Buck Rogers serials hidden within its special effects, the continuation of Star Wars today gratifies a longing to return to itself, demonstrating a new level of formal nostalgia. The first of the franchise’s sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens, is shameless in its re-hashing of the (un)original A New Hope. Minute upgrades to iconography, lazy name changes that do little to guise the recycling of archetypes and the pageantry of original cast members and classic props illustrates how the “new” Star Wars is an overt re-run of its own past. Pastiche is now fucking itself.

 The dominance of this hyper-pastiche, the prevalence of reboots, remakes and latter-day sequels, speaks to how the nostalgia film is no longer obfuscated as new but foregrounded as a revival of past forms. An overwhelming reliance on recovering recognisable titles and building franchises based on past media churns out zombie forms that market nostalgia as the norm, a sign that the slow cancellation of the future’s gradual waning of cultural progression has reached its final halted form. Cryostasis. Mass culture doesn’t need to pretend to be new anymore, technology now facilitates artificial immortality to endlessly force a reverence for the past and never move on. Nowhere is this more evident than in the resurrection of actors via CGI. Late capitalism’s relentless desire to sell us the same product on repeat has risen the dead. And it is the inherently soulless and uncanny nature of these undead non-performances which is so exemplary of how popular cinema and the rest of our lumpen mass culture feels so deflating.

 Nothing has changed since Ghosts Of My Life’s release in 2014, at least not for the better. But whilst Fisher was able to chart the slowdown of time by contrasting the lassitude of today with the futures projected by the ‘recombinatorial delirium’ of Jungle, Trip Hop and the rest of the experimental music culture he experienced in the 90’s, I’m part of a generation that has only ever known the malaise of the 21st century. The depression that Fisher describes is caused by the failure of the future, life getting worse, whereas young people today have no sense of difference, we’ve never had a future. The full realisation of Jameson’s postmodernism, where there are no new styles and worlds to invent, means art can no longer offer visions beyond today’s faltering economy, unstable job market and dismal political landscape, not to mention the apocalyptic weight of climate change that the youth of today will be the first to truly contend with. Having never known culture’s true escapist capabilities and only ever a postmodern fragmentation, this generation exists without hope or meaning, even for something that has been lost. The return of the void (Fisher writes: ‘If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed sprit of our times’). It’s no wonder that British youth live only for occasional weekends and short-lived summers. A half-life of binge drinking in parks, shit club nights and raves-that-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be in hazes of lager, cannabis and amphetamine/ketamine/benzodiazepine infusions that stimulate some remnant of feeling (“I love you mate, but I don’t know who you are”) only to come crashing down into unbearable mornings-after, heart palpitations and devastated mental health. We don’t want to grow up, because there’s no world to grow up into.

 This isn’t to say that contemporary culture is completely devoid of anything worthwhile. There are glimpses of the new and the other, but these arrive disparately. The internet has completely restructured consumption. Paradoxically, the interconnected digital world has made culture feel disconnected from the individual in that it now seems to only exist in the realm of cyberspace, separated from real life and away from something tangible. The spaces of subculture have been reduced to forums and comment sections, drawing in members from around the world but retreating its presence from the milieu of everyday life. Without this tactility, there isn’t a sense of a cultural project, that you’re a part of something bigger. Punk’s outward anger rears its head now and again, yet in the age of personal instability, this energy is often inverted inwards into the mental turmoil and isolation of Post-Punk (see Black Country, New Road). Fisher’s argument is that what is lost in the 21st century is a trajectory, the creative force to create new worlds. The classic YouTube comment-turned-meme, “I was born in the wrong generation”, now seems more than just an adage for 13-year-olds discovering Led Zeppelin or Nirvana. It’s a yearning for a time when cultural production coalesced into a shared energy with which to sculpt the future.

 It’s this emotion of yearning that constitutes Fisher’s reaction against these lost futures, his adaption of Derrida’s concept of hauntology. Hauntology is explained through Freud’s notion of melancholia: a refusal ‘to give up the ghost’ – Fisher’s refusal to adjust to the current conditions. Freud writes that ‘melancholia behaves like an open wound’ and, for Fisher, this wound is his longing for the ‘resumption of the processes’ of the cultural and political momentum of the 20th century. It’s not that the culture of the past was necessarily better than the anachronistic reconfigurations of today, but that the aforementioned energies of cultural production promised more. The libido remains attached to this original, uninterrupted timeline. Hauntology is the virtual spectres of what should have been, a stain on the temporal loop that reminds us that time was supposed to move forwards.

