how Internet 3.0?

Nearly everyday I make an effort as a dedicated GooglePlus user to read the feed and post some specialized content that my 500+ followers hopefully haven't seen. I've been writing for years, creating original articles & reviews for my blog Dark Entries, cultivating a global audience (thanks again Mother Russia!), and investing alot of time to curate material that I myself would love to see.

But think ahead: When the goggles of Internet 3.0 go on, what happens to Internet 2.0's collections, community associations, expressions of fandom, 140-character blatherings, your unboxing videos, that food photo gallery you made, and especially the network of online professionals/friends/strangers you've built? Will internet 3.0's new paradigm of altered reality & virtual reality interfaces just write those off like a wind into a house of cards, scattering your decade of 2-D wall postings into oblivion?

Granted, there's a majority of user emphasis on the moment, on the post of the now. The backcatalog of content isn't usually gone through, as it seems viewers only want the new postings from the time forward from when they joined or subscribed. (Yet I know I scroll back, feeling like I'm digging for buried treasures when I discover a subject for the first time, playing catch-up to the group's reactions to episodes, or news, or evolutions in that subject.)

And granted, there's alot not to like about the current circle jerk of material, those deformed viral cats, the overposted meme, political/religious outrage, historical fingerpointing, racist interjections, trolls, and a safe anonymity from which to flare out any unintelligible, unfounded, or unmerited thing they please. There are no sacred cows, no respect, and thus no real convincing anyone about anything. Unattributed content is a particular pet peeve of ours as originators of artistic & informational value should always be recognized.

There's a lawlessness that's beyond apology, and a freedom that produces great beauty, and as audiences & authors we suffer one to enjoy the other.

[Where have you gone, ASCII art?]

 Fixtures of Internet 1.0 didn't weather the transition  with the prestige it once had. Large 2.0 social media hubs quickly usurped the attention & content from former giants like The Well, Usenet, LiveJournal, Angelfire, Geocities, and other once-established specialty niche threaded forums with participation ranked user mini-profiles.

Thus it's our concern that our irreplaceable time, our recognitions, and our creative output not be unmade, or left behind in the ignored cyberbasement. We wouldn't have bothered if we hadn't felt they were worth posting in the first place and at this point we feel having them sidelined would be unacceptable.

We would like to trust the current social networks to create an importing tool, something that will transform our postings into galleries or collections that will attach to our avatar or float near our person or decorate our virtual castle to summarize this cyberpublic history of ourselves, perhaps a recognition emblem of legacy content that can still be carried forward & explored by others. Yet watching how companies abandon software & applications with no consideration for the loyalist user who believes in the platform or format more than they do, we fear they may do the same in this newfound digital arena.

[Yes +Google VR , we're specifically asking you on behalf of your 300M social media users & the internet as a whole. And +Magic Leap & +Neal Stephenson , we're curious if you've considered our concerns, as we like your ideas.]

[The Augmented Reality overlay as drafted by Magic Leap.]

  We'd love some sort of Tronscaped interface option, which would clue into the cyberspace aesthetic we've anticipated since William Gibson first wrote & +Steven Lisberger first imagined.

[Map of The Grid!]

So we wonder with 3.0 just over the crest of the digital tomorrow, should we still be bothering to post & look as much as we do if it's all going to be binned? This uncertainty makes us hesitant, the unanswered question disturbing in its consequences.

I've got books to read in the meantime, which aren't going to change anytime soon, and a map to make. Someone do let us know before this continues, yes?

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

are you Ready, Player One?

The '80s were the last macrocultural zeitgeist.

After that it all fragments with the media's pronounced non-objective political divisiveness and the internet making endless forum & chat room for every myopic splinter interest, as we went from one shared page where everyone wondered about the same things: whether Coke or Pepsi was better, if Prince or Michael Jackson reigned supreme, what exactly's up with those Goth kids, or when the nukes would drop and justify our unassailable doomsday existentialism. After the web's technological expansion there was no way to keep track of it all, nor at that point would anyone want or even need to.

As such the 1980s will always be relevant.

Which brings us to Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One", an unapologetic 374-page lovesong to the last true pop cultural monolith that is the 1980s.

[Sweet foreign language Tron-inspired cover!]

