The Shockwave Rider

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Toffler was pretty accurate with his predictions, so some of the praise here should rightfully go to him, but Brunner (1934-1995) co-opted these themes and made them his own, and in greater detail. Mi pequeña cabecita alcanza a formular reflexiones pero no le da para desarrollarlas del todo; leyendo este libro me ha dado por preguntarme cómo es posible que alguien en los 70 fuera capaz de percibir la trampa y las falsas religiones que surgirían a partir del desarrollo de los ordenadores, pero no fuera más allá de imaginar un aparato que sería aún más engañoso: el smartphone. How it ends is thus. It ends with a world on the brink of change – thanks to Haflinger’s worm that makes all information accessible to everybody from anywhere in the network.

Theoretically any one of us has access to more information than ever in history, and any phone booth is a gate to it. But suppose you live next door to a poker who's suddenly elected to the state congress, and six weeks later he's had a hundred-thousand-dollar facelift for his house. Try to find out how he came by the money; you get nowhere.And — no, it can’t be killed. It’s indefinitely self-perpetuating so long as the net exists. Even if one segment of it is inactivated, a counterpart of the missing portion will remain in store at some other station and the worm will automatically subdivide and send a duplicate head to collect the spare groups and restore them to their proper place. Incidentally, though, it won’t expand to indefinite size and clog the net for other use. It has built-in limits.” But it’s full of details—like the game of “fencing,” like an electronic form of Go. Or there are the identities he has taken: “lifestyle consultant, utopia designer, priest, data retrieval specialist”—that last is like being a systems analyst, but they didn’t have the name when the book was written. They barely had computers. But it has social networks, sort of. It has future slang that works. Every time I read it different bits of it have become relevant. (It’s wrong about “veephones” though. There’s a piece of tech we actually have and that nobody wants.)

Por el tinte del libro, en este caso me atrevo a aventurar que al escritor en realidad el cómo se la suda, y sólo le interesa describir los efectos sociológicos. Pues muy bien, con las diferencias obvias entre realidad y premonición, el tío lo clava. Esa falsa creencia de creer que tenemos acceso a TODA la información existente es muy real; que la existencia de un Nicholas Halflinger en nuestro mundo y sus actos nos sacara de ese estado anestesiado, visto lo visto, no creo que sucediera. Pero es bonito imaginarlo. It’s not because my mind in made up that I don’t want you to confuse me with any more facts. It’s because my mind isn’t made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with. So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP!” Teenagers join “tribes” that commit real mayhem, burning down territories. There are parts of cities that are no-go areas. There are game shows on TV where people are maimed and killed, and there are live circuses broadcast that have gladiatorial games and real deaths. The Sheep seems pretty dated now, while The Traveller – with its almost fable-like quality – may seem too enigmatic for today’s average fantasy fan. About this future America-- damn if he was not prescient! Most people live what is called a 'plug in' lifestyle, willing (and forced) to move all the time to new occupations and places; hence, most accommodations are standardized, as seem to be most personality traits. There are fringes of people who resist and resort to 'tribalism', warring among themselves for no real reason. Strange religions flare up and die; unminded by the powers that be (PTB) as they serve to provide an outlet of frustration/anger not directed at the government. Again, most people resort to some type of medication (can you say soma?) to keep themselves together.In the early years of the 21st century, computers dominate society. Everyone, from the super-rich to the barely scraping by* lives their entire life plugged into the global datanet via their veephones. Data savvy professionals can earn enormous amounts, but secure permanent jobs are a thing of the past, with people adapting to 'the plug in lifestyle,' living from short term contract to short term contract and never staying in one place long enough to make lasting relationships. Targeting your enemies with malicious computer programs (called 'worms' here) is an everyday bit of vindictiveness, and Government computers in'Canaveral' monitor every aspect of online existence. The pressure of life at this pace, and awareness of this panopticon, puts people under massive mental pressure. Physical and emotional burnout are common, and the aging survivors of the last century seethe with resentment at the lifestyles of children who have grown up in the world they created. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley deluded utopians are funding unethical, not to say plain stupid, experiments in posthumanism to 'win the brain race.' Estoy generosa: a lo mejor no se merece las 5 pero ¡qué coño!, me lo he pasado estupendamente leyéndolo y ya está. Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who often considered him too American in his settings and themes. He attempted to shift to a more mainstream readership in the early 1980s, without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him, although he was difficult to deal with (his wife had handled his publishing relations before she died).[2]