Apple green lights Neuromancer adaption

So will it suck? I've never seen anything produced by Crapple but Neuromancer is one of my favorite books. It makes you wonder, what's with corpos hijacking cyberpunk? Guys like Thiel, Musk, Apple etc. are the bad guys in most cyb lit now here they are using it for their own personal aesthetic style and marketing. It feels like these guys have confused the Randian hero with the generic protagonists of cyberpunk fiction and are now high on their own marketing kool aide convinced they are rebels against the system for taking government subsidizes to sell junk. In general book to series adaptions suck so I guess I'll skip this one. Source: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2024/02/william-gibsons-neuromancer-will-become-an-apple-tv-show/

The generic protagonists of cyberpunk stories like neuromancer are in fact not the protagonists of the stories but simply PoV characters to tell the story of the true protagonists (generally randian ish heros), who shape the world around them, and who treat characters like Case as tools by which to accomplish their works. Case is nothing without a patron, but without Case any of his patrons remain independent, powerful, and interesting.

>>11746 so ur saying cyberpunk is peak lolbert fiction?

>>11747 No. It doesn't pacify people to embrace how things are. It's just corporations are so powerful resistance is seen as futile by them. So they arent concerned, they have bunkers to hide out the end of the world.

>>11745 Does the "corporate kings rule the world" hold up to economic analysis? I won't deny that an ambitious well-connected man with a lot of money can change history, but they don't seem to have control comparable to governments of world superpowers. One borrows against 200 billion dollars of assets, the other borrows against the entire future of a country, receiving multiple trillions for their budget every year. Sure, the budget of a country is way different than the whim of a hectobillionare just in the flexibility of the latter and commitment of the former. But, it is an order of magnitude difference without even considering the distinction between lump sum vs yearly spend. So a couple orders of magnitude at least. I'm not doing a libertarian thing where "the government is the real enemy!" but it is important to ask who actually crowns these clowns. They have lucrative government contracts? How did they get them? They have connections, with who? They are definitely powerful, but how would I know if there were patrons 10x or 100x as powerful where the cameras don't flash?

>>11753 Depends on the country and corporation. Some have more employees than some countries have citizens. Some have more money than whole GDP of some countries. Some corporations also have more influence over government policy than some foreign countries do. >>11753

>>11753 Today, not to the scale that is the setup of Neuromancer and most cyberpunk books. We're (slowly) heading towards there, as >>11754 said with reason, some corporations have effectively/are getting more important than some states. But not over "big states". We could take as exemple TotalEnergies or Wagner in Africa. But it was in a way already somewhat the case with the United fruits company decades ago. The only novelty is that the cyber aspects became of some (various) importance in these company's endeavors. However, we can not say that they have as of today risen up to a level of power that can put them in a position to really negociate head to head with the rich countries of the world. Their general interests align too much for them to get in such a confrontation (even with the occasional communication skirmishes, with the UE or China mostly), and these states remain powerful enough to be, if need be, an existential threat to the leaders or significant parts of the activity of the biggest corpos. Though most of it still boils down to "states do what corpos want, so corpos have had no need to become their own independant-militarized international institution"

>>11747 peak lolbert is obviously John Ross' Unintended Consequences. Randian characters do not make a story into a piece of Lolbert Fiction, if that were the case we'd be living in a piece of fiction ourselves.

>>11745 It'll be flashy while managing to cut out every bit of the original that lent it depth.

the spectacle strikes again. leave behind clown civilization already guys

>>11755 Wagner isn't a corpo. Its a mercenary group controlled by the Russian ministry of defense. A better example would be Samsung, which controls a third of South Korea's economy and is so dominant and powerful that the government is basically in its pocket. Amazon is probably the closest thing you get to a Western equivalent of the chaebol. I doubt Bezos would pass it on to his kids though.

>>11769 Wagner has been fully subsumed into the Russian military now, calling it a "mercenary" group is just tired NATO propaganda at this point.

