From: ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu (jim morrison's AA group)
Subject: Re: William Gibson's Email
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Date: Mon, 28 Sep 92 21:19:07 GMT

In article <1992Sep28.082154.25376@src.umd.edu> tedwards@src.umd.edu
(Thomas Grant Edwards) writes: 

|OK, it's late, and I'm going to draw a bizarre analogy, so watch out...
|
|I'm getting really sick of violent techno music.  Sure, when I was
|an angry teenager, I got a real kick out of harcore punk, kind of our
|falling-apart cyberpunk world, heavily laced with underground hack/phreak/
|pyro BBS's and such.  Now we have FLA, Contagion, etc., and groups are
|pumping out truly _evil_ sounding fast-thumping music which any
|participant in a _Neuromancer_ world would thuroughly enjoy.

This happens between any generations....Hypothetically, Your dad may
tell you how he met your mom at a Johnny Mathis concert, and you may
tell your kids how you met your wife (making assumptions about sexual
orientation - sorry b'out that) while moshing at a Front 242 concert,
and those kids may tell their kids about how they met while stabbing
people at a Gwar reunion concert or something like that...:)

|If you had to write all this dark cyberpunk stuff, I'd imagine you'd
|get sick of it also.  Also, the mirrorshaded dudes in the body armor/
|headphone+mike, carrying a 5 foot long, 1 foot thick portable cannon
|around sci-fi/fantasy cons is also getting a little old.

I'm kind of depressed about William Gibson's comment that he doesn't
want to be making "Cyberspace LCVII"....He's created (or at least
fine-tuned, along with Bruce Sterling et al Mirrorshaders) a world of
many possibilities, yet it has become rather stagnant in focus and
motivation in a literary sense (at times)....

But maybe this is just becuase the literary vision is becoming
reality, slowly but surely and in various facets of life....

|Maybe it's just the hippie in me comming out, but I really see the
|"dark" cyberfuture hopefully replaced by the "happy" cyberfuture.
|Not a perfect world, no STNG earth, but people trying to deal with
|the great global and local problems instead of bathing in them and
|letting them fester.  

Well, you ought to start now (or a couple centuries ago)...But I do
agree that society probably will end up finding a hapy niche between
the spectrums of ST:TNG and Chiba City....Movements, in the long run,
never seem to shape the world as much as we initially think they
will...As an example, the hippie movement....It's been revitalized
recently, but to me it sems it was completely lost in the 70's and
80's, yet in the late 60's people were talking about taking over the
easrth with peace, love, and maybe LSD....And look at what's left of
it - not much...Just a second generation with some open minds, LSD at
$3 anywhere you look, and the Beatles plastered all over your radio
(oh, and tie-dye's)...So, overall, it certainly didn't change the
world to the degree that people were talking about...

|It's the technorave movement that is generating this optimism in me.
|People dancing (black and white kids, dancing to the same music! wow),
|no alcohol, no attitudes, bright lasers cutting the through the foggy
|warehouse-night, "I am you..we are one" t-shirts, smart drinks,
|mind machines, exploding digital samples.

Yeah, Digital Woodstocks every weekend are pretty cool....However,
even among the rave community that sense of optimism and free love (or
free extacy, rather) seems to be declining, tainted to an extent by
the movement's integrating into mainstream society...Where I live,
there are many more club raves (pseudo raves) than real raves... The
crowd recently has dwindled to an average age of about 14 I'd say,
guys go there "to get laid" or to get some drugs....And this is true
at both "real" raves and the club raves...No once cares anymore about
the communal sense that rave had initially...It's still sex, drugs,
and rock'n'roll(er, 150bpm techno :)....

|I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old :)

I come from a similar line of thought and experience, I think, from
what youve said, and I can definitely agree with a lot of your opinions..

|-Thomas
| resident technoshaman

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