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Big Tech is anti-technology.
Musk and Zuck are anti-creative: their “next big thing”s are boring parodies lifted from 25-year-old cyberpunk dystopian fiction.
Monopolies are anti-innovation.
Predictive/generative #AI is inherently conservative: its best idea of the future is a statistical average of the past.
_Frankenstein_, the first science fiction novel, is a Luddite parable. And we are all Luddites now (or should be).
This podcast is kinda long and kinda brutal but highly engaging and enraging and **hopeful **(really!), and everyone who can should listen to it, the sooner the better. In it, Ed Zitron interviews @pluralistic and @brianmerchant about how plutocrats who don’t love tech stole our tech utopia from us, with greed and collusion; those points above were just a few highlights
@possibledog @paezha minor nit: the golden age of dystopian cyberpunk fiction was 1975-85, so more like 40-50 year old than 25! Neil Stephenson rang the curtain down on cyberpunk in "Snow Crash" (1992). This shit is OLD.
@cstross @paezha yeah, totally! the point is that these anti-nerds are fundamentally uncreative
-- I was quoting the 'casters pointing out that the Cybertruck is from Blade Runner (1985) and the Metaverse is Ready Player One (2011) so I guess that "25" was Cory causally splitting the difference :-)
---
**Speaker 1** (42:02):
That's this is just what Corey was just talking about,
right is. It speaks to the conservatism of the a
lot of these… once they've built a company
that's big enough to where you know, you're casting around
for your next thing because you don't actually want to
do any you know, real innovating yourself.
**Speaker 3** (42:17):
You outsource it to a sci fi novel.
**Speaker 1** (42:20):
That's why we've seen this this sort of generation of
of sort of wish lists from cyberpunk from the metaverse.
I mean that was just Mark Zuckerberg saying, “hey, uh yeah,
My next thing is the metaverse.”
**Speaker 3** (42:36):
Then what comes from that is your future is being a legless, sexless,
low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character in a virtual world, that
I stole from a twenty five year old dystopian cyberpunk novel.
Cory (40:30) : ( @pluralistic )
"And the irony here, and I say this as a fully paid up member of the Science Fiction Writers of America and science fiction novelist. The irony here is how many of these torment-nexus-building weirdos read cyberpunk as a suggestion instead of a warning, and defend what they're doing as carrying on the visionary tradition of science fiction. The first science fiction novel ever was Frankenstein, and it was a novel about why you shouldn't just build whatever goddamn machine you feel like!"