Sack up, gunter*: Say Bill Gates or Steve Jobs dies/died, themselves competitive ego-products of 1980s greed-is-good corporate raider materialism, and instead of leaving their tech-legacies to friends or family or shareholders, decided to posthumously announce an internet-based contest within the virtual reality network they'd created, allowing the winner not only their personal fortunes of nigh-bottomless billions, but executive ownership of the whole internet itself. Essentially that's the high stakes plot of this near future 2041 cyberpunk modern masterwork.

Unlike most cyberpunk however, instead of grasping forward, Cline's virtual world frames its goggle-net in the rear-view mirror of Tom Cruise's Porsche 928, or Michael J Fox's DeLorean DMC-12: the 1980s context that not only sets our world's watershed reference points for the last agreed upon books, movies, music, and videogames, but the very same earmarks become possibly important clues for the greatest treasure hunt ever devised by a man who grew up in the '80s who was enamoured of all its facets. The conceit sounds like a writer's cop-out, but if you think about it of course we as users would want proverbial lightsabers, or sling a second-gen phaser from our spandexed space-uni hip, smoke the street comp in that unattainable Vector, sport a fierce "Lost Boys" jacket, or rad awesome big teased hair from "Square Pegs". They would pick these, and Cline takes us into the most bitchin' shopping mall of our collective media past with credit cards at the ready, going "Oh yeah! I sooooo wanted that!"

And I can't get over this book. It's so nerd geek gamer retro-wonderful, and payloads John Hughes teen brat pack films, half-remembered TV shows, nascent hacker empowerment ethos, kaiju cinema, classic Star Wars, Saturday morning cartoons, New Wave, Synthpop, hair metal, 8-bit, Radio Shack hardware and so much more into an intellectual atomic bomb signifier that completely levels the irrelevant house of "postmodernism"'s cards into the valueless joke it really is. All the things we have affection for become invaluable, and everything in its way is a miracle we can share, celebrate with each other, and, even more importantly, can be the things we can grow ourselves from, and inspire us to transcend.

Of course there's villainy ex machina and, as with any contest, loopholes & hacks to be had, so Cline builds the tension up, and the seemingly impossible search pulls his world's contestants, and the readers with them, in, trying just as hard to figure out where the clues are hidden.

Good sci-fi tends to be prescient in that egg/chicken, causal/predictive way. Just look at Verne (submarines), Dick (cloning), and Gibson (cyberspace). As we browse right now, convergence technology's busy combining networks down to smaller numbers with more features, whether that's Sony's liberal PS4 over Microsoft's over-regulated Xbox One next-gen consoles, sync service focused Windows 8.1, or multi-app A.I. driven smartphones, all vying to be the preferred user device. It's not too far off to imagine that the world wide web, the cloud, mobile networks, online gaming and video conferencing could also umbrella into one single shared virtual user interface. Recently Cline went and tried out the Oculus VR, deeming their device the looking glass step into his book's OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), the novel's world changing virtual reality.

Cline reveres the tools of technology and the things it can manifest, but indulges in a couple small humanizing moments to remind us not to lose ourselves socially & psychologically within the artifice (albeit pretty hollowly by comparison to the digital grandeur of the brilliant technostalgic world he posits, but point taken). And at the end Cline asks if we are ready to play on this newfound virtual grid where anything is possible, and if so, by whose rules? Will it be by an authority that will limit those possibilities, or by our independent selves with our shared media heritage & no limits save the potential of our imaginations? Either way, Cline's vision is coming. Are you Ready, Player One?

[*Gunter: Easter Egg Hunter]

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the Legacy of Tron.

The success of 1982's "Tron" was because it rode the crest of arcade culture. If you were a kid pumping quarters into those arcade machines back in the day, you ate, drank, and sweated pixels because underneath it all you felt as though something more important was being accomplished on the other side of the screen. It was split-second life-or-death reaction times, and the payoff was when Flynn ends up on the other side of the cathode glass, and you find out it's all horrifically true: That we as users are electronic caesars committing our progamme gladiators to fight it out and kill for us, again and again and again.

Given how well that ethos of translation played out, you'd expect this 3.0 (because 2.0 already happened in a PC & console release awhile ago), that the game grid and digital environs would now reflect the ideas of time-consuming MMORPGs, first-person shooters, real-time strategy sims, higher-speed internet communications, terragig storage, smartphone applications, sexting, and all the other bells and whistles such technology has gifted us with in the last 28 years since the original "Tron". Instead what we have are updated designs on much of the things in the first film, plus a few new vehicles that should fly off toy shelves in time for the holidays. (Yes, I bought a die-cast Light Runner.)

