Why did we not get the cool dystopia ala Gibson's Chiba City?

I remember walking over a hill into a rave in the Utah desert that we'd set up and thinking that it actually was the cyberpunk dystopia that I had been hoping for.

That kind of stuff is around but maybe not evenly distributed or legible to large demographics.

Unfortunately, so is the rest of the vicious horrorshow, equally illegible and equally uneven in distribution.

Interesting that you frame it as "hoping" for a dystopia. Like even in our wildest imaginations we can't envision a future where society works for regular folks.

I'm sympathetic to the problem that folks like Mark Fisher have laid out, in which (to paraphrase) "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", and that indeed might be one way to understand my feeling.

I take your point; it makes sense.

"Regular folks" is doing a lot of work, though.

It may very well be the case that most of the material world which props up the idea of "regular folks" never was capital-R Real and insofar as the idea is a pleasant dream it is not a sustainable one.

Proximate to me, often "regular folks" entail white folks unproblematically living their lives around the norms of US hegemonic capital interests. When I hear Pat the Bunny sing "show me utopia, I will call it a jail" I understand the feeling. I was, afterall, raised by Christians who believed in David Byrne's picture of "Heaven" as a place where "nothing ever happens".

Those are the folks who have happily elected a few people to replace the Flock cameras here with Axon. Their vision of an ordered society is a bit chilling to me, despite the fact that they understand their project as both liberal and progressive.

As I understand it, deviations from those cultural norms are already "dystopic" to the "regular folks" I know- if we somehow lost our ability to transmute sand into computing power and dead plants into motive power and had to go back to living in the cliff side then we'd no longer really be human, despite the fact that their enchanted sand and holy oil is literally destroying the ecology of the entire planet.

This situation is, of course, already a distopia for the bands of Ute and Jicarilla Apache and Dine and Hopi and others living near me. And when I look at the kinds of technological survellience built into the material structures it feels easy enough to note that we already live in a dystopia. I have heard some specific dakota folks refer this situation to as post-apocalyptic and I am inclined to agree.

If we accept that we're already in a dystopia and, further, that much of the hegemonic culture's idea of a "utopia" has already been a holocaust for several other groups of people, then hoping for a "dystopia" in that sense might seem a bit more coherent.

Damn, calling out Mark Fisher and Pat the Bunny? I think we are immersed in a lot of the same cultural and intellectual movements.

Because we got the gray box IBM version instead...

it seems like all the tech-fascists just read snowcrash and settled on that.

Maybe a specific cancer but in general “solving cancer” is about as scattershot and unspecific as you could be.

I have high hopes for AI yet am hard pressed to envision said abundance trickling down to the common man. The diseases cured will be locked behind a paywall and a renaissance of democracy and freedom is laughable in 2026, let alone beyond.

Dario and his team are on top of the world. He is a good salesman, no doubt. The shareholders will eat well.

This is what is truly problematic. People at OAI probably think they can do and say whatever they want.

Recently ran into someone who thought they had solved a major quantum computing problem. Needless to say, they had not, and I wasted a good hour wading through their ‘work’. Time I will never get back. Nothing more to add than to echo your thoughts. Wish I had a better solution.

I guess this is just what selection pressure looks like. It’s possible that adults who struggle to navigate social media and agitprop to the extent that they can’t imagine being able to raise kids in the 21st century might actually be right that their offspring would also struggle.

Shortchanging? Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? (Not the romanticized one). Do you think they were eating organic avocados?

Life and technology and healthcare and many other things are objectively better in many, many ways.

> Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s?

You mean the one where they could have 3 kids, send them to college, and graduate with no debt?

One of my professors went to UC Berkeley in the 60's. Inflation adjusted, his cost was $700 (I forget if this was per semester or per year).

Do you know how many people went to college in 1960?

Do you know how many households didn't have indoor plumbing?

Do you know how many people died of measles?

