Cyberpunk is now

Forty years after its imagining, cyber­punk has arrived, emphatically, totally for real. The con­fig­u­ra­tion of global power is dif­ferent than the cyber­punks imagined — in a way, it’s less interesting — but the tech is even better. Ghosts of lan­guage in the machine; recal­ci­trant bot swarms; gleaming nodes of com­pute, dense with possibility.

I’m still run­ning the “deep learning rig” I built back in 2016. Its three Titan X GPUs (purchased used on eBay; hot shit at the time) can run some of the smaller lan­guage models, barely, and very slowly, so I don’t bother, allo­cating my pre­cious 36 giga­bytes instead to more playful applications. Art stuff. My rig, called clash—get it? … of Titans? — is big and black, as func­tional and unlovely as I could make it. I invited an AI agent to poke around the server the other day. I didn’t really under­stand how many digital-archaeological traces remained lit­tered around the system; the agent’s reac­tion was, basically, “Damn, you’ve been up to some weird stuff in here … ”

Slabs of com­pute run­ning hot in offices, basements, dorm rooms … not a new thing, exactly, but their capa­bil­i­ties are new — their inhab­i­tants are new — and the whole scene is just great. Exciting and strange. Gleaming and haunted. Pile on the adjectives, the vibes: it’s somehow all richer and weirder than any­body ever dreamed in 1984.

P.S. Somehow Oxide fits into this too, even though that par­tic­ular gleaming node isn’t for AI …