Another thing they got right was the merger of governments, large corporations, finance, intelligence agencies, and globalized organized crime into one big sprawling mass of Machiavellian nihilists scheming for power. None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.

Gibson in particular nails this, especially in his original Sprawl trilogy. This sprawling mass is what he calls "biz." It's "just biz."

I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable. Any kind of principle, rule of law, or sense of national or cultural identity requires that coherence. Without it the system dissolves into this random churning stew of scheming, money, and power.

On a personal level it means you have to find these things in your personal life and the family and community you build around you, and you should not look for or expect these things from larger scale social structures. They can't deliver them, and the reasons might not just be "corruption" or "people are assholes." They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate.

Gibson depicts this too. His world of the Sprawl was bleak but there were pockets of people who had created what amounted to intentional communities within it. I'm thinking of the Afro-American-futurist arcologies in Count Zero or the orbital subcultures like the Rastafarians. Some of the subculture around the "console cowboys" also counts.

EDIT:

Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data, Enterprise's AI, droids in Star Wars) or malevolent (Colossus, Skynet, Dune's prehistory).

> Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data

Data painted and performed music: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Data#The_arts

To be fair, his motivation was to become more human. But at least he did have intrinsic motivations that didn’t appear to come from some training.

That aside, there are many examples that long predate Gibson:

Kurt Vonnegut’s EPICAC (1950): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPICAC_(short_story). It also has the motive of a human passing off the AI’s artistic creation as his own.

C. M. Kornbluth’s “With These Hands” (1951): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51531

Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1953): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatiza...

Incidentally, J. G. Ballard’s “Studio 5, The Stars” (1961): https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/some-dance-to-forget

Once the concept of “electronic brains” was there, the idea that they might also produce art like a human brain can wasn’t far.

Yeah it's really amazing how prescient these books are given when they were written. I wish I enjoyed them more, I'm reading Mona Lisa Overdrive now and other than intellectual admiration of it all I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through. I don't enjoy the prose, and how dense it is I guess cause I am not a careful reader.

> he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this

Plenty of forebears here. Orwell's 1984 has mass-produced trash novels generated by a machine. Stanislaw Lem''s Cyberiad has a poetry generator.

AI and creativity/art is actually explored through Data in Star Trek. He was a painter, played the violin, gave poetry readings...

"They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate."

Sounds unlikely to me without the caveat "within this particular brand of politics and socioeconomics".

> I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable.

I think we might just not have run out of money yet. A lot of debt (social, structural, technical, financial, cultural, etc) is going to hit us like a freight train if AI turns out to not be the magic cure people desperately hope it is going to be.

The power of "the biz" rests on cash not running out. Certainly not on loyalty of the workers.

> Another thing they got right was [...] None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.

I think it's worth asking whether "nobody really believes anything" is itself the result of a cynical manipulative play, one that occurs in the real world, and thus affects our judgement as we compare "today" versus a sci-fi book.

In particular I'm thinking of how certain regimes encourage a kind of "everybody is lying truth is pointless" nihilism, because it gives them a net-benefit in mentally exhausting their victims and deterring anyone without power from organizing.

In other words:

1. The dystopia-story may depict an amoral/post-truth fog and imply that it's an inevitable world-constant within the human hive. Not necessarily because the author believes that's human nature, but because it's window-dressing to the story they want to focus on telling.

2. We may feel like there's a similar fog around us today.

3. We could be harmfully-wrong if we assume our disempowering fog must likewise be an inevitable constant, while instead there are some beekeepers waving smoke-pots to generate it.

Sprawl is where he originally started exploring these ideas but Jackpot is where he really focused deep into them and it's even more prescient. It's also bleaker, he has clearly recalibrated his estimate of how much power and control these new entities will have and what they will choose to do with it. Unfortunately I think it's a better representation of the path we're on.

There's some Pynchon in these times too.