You are cherry picking a few data points to paint a very, very rosy picture of a reality in which the vast, vast majority of people were living a life much, much poorer than even a poor person today.

Only about 10% of Americans had college degrees in the 1960s compared to about 37% today and the large majority of them were men. Does that sound like a past anyone wants to return to?

And those classrooms had no AC (probably), no WiFi, no projectors, no access to (almost unlimited) online resources, no fancy gym, etc etc.

In 1988 in _Atlanta_ my local public school finally got ceiling fans installed, thanks to the PTA fundraising. We never had AC. We had one window unit at home in my parents bedroom. It was fine.

Without global warming, AC were not necedsary. Wifi, projector and nonfancy gym are literally no issues - if they disappeared you wont regret.

There was progress, but these are not important parts of it.

The projectors are not worth the extra cost (not even close!). When I think of all the classes I took in over a decade at universities, very few benefited from projectors. They existed mostly for lazy professors who wanted to write a slide deck once and keep using it, without doing interactive work on the whiteboard.

Wherever I studied (admittedly in the north), we did not need ACs. Heating was important, and many of the buildings were old and used the same heating they had in the 60's.

WiFi: Mostly not in my time either. I certainly don't see it as important in education. I personally didn't even own a WiFi capable device until 2012.

Online resources: I'll grant you that, but I'll point out where I went in the early 00's, our low ranked university had excellent Internet access (ranked amongst the top in the country), and the annual cost was $2600. Never found a journal, etc that I didn't have access to.

Gym? Seriously? For the extra cost in education, you can go to any good gym! Are you going to tell kids these days "Sorry you can't afford a degree that will help you get a job - we wanted a fancy gym!"

Other than the Internet, none of the other items is valuable for most degrees. Personally, in a hotter climate, I'd really want the AC - but I wouldn't pay that much just for an AC.

Maybe not organic avocados but more likely to be eating produce from your own backyard garden.

That was done for cost reasons back then but today local and seasonal produce is a staple of high end restaurants.

The 1960s was well after agriculture as a percentage of the population in the US had declined to a small figure, and relatively few suburban or urban dwellers were growing things for their own consumption.

Well we still were in small town America in the 1970s. :)

Absolutely incorrect. Do you really think the majority of people lived on an acre of arable land providing bountiful vegetables year-round? Do you know what a "tenement" is? Do you know how many people had indoor plumbing in 1960? How many died of the measles?

The vegetables obviously weren’t fresh year round but my grandmother and mother and aunts canned lots and lots of vegetables we ate throughout the winter.

> I imagine all generations think it was better in their day.

This might be objectively true these days, considering climate change.

Have you ever heard of leaded gas?

Did you see the "these days" part in my comment?

Edit: nevermind that even, leaded gas was banned in Europe in 2000, and while I was a child in the 90s, it did not affect me or anyone I know negatively (that we know of), so not sure how to interpret your reply at all.

They provide the world with an invaluable service at the expense of their freedom. Seems incredibly noble and good to me. Especially considering the current climate.

They're a for profit organization and you're falling for their propaganda.

Propaganda to what end? Are you referring to anything in particular?

Is your angle merely that shadow library hosts should be operating their services entirely for free (to the point of refusing payment) or is there something we're missing here?

No, just that they shouldn't claim that they have a vertous mission and that this is what your money is going towards.

Do you need to follow the law to have virtue? There's a correct answer to that question btw.

Freeing all information is virtuous, though…

I honestly get better results out of claude at the command line than inside a GUI. Maybe I am just imagining things. But a lot of times GUIs are just graphical abstractions of TUIs. It is cruft that makes things visually easier and more appealing. That does not stop people from mastering TUIs and unlocking extra potential as they typically offer much deeper customization.

Once you go down this path, it is hard to go back. Very few tasks, apart from things like Photoshop and Revit, really require me to be at a GUI these days. And with MCP a lot of that is going away.