"He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped;
But 'scaped in vain, for in their memory yet
His mind would half exult and half regret..."
-Lord Byron
Lara
As most of you know, I regularly train a jaundiced eye on the unkempt horizons of Tomorrowland in a (Quixotic) quest for my Jetsonian future as embodied by the ever-elusive personal jetpack.
This post has nothing to do with jetpacks.
Come to think of it, the jetpack posts don't either, not really. They're about the stagnation of mechanical technology. Of our pointless navel-gazing that has led to a virtual iceage of technological advancement. A brief glimmer of hope may lie ahead as space travel becomes commercially viable, but at present our needs are too few to play matron to invention of aught more than a more efficient delivery system for junkmail and a higher resolution platform from which to observe a more expensive and divisive political campaign.
Nevertheless, part of that quest - the dark side as I refer to it - has always been comparing the practical realities of today with the cybernetic prophecies dreamt up by dark visionaries from the early socialist morality tales of Fritz Lang (Metropolis) to the advanced 'hard' science fiction and dark futures of Phillip K Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) , William R Gibson (Neuromancer), and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash) which gave rise to the term "Worlwide Web" (Gibson), "Cyberspace" (ibid) and thence "Cyberpunk" (ibid) and the eponymous genre of games and movies that followed.
Recent developments at Cern give me some hope that at least the computer-culture, or rather computers as a virtual co-existent world where digital spirits swirl and interact, where the dangers and possibilities play on the fringes of the lost digital frontier. That at least the 'good' (or perhaps 'less bad') parts of the Cyberpunk pipedream might yet coalesce in the breathing world... for better or for worse.
Assuming Cern doesn't suck us all into a quantum singularity first.
Kawoosh!
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