Science fiction, and inspiration for cybertech : culture in tech

Good On the Media reminders, on the occasion of this weekend’s podcast commenting on Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The Ghost in the machine, episode. Linking the tech (giant-tech, a product of tech-giants) imagination to SF of the 1950s, and a structural misreading to boot, hooking on to “the gadgets” and ignoring the social analysis and stock-taking, a generic feature : SF not a poetics of the future but a treatment of the present and past. Paratopias. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson 1992. Ici ?, un virus à la fois informatique et biologique ? Osmoses et symbioses du biologique et du machinique.

And excellent notes on the superseded, irrelevant reference (becomes an ideological choice for a mythology, with clear orientations toward the great American age of postwar white arrogance), and the dephasing from much development in the genre itself since, from feminist to black ramifications and through-working. Afrofuturism, U Le Guin, …

The role of cyberpunk, I have also found underlined in other recent reading: The Fly, concerning telepathy, in Miah on the history of posthumanism ; Escobar on cyberculture and its cultural roots & emergence, literary ; popular imaginary. Advanced as argument for the cultural dimension and stakes, agency, within an official or dominant story of birth that prefers to mythologize tech “itself”. Cyberology and the cyborg, with and contra Haraway, among others. He has other titles, William Gibson’s Neuromancer for an original one, 1984.