Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

082349872349872

Anyone care to mark this piece to market? Somehow I don't think "the European artist-engineers"[0] ever did construct a cyberspace[1] which is inclusive and universal.

Looking at the "More from Medium" sidebar, we see suggestions for cyberspace activities that are neither rare nor (presumably) are well-done...

    - 20 Entertaining Uses of ChatGPT You Never Knew Were Possible
    - 5 Unique Passive Income Ideas — How I Make $4,580/Month
    - Don’t Just Set Goals. Build Systems

...which (in combination with bleak near-future HN prediction[2]) reminds me of nothing so much as Lem's 1971 Futurological Congress[3].

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[0] considering it hails from the country that brought us both Molière and Minitel Rose, https://www.journalduhacker.net is a bit disappointing. The revolution may not be televised, but it will probably —at least on this side of the GFW— be discussed online in (maternal or non-maternal) english.

[1] although I am here on Th' Continent now, despite having in 1995 been in California, so in the meantime I've apparently chosen my meatspace with my feet.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34231343

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress

> He sees that people do not drive cars or ride in elevators, but they run in the streets and climb the walls of empty elevator shafts, which explains why everyone in this new world is so out of breath. Robots whip people in the street and protect order. Through successive doses of more and more powerful types of up'n'at'm, Tichy sees increasingly horrible visions of the world, climaxing in a frozen horrorscape where people sleep blissfully in the snow, and the police robots are revealed to be people who are convinced that they are robots. The frozen state of the world explains why he has always found the new world to be so cold.

>Somehow I don't think "the European artist-engineers"[0] ever did construct a cyberspace[1] which is inclusive and universal.

Otlet & La Fontaine came close when they tried to get Le Corbusier (quite the artist-engineer) to build a version of the Mundaneum. They intended it to be public and electric, even somewhat decentralized. The surviving bits of it is fully wheelchair accessible.

As lazywebbing failed to work, my marks to market:

> ...and other macho sci-fi novelists whose future worlds were always filled with space traders, superslick salesmen, genius scientists, pirate captains and other rugged individualists...

In some cases (eg The Space Merchants, Pandora's Planet, and arguably The Ayes of Texas) these rugged individualists were parodies.

Is the "Virtual Class" of this essay (symbolic analysts, according to Robert Reich) impacted by ChatGPT?

> Electronic Agora or Electronic Marketplace?

Do both of these possibilities seem a little quaint, in a world which also contains 防火长城, شورای عالی فضای مجازی, and Роскомнадзор?

> the question facing the emerging hypermedia industry isn’t whether or not it will be organised as a mixed economy, but what sort of mixed economy it will be.

Now, this holds up, even in hindsight.

> Freedom is Slavery

I once asked someone of that generation why the hippies thought they could change the world. "After the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, anything seemed possible" was the reply. From the standpoint of 2023, I'd say Reconstruction continues to have yet to be fully in the past, for the Old Country is still dealing with the aftermath of 1868 and the 14A.

> Forward Into the Past

Ah, yes, the twenty-first century, when I can see "flyover deplorables" in the Old Country forming their own separate but equal social networks, sharing memes in which the fine christian Donetsk and Lugansk forces are flying a starred St. Andrew's flag (as opposed to the what, non-christian? Ukrainian forces?) Now, these memes are nowhere to be found on RuNet, but my maximal entropy source attribution is that it's highly likely that's where they'd ideologically originated.

> Cyborg Masters and Robot Slaves

Recall: the Virginians were only carrying on in the traditions of the Athenians.

> There are Alternatives

The specific alternatives mentioned don't seem to have panned out; or at least they are not being publicised at the moment. I am, however, optimistic that other alernatives will eventually be adopted.

Americans will always do the right thing ... after they have tried everything else. — WC

> The Rebirth of the Modern

The EU is trying to assert itself here (and full props to balsam for the Mundaneum! chapeau !); I would just suggest to my former landspeople in the Old Country that it might be nice if the net were indeed a place "with Liberty, and Justice, for all"

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