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.
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).
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.
DUB opened the portal to outer dimensions for people too afraid of LSD. They emerge pretty much at the same time, and also DUB is quite psychedelic on its own.
I saw that Autodesk VR setup. They had ping-pong working. There was serious thought about how to do CAD work in VR. But it was like trying to do mechanical drawing while wearing oven mitts. Precision work with hands in open air is just not human-compatible. But a lot of people at the time did think it was the future.
Hey, thanks for reminding me about that. We were inspired by Atari's Pong, to which I had devoted many quarters at the bar during my undergrad days.
Nolan Bushnell came to visit Autodesk at our invitation, and we gave him a demo of our 3D version of Pong. Later, Nolan gave me some of my first business lessons at a meeting held at the Thai Garden restaurant at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino. Memories...
I agree that VR isn't the best modality for precision CAD work, although it can be great for visualization. These days I just dictate what I want using a local Whisper instance, have Hemes-webui get my local LLM to write Python code, and then let FreeCAD generate the geometry. For me, that works much better than drawing in midair.
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.
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."
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:
The street is like nameless individuals. A corpo by contrast is the giant vertical sky-scrapers next to it. Total exact opposites. I don't see it as a clever joke when attached to a hostile trade-mark message. By using it in the opposite way from its actual meaning you embodied the entire antagonist cyberpunk corpo ethos in real life.
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?
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.
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.
As a kid that’s a hilarious name because “trump” is also a euphemism for fart. To this day, fart is the first thing I think of when I hear the word trump.
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.
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...)
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.
Trademarking words is common. "Apple" is one. It doesn't mean you can't use the word apple, it only means you can't name a computer company "Apple". There is still Apple Corps, Apple Bank, and tons of bakeries, cafes, donut shops, restaurants etc named things like "Apple Cafe", "Apple Donuts", "Apple Tree Diner", etc..
Or one can be like Apple, and just sort of ignore trademarks till you own them. Apple is kind of famous for taking over a significant portion of the music industry, despite a pre-existing agreement with Apple Corp never to do so. Not to mention launching the iPhone while Cisco still held the 'iPhone' trademark.
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.
I'm pretty sure the words "Apple", "Target", "Gap", "Camel", "Jaguar", "Shell" and many others are also trademarked. Some of them the world over. It doesn't stop you from using the word except in the same genre of business
Amusingly, what military types today usually wear is a Casio G-Shock. It's hard to break. It's unbothered by water, mud, etc. It doesn't transmit anything, which most "smart watches" do. (Wearing anything that transmits in a modern combat zone is waving a sign that says "kill me now") Solar power keeps it going without attention. There's a minimal light if you push a button. Right tool for the job. Not a status symbol.
Choose Your Own Adventure is also trademarked, though that trademark (initially held by Bantam books, lapsed, and re-registered by another company) did originate the name of the genre
The colour purple is trademarked, for chocolate. That just means you can't use Cadbury purple as the color for your chocolate wrappers. You can still use it for anything else. You can't make a game called Cyberpunk but you can use it for anything else.
Huh, I’m surprised R. Talsorian Games doesn’t also have a trademark. Wonder if they sold it to CDPR under the condition that they’re still allowed to use it for their products. Also, apparently a company in Shenzen holds the trademark in relation to lighting products, so you probably won’t see any 2077 branded lamps any time soon
I had hoped the letter might be both conciliatory and provocative. For those troubled by the coexistence of apparent opposites, I recommend Hegel's sublation (Aufhebung), Crowley's crossing of the Abyss, and Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, in that order.
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/...
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).
God, I only wish
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.
Yup, there’s righteous dub involved in orbital adventures
DUB opened the portal to outer dimensions for people too afraid of LSD. They emerge pretty much at the same time, and also DUB is quite psychedelic on its own.
I saw that Autodesk VR setup. They had ping-pong working. There was serious thought about how to do CAD work in VR. But it was like trying to do mechanical drawing while wearing oven mitts. Precision work with hands in open air is just not human-compatible. But a lot of people at the time did think it was the future.
Hey, thanks for reminding me about that. We were inspired by Atari's Pong, to which I had devoted many quarters at the bar during my undergrad days.
Nolan Bushnell came to visit Autodesk at our invitation, and we gave him a demo of our 3D version of Pong. Later, Nolan gave me some of my first business lessons at a meeting held at the Thai Garden restaurant at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino. Memories...
