| ▲ | William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace(colo.to) |
| 116 points by Eric_Gullichsen 6 hours ago | 29 comments |
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| ▲ | jMyles 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Whatever else is real or myth with regard to these trolly pranking trademark spats, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the term "cyberspace" emerged amidst - or at least adjacent to - a lot of LSD and Grateful Dead tapes. https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/... |
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| ▲ | xbar an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Cyberspace is defined with the word "hallucination", and Gibson spent 1977-1983 writing his short fiction and first novel on the subject. The degree to which he was influenced by psychedelic culture is open to debate, but I agree that it was non-zero. I think Grateful Dead tapes is your own projection, however. Bob Marley is more likely as muse-ic. | | | |
| ▲ | Eric_Gullichsen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Timothy Leary did say "The PC is the LSD of the 1990s" on the back cover of his 1994 book, Chaos & Cyber Culture (Ronin Publishing, ISBN 0-914171-77-7). | | |
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| ▲ | koolala an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm glad it failed to trademark. Autodesk is one of the worst corpo's around when it comes to being corpo. How un self-aware for them to make that 'street' joke. They were like a 100+ million company back then. |
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| ▲ | Eric_Gullichsen 9 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Really? The CYBERSPACE trademark application wasn't rejected. It was abandoned in 1991 after the VR project was cancelled and we developers left Autodesk to start Sense8. The recorded disposition was "abandoned—failure to respond or late response." https://uspto.report/TM/73816876 And yeah, Autodesk was hardly a tiny startup. Its market cap at the end of 1989 was about $945 million. But the "street" line was a deliberately smartass quotation from Gibson in a letter I wrote, not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture. Gibson subsequently had the better rejoinder: "Autodesk is not the street." Judging the Autodesk Research Lab of 1989 by the reputation of the company Autodesk later became seems rather ahistorical. Even founder John Walker had already declared himself "Bored (sic) of Directors" by 1988: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_65.html | | |
| ▲ | YrRight2PushBac 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture Perhaps not, but it was sent on Autodesk company letterhead... | |
| ▲ | davedx 5 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Such a tone deaf response. Autodesk tried to trademark a phrase recently invented by an author. They would have had to defend it too. Would they have sued Gibson? Ahistorical my ass Honestly I don't understand how it was accepted? Obviously Gibson invented it? |
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| ▲ | vessenes 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's a somewhat liminal experience to walk with a famous sci-fi author through a tech conference; there are many, many callouts. Money is never sent in thanks for the inspo. The one that sticks out to me the most is Facebook rebranding to "Meta" -- Neal Stephenson coined the term in 1992. As far as I know, they never sent thanks in any form. |
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| ▲ | pryce 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It was 'metaverse' that Neal Stephenson coined (which Meta did take and use in a way that does not, to my untrained eye, seem legally defensible.) "Meta" is a prefix from Ancient Greek, dating back thousands of years. | |
| ▲ | chr-s 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's a shame we've lost "meta" and "grok". | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | "A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our words and break all bonds of vocabulary, but it is not this day!" Don't surrender it, make 'em work for their ill-gotten gains. | |
| ▲ | chrisweekly 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I will not stop using good words like those. (We really do need a direct replacement for "trump" in card games, though.) | |
| ▲ | nekusar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Dont forget Lord of the Rings too. Palantir (of Orthanc). Anduril Narya Capital | | |
| ▲ | GolfPopper an hour ago | parent [-] | | "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own." | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | On the subject of corrupt-vs-build, Tolkien's contemporary CS Lewis had some good bits in The Screwtape Letters, in which a senior devil is advising a junior on the corruption of his charge. (I don't think one needs to be Christian to pick out its insightful bits on the human condition.) > Well, I am afraid it is no good trying to make him brave. Our research department has not yet discovered (though success is hourly expected) how to produce any virtue. This is a serious handicap. To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh? But as we cannot supply these qualities ourselves, we can only use them as supplied by the Enemy—and this means leaving Him a kind of foothold in those men whom, otherwise, we have made most securely our own. A very unsatisfactory arrangement, but, I trust, we shall one day learn to do better. > Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels. If conscience resists, muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people’s enemies. In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but not sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness. |
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| ▲ | socalgal2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How many people have you thanked for the words and phrases they originated? Note: They didn't make them famous. That happens through various means (marketing, PR, luck, etc...) Why do think they deserve to be thanked? | | |
| ▲ | harry8 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | At least as many as the number of times I've tried to claim someone else's words and phrases as my exclusive intellectual property in order to profit, because I believe the latter is zero. |
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| ▲ | fouc 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | conflating metaverse and meta |
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| ▲ | cubefox 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Meanwhile, "cyberpunk" has been successfully trademarked in the US, even though it describes a literary genre. That's like someone trademarking "space opera", "romantasy", "film noir" etc. |
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| ▲ | jrochkind1 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| it's humorous that he thinks that letter was "conciliatory". |
