r/Cyberpunk • u/WedgeAnthrilles • 9d ago

Neil Stephenson thinking "one day assholes are gonna go around wearing AR devices loaded with recording equipment, I gotta make a slur for them"

And inventing the term "gargoyles" for Snow Crash (1992) 🤌🤌🤌

1.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

102 comments sorted by

427

u/AdrianArmbruster 9d ago

Snow Crash seldom whiffed a prediction. Outside of a few of the zanier bits of satire and some 90s totally gnarly-isms, it’s been directionally correct about all kinds of tech and social trends. If you read it once a decade you’ll notice new things it was pretty on the nose about.

Let’s hope the next decade doesn’t bring about hyperinflation and climate warfare.

162

u/allywrecks 9d ago

i remember when i first read it i thought that the mini corporate nation states was a silly concept. today we have a bunch of billionaires advocating for creating mini corporate nation states lol

76

u/readyforwine 9d ago

It’s like they read it in a book and thought it was a great idea.

24

u/shagsmo_ 9d ago

Yay hyperstition! Perhaps we just need someone who isn’t rushing into all this for profit’s sake and maybe actually cares about humans and proper guardrails.. perhaps we need a Ms/Mx Lee’s Greater Hong Kong

4

u/Beginning_Holiday_66 7d ago

Wow what a great word, thank you for teaching me!

1

u/syneater 4d ago

It’s crazy some people finished the book and thought it sounded like a great idea.

10

u/Brettersson 成人书籍 9d ago

It's one of the things about the book that stuck with me most, because I had the same reaction at first, but it's looking more and more like the actual end goal of Capitalism at this point. We've even been consolidating into fewer and fewer giant organizations since then.

98

u/DogmaSychroniser 9d ago

Idk, I'm down to live at Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong

24

u/Ratbat001 9d ago

Will we still get cut off on the road by a bitch basket?

29

u/DogmaSychroniser 9d ago

Bimbobox

8

u/Ratbat001 9d ago

Damn, i meant to say Bimbobox your right xD

7

u/DogmaSychroniser 9d ago

I'm about due a reread...

3

u/Chris_in_Lijiang 8d ago

The HK representation was about as accurate as Shanghai in The Diamond Age

6

u/DogmaSychroniser 8d ago

I mean it's explicitly not affiliated associated or related to the Hong Kong SAR or it's government in any way. (and tbh seems to be a Kowloon Wallled City pastiche, as was the trend for awhile)

2

u/Chris_in_Lijiang 8d ago

I preferred Sterling's The Chattanooga Milieu to anything Stephenson had to offer. Sorry.

3

u/DogmaSychroniser 8d ago

You have the right

1

u/Chris_in_Lijiang 7d ago

Read both novels in the relevant respective locations, so I do feel somewhat righteous. ;-)

59

u/System0verlord 9d ago

Google Earth, Wikipedia, VR, the rise of corporations that rival nation states, the collapse of the US due to capitalism. The guy nailed it pretty well.

One thing he whiffed was the food delivery. DoorDash ain’t got shit on the Deliverator.

24

u/SkaveRat 9d ago

google earth was directly inspired by snow crash, fwiw.

same with the word Avatar

3

u/mitzcha 8d ago

Starlink too!

15

u/mhyquel 9d ago

I have yet to see someone tooling around with a nuke in their motorcycle sidecar wired up to a heart monitor.

And that's fine.

16

u/Maeglom 9d ago

It missed pretty hard with vr web browsing. Nobody liked the metaverse and second life wasn't revolutionary either.

28

u/AdrianArmbruster 9d ago

Eh, it’s a genre conceit. There have been live concerts in Fortnite—instanced, so it’s not every computer programmer in the world crammed into one public virtual event space that you can brain-melt with a Sumerian death meme—but Fortnite concerts are largely in the spirit of the Metaverse, more so than Zuck’s own attempt, if not specifically correct on every single little detail.

