How much is 1 trillion dollars? It's as if everything in all of Singapore, every piece of art, every person's home, every car, every diaper, every stitch of clothing, everything that belonged to the entire nation of Singapore - a prosperous island to be sure... as if all that faded away, leaving just the people standing on a barren desert. And then, not 20 minutes later, it all came back.
It got me thinking back then. Indulge me; I'm going to quote a nearly three-year-old blog post verbatim:
San Francisco is sailing by outside the train's walls, and the woman next to me is explaining about Mexico City. How from the air it just goes on in all directions, with no end by the horizon. How the trains are packed full, and men wearing backpacks with speakers in all directions will board, blast the train with a quick snatch of music, try to sell a CD, then head to the next car. I think this is what we expected from our cyberpunk future, only in Japanese.
I've been buying up boxes of Netrunner on eBay, a cyberpunk game that died in '99, to share amongst my friends. The cards are littered slang from 2020, a future where millions logged onto The Net every day. Where a deranged AI could crash the stock market. Where the 'eurobuck' was stronger than the dollar, and governments took their marching orders from corporations.
Funny how that future never happened.
When Mike Pondsmith wrote CyberPunk 2020, it was 1988.
The treaty creating the Euro was signed in 1995. The first ones entered circulation in 1999. The Euro overtook the dollar in 2002 and has been higher valued ever since.
ArpaNet came online in 1969, connecting 3 computers. By 1988, a wider 'net of civilian computers had grown up around it, and people were calling that "The Internet". If you worked outside academia, you wouldn't hear about it for a few years more. By the middle '90s, most Americans had heard of the Internet, and might even have seen it through AOL.
The first AI stock trader came online in the late '80s. It was wired to the NASDAQ by a spliced feed, and when the officials discovered it a few years later, they demanded that its parent company disconnect it and trade through a screen and keyboard the same as everyone else. The corporation complied by rigging a camera to the computer to read the screen and a machine to type on the keys, and kept the AI directly connected, with no human in the loop. The NASDAQ officials left in a huff, but never tried to shut it down again. The generations of AI traders that followed this one, now called "HFTs" (High Frequency Traders) tripped the flash crash when they fell into a logic trap their programmers didn't foresee.
Blade Runner was set in 2019.
Ghost in the Shell set its future in 2029.
We don't have offworld colonies. Brain to computer interfaces are still reserved for a handful of medical cases whose brains we were poking things into anyway, for other reasons. I don't see any replicants on the horizon.
But in so many other ways, we're right on schedule for the cyberpunk future we were promised in the 80's.
I'll share the rest of the steampunk pics as soon as I get them. It was a great shoot, and we put a lot of effort in it, so I'm sure that I'll like the end result.