kradeelav | (no subject)

do you ever have a moment when you read one line by a writer, and instantly
seethingly,
(pettily) dislike that fucker and their taste on the spot so much that you'd duel them to the death out of sheer spite of their existence when that was the fancy thing to do? or at least dunk their head in the toilet if you were classmates? :P

i was not aware of this feeling until reading about this Stephenson dude here l m a o:

Stephenson teamed up with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination to create Project Hieroglyph, “a global collective of writers and researchers” dedicated to countering the “darker, more skeptical, and [more] ambiguous tone” that had recently come to dominate sci-fi. Within two years, he persuaded a who’s-who of authors to join up: Elizabeth Bear, David Brin, Bruce Sterling, Charlie Jane Anders, and more. But after another two years, Project Hieroglyph went dark.

To his credit, Stephenson saw his target clearly. As he explained in a 2012 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Project Hieroglyph had “one rule: no hackers, no hyperspace, and no holocaust.” Notwithstanding his unorthodox counting technique, these three rules make sense.

I'm sure he's a decent(?) guy! (barring any controversy i don't know) but wow words cannot contain the primal feral cat hades_screech.gif reaction I had. ~~bitch what fuckin world does sci-fi exist without hackers other than your numbnut proto-anti prude balls???~~

anyway imma pick up some octavia butler shorts for sci fi with some sense and fun. :P (it has been A Day)

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Okay I had the same reaction
'no hackers'
*record scratch* excuse me?

This smacks of a person that has no idea what 'hacking' is. It is integral to the environment of thrust upon technological entrenchment, it's not just some digital breaking and entering. If you want your SciFi without Hacking, then the only thing you're good for is the Sword and Planet genre.

*reads some of the article*
Ah I see, this guy is one of those HARD SCI-FI techno-purists that want's '''''REAL''''' speculative tech. And worse yet, wants the prestige of 'solving problems' through fiction. Ugh exactly the kind of flavor of scifi elitism I hate.

I don't care for Stephenson much to begin with, so I'm kind of BEC in this way. Oof.

i was a little surprised seeing this quote out-of-context, since Stephenson in my experience is particularly beloved by hacker-ly types, and his most famous novels are very Cyberpunk Classic TM, etc

(the only thing of his i’ve read is Snow Crash, but i’m told that one’s pretty representative, and that one’s definitely pretty well-known and very Hack The Planet TM)

reading the article, i get where the flinch reaction comes from, but i think Stephenson wasn’t so much trying to dunk on hackers as he was trying to open up some new, under-explored avenues in the genre? which is an impulse i can understand—if you’ve been writing cyberpunk-focused narratives since the 80s, and you feel like there’s some a (personal or global, whichever) stagnation in that genre, it makes sense to try something, anything new

(i also think the linguistic drift in the term “hacker” itself makes it a little tricky to pin down what exactly Stephenson’s feelings are here. it’s been sort of weird watching that transformation over the course of my lifetime!

ime, boomer-era computery types (e.g. my professors in college) used “hacker” as an honorific and acknowledgment of skill. a really great hacker wrote a fantastic compiler or the core garbage collection routine for a major programming language or whatever. it was an apolitical compliment; some hackers may live in psychadelic-friendly group houses in the Mission, and some hackers may do boring shit for IBM; these were irrelevant to what made one a “hacker”

whereas gen x computer types seem to take the term to be an explicitly countercultural thing, e.g. even if you are very skilled, you are not a hacker unless you’re at least some of: a GPL stan, anti-corporate, doin’ illegal things, really into decentralized/federated software designs, etc

and with millennial it seems to have taken on a connotation of hustling/world-conquering/new money that wasn’t as present in earlier iterations. like, big companies run “hackathons” and some people really do make it part of their identity to “win” these hackathons, whatever that means, and yada yada

and while i think some of the blowback against the latter is a touch misplaced and i think the gen-x group can suffer a touch of myopia, like, these are all very different sort of things, so it’s hard to tell what exactly it is that’s being excluded in the first place, lol)

i have no dog in this fight since i found Snow Crash merely okay :P but yeah that’s my read on it lol

more importantly, fuck yeah Octavia Butler god her stuff is so great

Little bit of a reassurance to know I wasn't the only one that kinda winced, yeahhh

that's super cool to hear about your thoughts on the linguistic drift there on hacker as a word! :o on a mission reading some of the earlier books on linux (figured if i switched over to an entire OS it would be cool to know the history of it xD) and i have absolutely seen all three of those ways applied to various kinds of people. and then of course, you get the media also involved in it where they have a whole spectrum of like - hacker as fairly benign or hacker as a "scare chords" type of e-criminal kind of thing.

words, man. so weird xD