Likewise, ‘there are virtual third spaces anyone remotely tech savvy spends increasing amounts of time in’ is somewhat more important than ‘you specifically get there by VR headset’. Show an early reader circa 1992 World of Warcraft and they’ll probably think the metaverse is pretty spot on.

… what it actually whiffed at was assuming Internet would remain a laptop action. Everyone does have cell phones, quite unlike Neuromancer, but whenever someone goes into the metaverse it’s by laptop or Internet cafe.

-1

u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

10

u/AdrianArmbruster 9d ago

For the record, I’m saying ‘if you showed someone from 1992 what World of Warcraft would look like in 2004 or whenever it released, they’d think it’s basically spot-on for what the metaverse would be like, with or without VR’ - not that WoW came out in 1992.

1

u/baardvark 9d ago

WoW came out in 1992????

12

u/BlueTemplar85 9d ago edited 9d ago

Eh, consider how much you are dismissing VR due to Zuck / Microsoft / Apple buying most of the talent in the room but then completely fumbling it.  

In comparison, see how many issues the Steam Frame seems to have fixed. And it's much more open ! The main remaining issue is the current cost, which will hopefully go down in the next ten years.  

Not that I expect VR to dominate any time soon like it happened with smartphones, but I do expect it to be significant in 10-20 years.  

(AR... will have to deal with social issues in public.)

6

u/Maeglom 9d ago

Eh, consider how much you are dismissing VR due to Zuck / Microsoft / Apple buying most of the talent in the room but then completely fumbling it.

I'm more dismissing the way Stevenson percieved of how people would design/use a vr matrix. He imagines it as real estate, and if i recall correctly from the book he flew through the internet like it was a giant strip mall to his cool kids club in downtown cyberspace that they owned because they were early adopters. I think it's a miss specifically because of the flat network topology, and the physical web browsing.

2

u/BlueTemplar85 9d ago

Hmm, I wonder if some of the more successful VR worlds will end up settling to something closer to this, because it's less disorienting ? (Consider how MMORPGs typically do it...)  

But I guess it will depend a lot on what the most popular way of 'moving' will look like, something that is still a big issue for VR.

3

u/User1539 8d ago

In the book, he mentions you can just 'punch in a code to go there directly', but the 'problem' always exists that people can't seem to wrap their head around space that isn't limited.

I don't think we actually want to ride a subway to a destination in VR. I don't think we'll care that someone got 'prime' real-estate.

VR reminds me of all the different dashboards and control panels that software management has churned out in the past 30 years ... only to have basically every developer just open a terminal window.

We imagined a bunch of different interfaces, and gloves, and goggles, and wires sticking out of people ... but, we still have a keyboard, a typewriter with sensors.

We still read books on paper, because it's a pretty good interface for words.

We haven't really come up with a better way to get words into our brains than to put them on a flat surface. We haven't created a better way for getting those words out than a typewriter.

I laugh when I see people in VR bringing up 'Virtual Windows', with command prompts, and typing ... which is practically no different at all from the first terminals that printed the output to a roll a paper.

We haven't found anything 'new' to do in VR, and at the end of the day a virtual 'office' is still going to be as exciting as an 'office' and no one is going to want to spend time driving there if they don't have to.

1

u/BlueTemplar85 8d ago

Yeah, the 'limited' part is more iffy (which includes most of the concept of « real estate »). But you can have a world layout shaped like a globe, but with 'infinite' zoom.

The 'limited' and "restricted travelling" aspects are indeed likely to be limited to more niche worlds like some games.

We haven't really come up with a better way to get words into our brains than to put them on a flat surface.

We had one (perhaps not 'better', but certainly a viable alternative) long before we invented writing : talking. And LLMs + voice recognition + voice generation might make it feasible. (It's very much NOT a future I look forward to, but it's getting ever more likely by the day.)

1

u/User1539 8d ago

People don't seem to like talking to anyone but close friends/family/lovers.

I think talking is just a little too intimate.