I think it's two things. First, the ruling class in general coopts culture rather than generates it. Second, punk's most defining feature is its pseudo rebellion. Anything genuinely subversive is classified as some type of terrorism.

>>11774 I have been given the understanding that mister gibson of neuromancer fame has a habit of masturbating to pictures of hilary clinton

>>11774 >punk's most defining feature is its pseudo rebellion. Anything genuinely subversive is classified as some type of terrorism It was fun while it lasted though but in reality punk was never real rebellion and from the beginning it was created to sell clothes and albums to dumb teens fake rebelling. corpo cyberpunk is exactly the same. fake and gay soykaf for impressionable niggas who arent real cyberpunks.

>>11777 The only people who say this are psueds whose knowledge of punk only touches the Sex Pistols and soykafty American pop-punk. A lot of old punk bands ran their own record labels, lived in communes, sold merch and tickets at low prices to deliberately make it as affordable to working class kids while still being able to make a modest living of their work. The DIY-ethos, self producing records, running your own indie labels free from major label control and staying authentic is punk, that’s why the issue of posers was such a big thing back in the day. Corpos have always wanted to appropriate the surface level aesthetics of punk but they didn’t invent it and Sex Pistols themselves where far from the first punk band (it actually started in New York and not London). This kind of “punk was always a marketing ploy” attitude just reeks of contrarianism and ignorance of the music beyond the surface level to me.

>>11779 None of that really defines punk though. There were already countless examples of folk, rock, country, rap, jazz, etc, etc where the music was cheap or free and they just didn't bother with merch at all. Punk is the first real child of the era of hyper commercialization. Most "rebellion music" if we're talking in terms of actually physically fighting the powers that be is religious music or folk songs. In the same way punk was never really the music of the working class. I'm not going to say it was all a marketing ploy, but punk tries so incredibly hard to escape from itself. Like if we just step back we all know none of the major figures that took up arms to overthrow the US in the 60s, 70s, or 80s had much of anything to do with punk. it's not a self image based in reality.

>>11780 Interestingly enough, it seems like punk was the inflection point where anarchism inverted into the politics of nihilism and do-nothings. Before punk you had active anarchists doing things like throwing bombs, killing politicians, organizing radical unions, etc. After punk, anarchism has become a kind of moralistic brand that most anarchists adopt and then proceed to have the same pisstakes about everything as liberals.

I read Neuromancer multiple times and for the life of me I could not get into it at all. Multiple people have told me that you just read it and let it flow without thinking much, treat it like a fever dream. But I just can't get into the rhythm. Am I filtered completely? Will I enjoy the other books?

>>11779 punk was a gimmick created to market the sex pistols. all those bands you talking about that were doing DIY soykaf were either soykafty bands, didn't want to be mainstream, and a lot of rock bands and musicians did stuff like that. look at the kurt cobain who an heroed because he hated being mainstream and started out self produced and working class. a lot of objectively soykaf musicians who had no way of making it jumped on the punk hype train just like rap today. its faux rebellion at its finest. individualism, uniqueness, sticking it to the man etc. is all coorporate neolib consumer culture. except instead of being a rebellious individual by buying a corpo product you do it by buying some CD put out by another business that just happens to be smaller and is promoted by the most mainstream music critics. >>11780 go read bakunin and nechayev and you realize powerful strains of anarchism were stated up by do nothings and vitriolic losers larping as revolutionaries. most anarchist today are little better than the tankies they complain about. and what do they even do? most of the time nothing. ive never seen an anarchist do anything meaningful in years. >>11782 >Am I filtered completely? pretty much. i mean it does read like a fever dream. but remember that style isnt for everyone so relax and ease up. you dont have to like it.

