#introductions Hi there, I'm Mat. I make interactive media and experimental narrative games. They can be found at http://aether.in.net.
I used to study film and I still like to dive into esoterics. I'm also a bit of a weeb. I'm interested in gentle indie pop and cyberpunk + political theory, especially the CCRU.
Hey friends! My friend Phil and I have been collaborating on an indie pop album and we've finally released it. @goodbyecomputer provided the art, too. Lapsed Catholics' Hetaera is out:
You can now log in to the Subserial Network. Explore the mesh network of the post-singularity and track down synthetics unbecoming human by using your own desktop.
check up on each other. not even the go-to people, check up on people you haven't thought about in years. follow your concern further back in your connections
FInished the book. Spoiler-heavy Neuromancer review, if you're interested in discussing:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2682009282
@matilde While Gibson's fine, he didn't invent most of that stuff, it's in other SF and other cyberpunk writers before and current to him. Spider Robinson's "God is an Iron" (1979) is maybe the first modern wirehead/simstim, and even that's somewhat based on older ideas.
neuromancer spoil, philo
Accelerationism is the incestuous billionaire cryogenic family in space suiciding the human race into death with sentient AI pulling the strings on the human race, one person at a time, against and with each other, to birth itself
I see why this book is part of the canon as much as the theory is. It, and Terminator, are the basic theory, but For Real, Actually,
Thinking about the particular relish the female lead gets from sharing sensory experience with a passenger, with particularly titillating them. Some kind of new uh, idk — we talk about the attraction to being objectified, of being an object of desire, but of being the origin of new sensation, of being the vessel, of being the same meat
Can't believe Gibson thought of all that stuff in 1984. Can't believe even just a throwaway thing like the simstim stuff gets used as novelty concepts in SF thirty years later and then he already took it fifty levels higher in the same book. Can't believe he thought Blade Runner was stealing his thunder.
"We need a late 20s young professional girl of variant sexuality for this one, boss. She has to prefer wine to beer and be good at describing tech, but not much of a coder, and she has to like these three podcasts."
"No prob, my man, there are ... 30, in the United States."
post-truth internet
As time goes on I become increasingly convinced that an understanding of narrative and mythology, and the ability to navigate the grand narratives of other humans outside the internet itself, is most important.
Over and over again, it doesn't matter what happened. It matters how people see the world. Navigating this fact is a survival skill.
post-truth internet
For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
pol + independent media
Article on the different audience structures for left and right independent media. Murphy tries to decipher organic spread for the "alternative stream" of politically-bent independent creators, finds trajectory of upward mobility constrains left media consumers considerably.
https://theotherlifenow.com/audience-structure-on-the-left-and-right-of-new-indy-media/
Technomystic of the cybernetic left. Interactive media artist with http://aether.in.net. Avatar by @aurahack.