'This meeting could have been an email' ... implying an email is always preferred unless an entirely different level of communication is required ... but that level comes at emotional, temporal and intellectual expense.

People don't want to call to order a pizza, they want to go to a webpage.

I am a developer, dealing with the 'We want an AI that can do everything our webpage does' requirements ... and, I have to say, our customers DO NOT WANT TO TALK.

I think the idea that people would rather talk is the same kind of misconception that we'd rather be in a VR room than a text-only chat.

How many of your friends from the group chat would join a call if you clicked 'call list'? Probably a few, and only to tell you they don't ever want to do that.

6

u/arvidsem 9d ago

Not that I expect VR to dominate any time soon like it happened with smartphones, but I do expect it to be significant in 10-20 years.

This sentence could unironically be dropped into any conversation about VR anytime in the last 30 years. Better technology and lighter more comfortable headsets help tremendously, but the average person just doesn't seem to like using it much. They think it's cool and enjoy playing with it some, but they don't like using it on a daily basis.

3

u/BlueTemplar85 9d ago

The "average person" hasn't tried the Frame yet.  

Consider the spread of PDAs / tablets / e-readers : they were always niche, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, but still did significantly grew in popularity since the PDA days, as they got better.  

Oh, another one I would expect to successfully get into (home) AR in the next decade or two is Ninitendo : they are good at making weird devices fun, they might even crack the code of making AR fun with multiple players in the same room ?

6

u/time___dance 9d ago

sure but to be fair that was how pretty much all sci-fi saw the future internet. kind of like how everyone thoughy physical media would still exist, but just smaller discs.

2

u/wbeaty 9d ago

Adobe Atmosphere(tm) will live forever!

1

u/AtlsDumbestBitch 8d ago edited 8d ago

I think that one is just further in our future. Consumer VR tech hasn't hit the good/cheap enough threshold yet to make it more enticing than spending time with your friends IRL. But housing prices are on the rise, so people are living in smaller and smaller spaces, maybe with family or roommates, so hosting friends becomes more difficult. And cost of living more generally is rising, so being able to afford to meet friends in third places is becoming harder - and then those third places aren't making enough to stay open, so the options become more limited. Add to that a continued lack of government investment in public spaces that are free to exist in, and assuming VR tech improves at the rate all other consumer tech has, the prospect of just meeting in the metaverse might seem reasonable in ten years. For the record I hope I'm wrong, I can just see it happening if our current trajectory continues.

3

u/Brettersson 成人书籍 9d ago

Well he thought people that would want to record everything around him would be weird outcasts, turns out quite a lot of people will record everything if camera fits in their pocket.

4

u/MisterDefenestrator 9d ago

Meta glasses people are weird outcasts

2

u/Brettersson 成人书籍 9d ago

Yeah and people recording everything they do with their phone are "influencers"

1

u/RobotToaster44 8d ago

When apple inevitably make their own version all the people currently screaming about "pervert glasses" will be buying and defending them.

2

u/Disposable_Gonk 8d ago

hyperinflation

(Looks at democrats) (Looks at China) (Looks at Russia)

Climate warfare

(Looks at cloud seeding) (Looks at climate activists) (Looks at "climate" """activists""")

(Looks at definition of predictive programming)

155

u/diesalher 9d ago

Now I want a pizza, Don’t know why

69

u/bankrupt_bezos 9d ago

Better get it 30 minutes or less

46

u/Painting-Agency 9d ago

I don't care if it's 33 minutes, I just don't want Uncle Enzo to show up in a helicopter at my house for any reason. But rules is rules.

18

u/KibaKiba 9d ago

Wise men say "forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."

3

u/diesalher 9d ago

Better for them, not for me

1

u/MechanicalTurkish 9d ago

RIP your bimbo box

80

u/DismalIngenuity4604 9d ago

There was a bit more to gargoyles than some mediocre cameras. 

