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« on: June 04, 2020, 10:36:41 pm »
So is the problem then that the research should be thrown out, or that the newly limited realm of applicability for the research is less exciting when you discover your hard earned insights about rich white college kids are hard earned insights about rich white college kids?
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Regarding burgerpunk... I'm basically a relic because I would rather sit in a weird spot in the room by the door because I can use a wall mount for one monitor and put my computer close enough to the wifi and the wifi close enough to the modem that I can hit both directly with a wired troubleshooting session spread across either screen and actually enjoy that my nicer monitor (love that IPS shit) doesn't have a VESA option because I've got it on a lazy susan so I can turn it to show the missus stuff easily while storing convenient bolts/nuts/bits/washers/screws/smaller tools under the screen in easy reach.
I was annoyed to learn that not only was the cable modem we'd had for a long time buggy AND slow, comcast had apparently been charging us for it every fucking month and ordered a modem of our own which I had to call a guy in india to fucking hook up properly while making sure they knew I'd be discussing shit with the BBB if those charges for their piece of shit kept going. Have to check regularly to make sure nobody in the house ever looks at the xfinity wifi hotspot because it meters your use and charges for a slower version of the fabulously better wifi our new router spits at us... well, me, everyone else splits the bandwidth, but I'm the only one who can jack into the full 220~ Mbps digital meth goodness. Fuck heroin, gimme an ethernet port on my arm, 10 Gbps or better thanks!
We recently had two dudes that previously rode in the space shuttle get to the jumble of air-filled cans falling across the sky while riding a rocket that had it's first stage politely return to the planet and wait for reuse by the private company that made the damn thing.
You can get completely normal looking glasses with little HUD effects that talk to the internet through the fondleslab in your pocket and let you get notified about the likes you got from the ridiculously high quality pictures your fondleslab pulled in from it's sensors and interpreted smartly enough to tweak the lighting and colors of your mocha foam heart and steam while applying a pleasing bokeh bloom to the background wall and illumination sources.
Despite the onslaught of a global pandemic the stock market has kept going up due to the various tech and infrastructure companies in the right places to massively benefit from the average income of the average person in the US going up courtesy of the government giving brief bursts of helicopter moneymachine going brrrrtttt!
The government is nominally led by a rapacious simpleton weakboy who is only really good at fucking up and only ended up elected due to some piece of shit making literal cancer into a form of "entertainment" called reality tv and getting the hilarious idea of trying to make a total shitsack garbage fire like Trump look like a savvy corporate tycoon without realizing people might believe it wasn't staged scripted bullshit and take the ridiculous joke seriously enough to accidentally the whole presidency.
I'm on no form of social media, I email my mom occasionally, I only check twitter when an actual relevant link in a discussion or article is given, or KSBD seems late, and the rest of the time can't even imagine spending any amount of time sifting through all the bullshit. I'm at a point where facebook is something that happens to other people because every time they try to change something to slip trackers through my armada of blocking mechanisms I update and forcefuck their bullshit to death before it ever gets to the point of my browser trying to request a connection.
I am odd, clinging to my mechanical keyboard and no mouse, two screens and no wifi, existing largely as a me-shaped hole in the pervasive mesh of tracking information woven around the world, using tools with no power source except my own muscles to turn materials or random objects into new and more useful forms, drinking tap water in a big refillable bottle because of a traumatic discovery of sugar ants up under the cap of the horrific poison I used to drink called sprite.
I am uninterested in taking part in much of the world because I would rather deny it the opportunity to influence me, I am an asshole and an anarchist so I either ignore shit or end up plotting how to set it on fire before making it explode. I am poor, but I am free to do what I want in ways that I've found satisfy me. Nonetheless when I look up from the sawdust at the screen or glance outside, I am well aware that I cannot get truly free of capitalist bullshit, similarly I cannot deny that I am in the future.
It is not the future we expected, it is not the future we wanted, it is strange, and banal in so many ways, but it is definitely not lacking the dressings of near-future fiction we used to expect from cyberpunk.
Though Stross says it hasn't aged well, I think he's too critical of his own work and Accelerando remains a fascinating read which certainly didn't age as badly as shit like TNG having big clunky tablets, a barely competent smarthome assistant, and the now laughably pitiful specs and capabilities of the gee-whiz android Data.
I do not envy him trying to write his "present day+lovecraft" series of Laundry novels when shit he thought would be outlandish but semi-plausible keeps getting outdone by reality.
