<story><title>Cyberdecks (2013)</title><url>https://blog.rfox.eu/en/Hardware/Cyberdecks.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway33381</author><text>I always felt that a lot of the aesthetic choices in the cyberpunk genre have been subject to scrutiny as the genre aged. Things like black leather outfits to punk rock. The overall tone of cyberpunk as a genre has always been a favorite of mine. But that it hasn&amp;#x27;t really changed too much in the decades that came. Instead derivates instead of additions and adjustments to the core cyberpunk genre.&lt;p&gt;The Cyberdeck itself is well gone a bit off the rails, personally I think a more modern rendition work be more about discreteness it would provide in contrast to a conventional notebook, along with it&amp;#x27;s utility purposes. But the more modern renditions still heavily favor brick like designs which is fine, sometimes I wish the genre would change. Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it&amp;#x27;s inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn&amp;#x27;t have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was. This is getting long but if anyone wants to talk I&amp;#x27;m all ears.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>postmodest</author><text>Having grown up in that era, I think the &amp;quot;cyberpunk&amp;quot; look is very much tied to the end of the 70&amp;#x27;s nostalgia for the counter-culture of the 50&amp;#x27;s (I&amp;#x27;d even argue that Punk is the first symptom of that nostalgia; a reaction to the hippie aesthetic and a look back to the postwar rebellion of surplus military leather-wear.) So cyberpunk as a vibe is a neon Disco veneer atop the inward-looking exhaustion about the failed Space Age, over a substrate of 50&amp;#x27;s  nostalgia. It was a mash up of dated styles from the start, ageless in the way that all postmodern thing are, because it refuses to imagine a &amp;quot;present&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s just a blend of every past moment.&lt;p&gt;Cyberdecks in particular though, are dated, because they imagined a Present, and came from the mind of an author whose idea of &amp;quot;a machine that creates a consensual hallucination&amp;quot; was the very typewriter he was using to hallucinate the tale.  Gibson had never used a computer when he wrote Neuromancer. So his model starts with what he knows, and alludes to the computers of the day: typewriters you plug into your Sony TV. Having read the book in the 80&amp;#x27;s, I imagined the cyberdeck as being something between an ZX Spectrum and a TI-99. It had that Bertone wedge aesthetic, and was black. A Keyboard with a ROM slot for the Dixie Flatline. Because while Neuromancer was nominally a sci-fi novel, it wasn&amp;#x27;t imagining anything new in the way that other Big Science space-age authors did. It was a beat-inspired noir novel about demonology and ghosts, that only happened to take place in the future. It was in its own way backward-looking nostalgia.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s why I think it&amp;#x27;s hard to &amp;quot;date&amp;quot; Cyberpunk: it&amp;#x27;s not so much futurism as it is encompassing the whole 20th century (&amp;quot;Le Vingtième Siècle&amp;quot; if you will...) and placing it in the future context as a way of transposing it for examination.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cyberdecks (2013)</title><url>https://blog.rfox.eu/en/Hardware/Cyberdecks.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway33381</author><text>I always felt that a lot of the aesthetic choices in the cyberpunk genre have been subject to scrutiny as the genre aged. Things like black leather outfits to punk rock. The overall tone of cyberpunk as a genre has always been a favorite of mine. But that it hasn&amp;#x27;t really changed too much in the decades that came. Instead derivates instead of additions and adjustments to the core cyberpunk genre.&lt;p&gt;The Cyberdeck itself is well gone a bit off the rails, personally I think a more modern rendition work be more about discreteness it would provide in contrast to a conventional notebook, along with it&amp;#x27;s utility purposes. But the more modern renditions still heavily favor brick like designs which is fine, sometimes I wish the genre would change. Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it&amp;#x27;s inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn&amp;#x27;t have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was. This is getting long but if anyone wants to talk I&amp;#x27;m all ears.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swiftcoder</author><text>&amp;gt; Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it&amp;#x27;s inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn&amp;#x27;t have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was&lt;p&gt;It remains a neat way to get around the display problem, though. Even if most practical work in cyberspace takes place on 2D surfaces, nobody really wants to cart around a pair of 34 inch 4k monitors to work on the go.</text></comment>