138 pointsby Eric_Gullichsen7 hours ago10 comments
  • jMyles5 hours ago
    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/...

    • Eric_Gullichsen4 hours ago
      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).
      • davedx2 hours ago
        God, I only wish
    • xbar2 hours ago
      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.
      • belZaah2 hours ago
        Yup, there’s righteous dub involved in orbital adventures
  • Animats15 minutes ago
    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.
  • vessenes4 hours ago
    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.
    • pryce3 hours ago
      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.
    • chr-s3 hours ago
      It's a shame we've lost "meta" and "grok".
      • chrisweekly3 hours ago
        I will not stop using good words like those. (We really do need a direct replacement for "trump" in card games, though.)
        • McDyver25 minutes ago
          No, we need a replacement for trump outside card games
      • Terr_2 hours ago
        "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.

      • nekusar3 hours ago
        Dont forget Lord of the Rings too.

        Palantir (of Orthanc).

        Anduril

        Narya Capital

        • GolfPopper2 hours ago
          "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own."
          • Terr_2 hours ago
            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.

            • jasomill36 minutes ago
              The observation that hating others' enemies is not technically incompatible with loving one's own is brilliant.
    • socalgal22 hours ago
      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?

      • harry82 hours ago
        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.
    • fouc2 hours ago
      conflating metaverse and meta
  • koolala3 hours ago
    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.
    • Eric_Gullichsen2 hours ago
      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

      • koolalaan hour ago
        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.
      • YrRight2PushBac2 hours ago
        > not some corporate attempt to pass itself off as counterculture

        Perhaps not, but it was sent on Autodesk company letterhead...

      • davedx2 hours ago
        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?

  • cubefox6 hours ago
    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.
    • Uehreka5 hours ago
      This makes me wonder if omegaverse (if you don’t know, don’t know) is trademarked given its litigious history.
      • jjulius4 hours ago
        > ... if you don't know, don't know...

        See, this made me know. I'm gonna go shower. :(

    • derektank5 hours ago
      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
    • jetbalsaan hour ago
      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

      • jasomill34 minutes ago
        The Stargate franchise is absolutely space opera.
    • throw0101a5 hours ago
      • Animats5 minutes ago
        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.
    • mitxela3 hours ago
      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.
    • laughing_manan hour ago
      I wonder if the trademark could actually be enforced.
    • efnx3 hours ago
      Who owns the trademark on that?
      • blacksmith_tb3 hours ago
        Looks like CD Projekt (for Cyberpunk 2077 I expect).
        • derektank27 minutes ago
          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
        • Apocryphon31 minutes ago
          Lame. It should belong to R. Talsorian Games still.
  • jrochkind12 hours ago
    it's humorous that he thinks that letter was "conciliatory".
    • Eric_Gullichsenan hour ago
      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.
  • Eric_Gullichsen7 hours ago
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  • hilde5744 hours ago
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  • zeristor7 hours ago
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  • georgestones2 hours ago
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