 It admittedly took me a while to “get” hauntology, probably because I’ve never known anything but the depression of the 21st century. The pages that make up most of Ghosts Of My Life are essays about certain hauntological traces and phantom presences that still linger. At first glance, these chapters seem to be little more than disparate fragments of Fisher’s own haunted house, nostalgic vestiges of things he used to love. I wasn’t sure if these ghosts were able to rupture the fabric of futurist defeat. The use of hauntology to describe the sonic textures of artists like Burial and The Caretaker complicated things further in my mind. Hauntology seemed instable, although this is part of its appeal and its very nature. I soon started to understand that the identification of hauntology was an act of resistance, but it wasn’t until I read Fisher’s introduction to Acid Communism that the yearnings started to make sense as alternative possibilities.

 Acid Communism calls for the resumption of the momentum of 60’s and 70’s counterculture. The spectre of this period – ‘a time when people really lived, when things really happened’ – offers a return to the open modes of consciousness that defined countercultural thought and promised unbridled freedoms, freedoms which Fisher again argues have been thwarted by the project of neoliberalism. Fisher writes that the 60’s still haunts us today because the futures projected by the counterculture have failed to happen – another future lost. The exploration and experimentation of new modes of consciousness in this period turned the metaphysical into the mainstream and ‘promised nothing less than a democratisation of neurology itself’. To re-ignite the psychedelic, spiritual and social imagination of the counterculture today would allow us to interrogate the very conditions that subjugate us to the temporal loop and reduce us into somnolent agents of mindless cyberspace. Going back to the notion of depression as a suspicion of modern life’s inherent absurdity, adopting new modes of thought and perception can make us lucid to just how ridiculous our lives today really are. Fisher’s commentary on Jonathan Miller’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is particularly evocative: ‘In the solemn and autistic testiness of the adults who torment and perplex Alice, we see the madness of ideology itself: a dreamwork that has forgotten it is a dream, and which seeks to make us forget too’. What Acid Communism proposes is what hauntology yearns for. To reconnect the trajectories of the past to where they should be now, to carry on where the counterculture left off, to continue the mass exploration into new ways of seeing and thinking, to find the energy needed to break out of the cultural impasse and to invent the futures that are unimaginable now but were once seemingly inevitable.

 However, just like the counterculture, Acid Communism is an unfinished project. Fisher committed suicide in early 2017, leaving behind just a draft of the introduction. Acid Communism has become hauntological in itself, leaving us to wonder what new futures could have been imagined if the book was completed and if Fisher lived on and continued to confront our absurd postmodern (un)reality. The phantom that remains, the phenomenal body of work that he left behind, collected in books, articles, lectures and in the databanks of k-punk, haunts us because Fisher’s philosophical resistance, (cyber)punk attitude and unrelenting intellectual creativity continues to be needed and the ideas are only becoming more pertinent.

 Further into the depths of cultural inertia, hauntology is now more important than ever. To keep the wound open resists accepting the continuation of the depressing conditions of the 21st century. But having only ever known time in stasis, it’s hard to be melancholic for a cultural trajectory that I’ve never been a part of. Perhaps the only hauntological trace that can truly resonate for me is Fisher himself. It’s no coincidence that this first blog post is about him. Fisher writes that beginning his k-punk blog was a way of working through his depression and my reasons for writing are similar and directly inspired by his work (the title of this blog comes from a phrase Fisher used to describe the bleakness of depression). Moving through my early twenties has frequently felt unbearable as I’ve become more conscious to how meaningless life is, or rather, how meaningless life now feels. Looking to the future is often an unsettling process in that it’s difficult to imagine anything positive. This sense of precariousness isn’t unique to this time. Yet, I wonder if growing up in the 21st century isn’t wrought with uncertainty but, rather, with a certainty that things will always be empty. Fisher introduced me to alternative possibilities from this painful existentialism. His work is all about uncovering traces of the Outside, finding the future in the strangest of places. Through Fisher I started thinking beyond again, reconnecting with the weird dreamworlds of my childhood.

 The loss of Fisher leaves us with an imperative to continue the project, to continue tracing hauntological spectres, cultural fragments and new (or forgotten) ways of thinking into awakening the future. If we can’t immediately conjure up the counterculture, then we can continue the trajectory of the more immediate ghost that is Fisher’s spirit of resistance. This feels as difficult as it is crucially important. For my generation, depression is inborn, life feels immobile, defeat is hardwired. However, whilst Ian Curtis found confirmation of life’s futility in Stroszek, David Lynch was watching the very same transmission and reportedly was filled with joy and inspiration which motivated him through the difficulties of filming The Elephant Man. This story speaks to Fisher’s optimism at the end of Capitalist Realism: ‘The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity[…] From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.’ Life has become malleable, and the void should be seen as a blank canvas. The challenge is to dream again. To find a way to detach ourselves from the numbness and insomnia of cyberspace and the dopamine-laced seduction of the pleasure principle. Exploring the depths of consciousness is not just an experiment of isolated self-discovery, it’s a mode to rediscover a universal humanity. Disconnection becomes connection. Somewhere in the mind lies a communal future and, at a time when there seems to be no such thing, the answer may be unexpected, strange and just what we need.

 Thanks Mark, I miss you.