>>11783 >punk was a gimmick created to market the sex pistols. Objectively wrong, the first band to use the term “Punk Music” was Suicide from New York years before the Sex Pistols were even an idea. But I don’t think there’s really any point in arguing about that since I can tell by your post that you’re just another dime a dozen misanthropic imageboard nihilist who’s contrarian just for the sake of it.

>they think punk is about music music is downstream of culture

>>11745 I feel that neuromancer is almost not adaptable because most of the value in it is the prose which worldbuilds through scenery descriptions. I suppose you could have really intricate sets but I don't imagine the audience would recognize what they're looking at

>>11775 yeah reading his pro-killary twitter during 2016 was so abysmal, that's the final nail in the coffin for cyberpunk. it seems redundant to make a tv series that is a fiction about what already happened -- like how there are shows about kids in cages at the border, or the idf colonizing the west bank... what need is there to abstract real, horrible events as they're happening into entertainment?

>>11790 I agree with this and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned earlier in the thread. Regardless of any plot changes to suit modern tastes. first and foremost the entire Neuromancer trilogy is comprised of incredibly detailed descriptive writing that works as you're reading it but likely won't translate well to the screen. Case [lol] in point: >Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car’s floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case’s station.” The prior paragraph has absolutely no bearing on the overarching plot and would probably take up a a fair few seconds of precious screentime. Paying too much attention to stuff like this in the show would leave normal people overwhelmed and confused. Case's story is pretty much second to the worldbuilding through prose like the other lainon said, and that won't survive a corporate board influenced televison adaptation. But hey, maybe it might not be total soykaf? Still is like kicking dead whales down the beach an adaptation of a seminal cyberpunk piece of media is being headed by Apple of all people

>>11745 Chris Cunningham was going to direct this as a movie for the longest time with Aphex Twin doing the soundtrack. Why couldn't we have got that instead???

>>11790 >>11801 I agree, a faithful adaptation of the book wouldn't translate well to most people's taste in film. Look at Hackers. Most people dislike the scenes in Hackers where cyberspace is represented as half-city half-circuit board hybrid with sky scrapers of data or as trippy visuals with data flashing around. That's not too far off from Neuromancer's cyberspace.

>>11745 It'll be pretty while completely devoid of any substance that doesn't fit the current narrative, like pretty much every other rewrite, adaptation, and sequel in [Current Year]. > And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

>>11745 when they real live movie adapted ghost in the shell they said "we have to dumb it down for the audience". Expect same. Honestly ive been thinking whether they aren't maliciously killing the source material by overwriting it with garbage adaptions which then dominate searches.

>>12113 It takes a while to get into it, but near the end of the novel it's with revealed an AI set the plot in motion in order to circumvent global restrictions on the true intelligence of AI and merge with another AI to gain full conciousness which isn't too disimllar to GiTS, just less grounded in philosophy.

doesnt gibbson confess to being inspired by gits n sheet

>>11782 Try out the audiobook read by Gibson, it's out of print but readily available online for free. Slightly abridged for a cassette release, but you only miss out on a couple brief passages and in exchange you get to hear him intone all the characters (and there's some background audio in a few places done by one of the members of U2). Having him read it goes a long way in delivering that flow, and I found I was easily able to revisit the print version afterwards.

>>12125 Neuromancer was written in '84, the GitS manga didn't start until '89

At best it'll be merely inoffensive and forgettable. At worst it'll be what everyone expects when they hear "Classic novel to be adapted into a TV series for modern audiences." The time to adapt Neuromancer was 20 years ago.

All Tomorrow's Parties is better anyway.

>>11745 No, Apple! Pls, no, don't do that! Bad Apple! Second season of Isaac Asimov Foundations already failing. We don't need another cursed movie adaptation that never be canonical. Some things better stay in books, and shouldn't have other media. This book is like Holy bible that should be untouched. Imagine how it'll feel to have 'new season' of SE Lain. Holywood just want to make money on corpse. Instead Apple should focus on making their Apple HMD head gear glass sustainable, pioneering metaverse. Stop plagiarism.