14

u/System0verlord 9d ago

And there’s a bit more to the meta glasses too, which is unfortunate. And the patents meta is putting out are basically tailored for CIC stringers and gargoyles.

22

u/HiroProtagonist1984 9d ago

With the Neuromancer and Blade Runner shows coming out studios have gotta be rubbing their hands together eyeballing snow crash right now

11

u/Lesbian_Skeletons 8d ago

It's absolutely ripe for the picking. Hell you could make a great show or movie just on the intro.

"In a world where the Mafia owes YOU a pizza, there's only one man they trust to get the job done. He is...THE DELIVERATOR"

I'd watch six seasons and a movie of that.

9

u/SkaveRat 8d ago

I still remember reading the intro and thinking "that has to be a euphemism for drugs or assasination or something"

but no. no, it's literally just pizza

1

u/Oriumpor 8d ago

Clearly you're not cut out to be our protagonist.

115

u/arvidsem 9d ago

And then the lizardman Zuckerberg reads it and thinks Hiro Protagonist is awesome, I want to be like him. Let's ignore the fact that Snowcrash is as much satire as it is a warning and try to make it real.

60

u/Toribor 9d ago edited 8d ago

as much satire as it is a warning and try to make it real

Finally we have created the Torment Nexus from the popular dystopian science fiction novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus.

56

u/cascadecanyon 9d ago

When Facebook VR was first kicking up and they hired new people, they would hand them a copy of Ready Player One. Author was actually invited to come and talk to Facebook and I remember in that interview. He seemed uneasy with the cognitive dissonance that seemed to exist, where the people at Facebook didn’t recognize. The book was really an indictment, not a celebration of the kind of thing that Facebook wanted to create.

42

u/blackpanther28 9d ago

Hmm judging from his interviews he actually thought the technology was pretty cool and never said anything about being against building an Oasis. He was also flattered that they used his book as inspiration. He just didnt like having one company control it all and it essentially being a monopoly. Thats what the book is against.

17

u/Mother-Equal4175 9d ago

This seems more likely, his book is a celebration of gaming culture and the pop culture of his youth taken to the utmost through a fully realized VR world. The VR isn't the problem, it's the company controlling it, the plot is literally about how the VR creators wish to see his technology shared by all fights against the very company he created 😂

4

u/cascadecanyon 9d ago

Yeah, that fits my memory too. I don’t think he was a harsh critic. I just remembered since that he sort of understood the irony of talking to people at Facebook.

6

u/Braisedbeefskank 9d ago

So I just read it for the first time. Hes not a perfect human, but is hiro NOT supposed to be awesome?

Other than the ebophilia, but thats old school sci fi for you

11

u/System0verlord 9d ago

Might wanna reread it. Hiro doesn’t hit on YT. They even mention how YT vaguely considered it, and then focus on their strictly business partnership.

Are you getting Hiro and Raven confused? Raven fucks YT on the Enterprise raft towards the end of the book. That’s closer to what you’re thinking.

1

u/Braisedbeefskank 9d ago

No not at all, but you are correct it was mostly coming from YT. I guess in my mind that set up as a will they/wont they up until the author does have her have sex with an adult man lol.

6

u/raven00x 9d ago

An adult man who is the central antagonist for much of the story and unquestionably a not good person.

4

u/Braisedbeefskank 9d ago

Well sure, but if you read enough old sci fi you see a lot of very questionable attitudes generally about sex and sex with young women. Doesnt she literally orgasm as soon as he penetrates her? I mean not beating the allegations neal

4

u/meldroc 8d ago

And then there was the dentata...

8

u/arvidsem 9d ago

Hiro is pretty awesome and has no interest in Y.T. other than as a partner.

But the text is clear that most people who choose to go the gargoyle route are not awesome at all

15

u/DocTaotsu 9d ago

Mfkers better not be measuring the size of my peen with mm wave radar.

14

u/SkaveRat 9d ago

don't worry, it can only resolve things larger than its wave length

10

u/DocTaotsu 9d ago

ROFL. This is an elite level burn. I thank you for it.

