Techno-Futures (Blog6)

“Burning Chrome”

By William Gibson(1982)

Oh, boy. This story was strange. I have a small grasp at what the concept was but I’m not entirely sure I understood it.

Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but Jack and Bobby are some kind of Robin Hood hackers, not affiliated with the “heat” as they called law enforcement, but also not affiliated with Chrome and her mob. In fact, they set out to take down Chrome, take away all of her money so in a sense, stripping her of her power. I believe Chrome is a person but she’s had hormonal procedures that make her look young? I had a really hard time comprehending this story, but it seems as though the life that “Burning Chrome” depicted is one where plastic surgery is exploited to the maximum. You hear about people getting not just different eye colors but completely different eyes? And I’m guessing the “The House of Blue Lights” is some kind of whore house? It makes me wonder, is this going to be what our future holds for us? People getting so much surgery to look “perfect” they end up stripping the meaning of the word beauty? I can definitely see similarities, in that aspect, to present day’s issues with body image. Women, men, getting face-lifts to look younger, along with many other surgeries just to look like photoshopped pictures of plastic Barbie dolls. When the main character was describing Chrome I couldn’t help but think about the “Uncanny Valley” that we discussed in class. I feel like that was definitely portrayed in a couple of different instances,

“Chrome: I’d seen her maybe half a dozen times in the Gentleman Loser. Maybe she was slumming, or checking out the human condition, a condition she didn’t exactly aspire to. A sweet little heart-shaped face framing the nastiest pair of eyes you ever saw. She’d looked fourteen as long as anyone could remember, hyped out of anything like a normal metabolism on some massive program of serums and hormones.”-p.557

“He had the kind of uniform good looks you get after your seventh trip to the surgical boutique; he’d probably spend the rest of his life looking vaguely like each new season’s media front-runner; not too obvious a copy, but nothing too original, either.”-p.559

*********

“Computer Friendly”

By Eeileen Gunn(1989)

I think the author chose a child’s point of view because just like the child, the reader is learning all about this new world as well. So a lot of the same questions the child was asking, I found myself asking as well. At first, I didn’t see much sci-fi in the text. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, when will there be an alien dropping out of the sky or some kind of cataclysmic event? It seemed as though it was a regular girl who was getting dropped off at a school and when they kept talking about how smart she was and how she had to take tests to prove it I thought, “Oh, well this girl must be trying to get into some private school?”

 As I started reading more and more, I picked up little hints here and there of something off about this world the author threw us into.

“The monitor watched as they wiped the wall, then took their thumbprints.”p.640

Took their thumbprints? I couldn’t help but think, what kind of school is this? Are they keeping track of how many times she gets in trouble? As the story goes on it reveals more and more how strange the world is, like how her father’s memory gets wiped clean after being at work all day and his daughter has to guide him home. Also, her brother, he seems to already be at work. And he doesn’t come home every night for dinner. In fact, his parents don’t even talk about him much at all.

“Her parents didn’t talk much about her brother Bobby. He had done well on his tests, too. Now he was a milintel cyborg with go-nogo authority. He never called home, and her parents didn’t call him, either.”-p.644