Perhaps the true Legacy here is this: The investment of $200 million into this sequel only supports the fact that the 1980s still and will always rule the cultural school.

[Excellent double feature art poster credit to Eric Tan.]

Best bit? The Score. Pounding threat, electronics laced with a nearly human jarvik heartbeat so you know something's at risk. While Daft Punk's never been past a fun and rarified novelty, if they don't win an Oscar for this soundtrack, there's no justice on the aural grid.

The strength of Tron is its setting with all that it implies. The moment of emotional reaction of user being trapped in a computer world, that emotionally neutral wonderland of cold blues and angry reds being the dominant factor. Contrast with the compounding of Sam Flynn's reactions, and pushed over the edge by Michael Sheen's over the top performance as Castor, and what was once the placid cyberworld is now upstaged and imbalanced. The only apologetic I can fathom would be that since programs are now more sophisticated their behavior would be more emotional to reflect that, but the film doesn't imply this, and I had to come up with it.

Olivia Wilde is the digital hotness, and on top of that every lady in tightly glowing striped pajamas in this film is. Notably, icy blonde Beau Garrett's the digital coolness as Gem.

Nit picks: Jeff Bridges young computer generated face looked like digital botox -- it just never looked organically believeable. The light cycle sequence didn't have the uncontrollably insane velocity that was so felt in the first movie. Yes, it had alot of clever dynamic changes, but if it'd been rendered differently it might have possessed the hammering-heart-pushed-up-into-your-now-choking-neck thrill it should have.

And for a movie encapsulating the currents of lightspeed electrons, pacing flagged in a few spots. In the first even when there were moments you were learning something about the digital frontier, and it was more the still hum of a machine that you knew could wake up at any second. Here in parts where the chase isn't on, it's more like the machine's i7 got swapped for a P1 and you're waiting for the flippy hourglass to turn back into a cursor so you can get on with it.
Visually everything's very, very pretty. Spatially well defined, imparting a sense of place one'd love to visit and is left wanting more of at the end of two hours.

As a sequel "Tron Legacy" doesn't stand alone, but it makes a worthy successor to one of Disney's most ambitious modern classics. Helmets off to the house of mouse. Now let's go play some deadly frisbee on the Wii!

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Post-Review Film-Influenced Addenda:

from 12.3.14:

Exciting Tron-esque teaser panel from "Batman Incorporated" issue #7 (July 2011).

Followed by Batgirl on lightcycle in issue #8 (August 2011).

Morrison & Clark may have partially wanted to homage 1990's "Batman: Digital Justice" (and "Dick Tracy" from the dialogue and catchphrase in that first panel [clever!]), the first completely computer illustrated graphic novel, but the lines of light, neon primaries, and the lightcycle are pure "Tron Legacy", and speaks alot for Tron programming our expectations of what a virtual reality version of the internet might look like as Bruce Wayne upsells it to potential investors.

A month before the film, Marvel did a few "Tron Legacy" style variant covers as promotion for Disney, its parent company:

[Thor.]

[Spider-Man. Note Tron City-scape.]

From 9.12.13:

And then they got in ... to the real world:

[Happy accident lightcycle race in foreground. Photo credit goes to yours truly.]

It seems "Tron Legacy" director & professor of architecture Joseph Kosinski's design sensibilities & lightline styling accents have influenced someone else, and actually crossed through an I/O tower to rez up as Tucson's aLoft Hotel at Speedway & Campbell. At night it really does look like a data construct from The Grid.

from 8.3.13 at 4:07am:

Then there's nights when one re-screens with your peeps:Yes, Stacia & I derezz programs for the MCP!

[February 2011.]

Below, note the bottles of blue & green energy for thirsty video warriors, bowls of red vs blue computer chips, and, um, data-salsa. Yeah, hot mexi-data-salsa.

[Melisszler Vs Gwyeniflynn. July 2013.
Due to Grid wavelengths being outside of the visual 3700-7000 angstrom range, this photo's blurry. Also, Sark Lives! {somewhere in this shot}]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.