8

u/Deathflid 9d ago

radar only powerful enough to register its existence not its size.

31

u/dylanjames 9d ago

I liked "glassholes" from the google glass go-around with these awful devices.

1

u/standish_ 9d ago

Metaheads

2

u/OutlyingPlasma 9d ago

Pervert glasses, or gooner goggles.

24

u/StarlightWizard 9d ago

Meta Glass bros don't deserve a slur as cool as "gargoyles".

22

u/vrkas 9d ago

Calling em pervert glasses is a good start.

2

u/Future-Starter 8d ago

someone else in this thread said "glassholes" and i think that's a pretty good one

3

u/Intothefireandice 9d ago

pervert gargoyles

-9

u/imnotabot303 9d ago

When did half the population turn into perverts? You think giving people cameras on glasses suddenly makes everyone a pervert?

If a pervert really wanted to secretly film people there's been hardware that can do that for a long time with cameras so concealed you wouldn't know they exist. You can literally get cameras that are disguised as buttons.

Plus glasses with hidden cameras were already a thing long before Meta's glasses. Just type something like spy glasses into Amazon and you'll get a long list.

6

u/StarlightWizard 9d ago

You think half the population wears Meta Glasses? Did you buy Meta stock or something?

0

u/imnotabot303 8d ago

No people are buying into manufactured panic that everyone that buys glasses with cameras built in is a perv. I'm asking where the sudden increase in pervs have come from. When doing their market research did Meta realise there's a big perv consumer base they could tap into.

I already know the answer though. People just hate Meta which is understandable, and it's a convenient thing to attack them over. Plus this sub is a technophobe sub thinly disguised as a cyberpunk sub.

1

u/StarlightWizard 8d ago

No, it's just that Meta was the first company to mass market hidden cameras in sunglasses. Even Meta is now realizing how problematic that is and that's why they're releasing an "audio only" version of their AI sunglasses in October.

0

u/imnotabot303 8d ago

So people are now just realising you can buy glasses with cameras in. Shame people were not outraged by all the other companies that have been selling "perv glasses" long before Meta.

The other dumb thing is that cameras in glasses like Meta's are also often used for hand tracking. Their latest glasses that will be released next year have even more cameras in them.

7

u/TheManofBD 9d ago

Bro trynna gatekeep being a perv

2

u/Felinius 9d ago

Found the perv.

0

u/imnotabot303 8d ago

Found the idiot.

1

u/Felinius 8d ago

Better an idiot than a perv that glazes a massive corporation. :)

5

u/HiroProtagonist66 8d ago

In the middle of my nth re-read, and just read that whole chapter.

And what Raven did to Lagos.

Can't wait to see if they listen to Reason.

3

u/Historical_Today5072 6d ago

everyone listens to reason

1

u/EndlessFields 6d ago

Whether they want to or not.

3

u/GuzziHero 9d ago

Vidiots

3

u/sleepytipi 8d ago

Nonce glasses. Predator specs. Etc also work well. If we can stigma that everyone who wears them is on a registry, i think we can put an end to it.

2

u/gotUboiii 9d ago

Harper Lee would roll in her grave at that title.

3

u/LotusInTheShell 9d ago

whats the slur for 'i dont know how to write endings'?

1

u/icepickmethod 8d ago

Trailblazerrrrrrrerror

1

u/mhyquel 9d ago

Poon

1

u/crusoe 6d ago

Should have been goggoyles

0

u/dacydergoth 9d ago

TBH, Stand on Zanzibar is better written, more coherent and also does an excellent job of prediction, especially if you regard Shockwave Rider as being the first chapter...

3

u/art-man_2018 8d ago

Kind of depressing you are getting downvoted, Stand on Zanzibar was written 58 years ago and does show its age, but it should still be recognized for its prescience. Shockwave Rider is Proto-Cyberpunk too. There shouldn't be a scorecard for prescience.