Re: <nettime> Cyberpunks who were right about everything, but so what

[Joseph Rabie <joe@overmydeadbody.org>]

We look upon computing as ubiquitous and all-encompassing, which of course it is.

But this was preceded by the mainframe, very big, very rare, with the authority of science and its priesthood of programmers. Each unit confined to a building all of its own. More representative of bureaucratic institutional control than capital, which came later.

In the sixties mainframes were decried as a major symbol of the modern, dystopic state.

Relative to which personal computers (coming in the wake of the Whole Earth "ecology") were seen as a force of liberation. As Apple said, "Think Different!" -- which as corporate utopist propaganda might even have been half sincere, at a time when Microsoft was the devil incarnate.

Today, Microsoft passes as a benign (?) grandfather and Apple says "Think Apple!"


Joe.



> Le 4 mars 2019 à 22:28, Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
> Not to sound skeptical, but is there another way of viewing it?
> 
> The new Pretorian Guard, a guild tending the computing machinery for the pedestrian cause of concentrating control tools of the capital, needed its mythology, and cyberpunk was born. Historically speaking, there is no evidence of spontaneity in the recent cultural, ehm, movements:
> 
> https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.PDF
> 
> https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/finks-by-joel-whitney/
> 
> 
> 
>> *As a cyberpunk ideologue, I’m touched that this subject would come up on nettime.  As it happens, I know where all the cyberpunks are.  At the moment, they’re in London, San Francisco, Vancouver, Providence, Austin, Raleigh, Los Gatos, Seattle, and the village of Nottingham, New Hampshire.
> 
> 
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