I agree that VR isn't the best modality for precision CAD work, although it can be great for visualization. These days I just dictate what I want using a local Whisper instance, have Hemes-webui get my local LLM to write Python code, and then let FreeCAD generate the geometry. For me, that works much better than drawing in midair.
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.
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
The street is like nameless individuals. A corpo by contrast is the giant vertical sky-scrapers next to it. Total exact opposites. I don't see it as a clever joke when attached to a hostile trade-mark message. By using it in the opposite way from its actual meaning you embodied the entire antagonist cyberpunk corpo ethos in real life.
> not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture
Perhaps not, but it was sent on Autodesk company letterhead...
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?
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.
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.
It's a shame we've lost "meta" and "grok".
I will not stop using good words like those. (We really do need a direct replacement for "trump" in card games, though.)
No, we need a replacement for trump outside card games
Top Trumps is a popular card game for kids here.
As a kid that’s a hilarious name because “trump” is also a euphemism for fart. To this day, fart is the first thing I think of when I hear the word trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Trumps
"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.
Dont forget Lord of the Rings too.
Palantir (of Orthanc).
Anduril
Narya Capital
"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own."
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.
The observation that hating others' enemies is not technically incompatible with loving one's own is brilliant.
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?
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.
Trademarking words is common. "Apple" is one. It doesn't mean you can't use the word apple, it only means you can't name a computer company "Apple". There is still Apple Corps, Apple Bank, and tons of bakeries, cafes, donut shops, restaurants etc named things like "Apple Cafe", "Apple Donuts", "Apple Tree Diner", etc..
Or one can be like Apple, and just sort of ignore trademarks till you own them. Apple is kind of famous for taking over a significant portion of the music industry, despite a pre-existing agreement with Apple Corp never to do so. Not to mention launching the iPhone while Cisco still held the 'iPhone' trademark.
conflating metaverse and meta
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/metaverse/
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.
I'm pretty sure the words "Apple", "Target", "Gap", "Camel", "Jaguar", "Shell" and many others are also trademarked. Some of them the world over. It doesn't stop you from using the word except in the same genre of business
This makes me wonder if omegaverse (if you don’t know, don’t know) is trademarked given its litigious history.
> ... if you don't know, don't know...
See, this made me know. I'm gonna go shower. :(
See also the legal drama over someone trademarking "NATO strap" for watches:
* https://mgbwatches.com/blogs/journal/why-we-re-phasing-out-t...
* https://timeandtidewatches.com/trademark-wrangle-over-nato-s...
* https://www.crownandbuckle.com/nato-strap-history
* https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/nato-history/history-by-the...
Amusingly, what military types today usually wear is a Casio G-Shock. It's hard to break. It's unbothered by water, mud, etc. It doesn't transmit anything, which most "smart watches" do. (Wearing anything that transmits in a modern combat zone is waving a sign that says "kill me now") Solar power keeps it going without attention. There's a minimal light if you push a button. Right tool for the job. Not a status symbol.
Around here large amount of military personnel is wearing Garmin. I see a lot with Fenix 7X, Instinct 2X, and Enduro 3.
But hey if they ever qualify as "smart watch" they're definitely more on the utilitarian side than on the "wrist-sized phone" one.
Time moves on.
Choose Your Own Adventure is also trademarked, though that trademark (initially held by Bantam books, lapsed, and re-registered by another company) did originate the name of the genre
Riddle me this, was Stargate SG-1 and family a space opera.
I inclined to believe so. I miss shows like that, we need more space operas
The Stargate franchise is absolutely space opera.
The colour purple is trademarked, for chocolate. That just means you can't use Cadbury purple as the color for your chocolate wrappers. You can still use it for anything else. You can't make a game called Cyberpunk but you can use it for anything else.
I wonder if the trademark could actually be enforced.
Who owns the trademark on that?
Looks like CD Projekt (for Cyberpunk 2077 I expect).
Huh, I’m surprised R. Talsorian Games doesn’t also have a trademark. Wonder if they sold it to CDPR under the condition that they’re still allowed to use it for their products. Also, apparently a company in Shenzen holds the trademark in relation to lighting products, so you probably won’t see any 2077 branded lamps any time soon
Lame. It should belong to R. Talsorian Games still.
it's humorous that he thinks that letter was "conciliatory".
I had hoped the letter might be both conciliatory and provocative. For those troubled by the coexistence of apparent opposites, I recommend Hegel's sublation (Aufhebung), Crowley's crossing of the Abyss, and Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, in that order.