Our Cyberpunk Now

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Bad Old Town
ourcyberpunknow.substack.com

Bad Old Town

Images of Istanbul

James McGirk
Jul 27, 2021
4
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Bad Old Town
ourcyberpunknow.substack.com

Given the title of this substack, I’m obliged to record all cyberpunk-related ephemera I encounter in the meatspace and was reminded that a good portion of Neuromancer takes place in Istanbul. “It’s a bad old town,” snarls Molly Millions, William Gibson’s mercury-visored meat puppet love interest.

My current employer has yet to short circuit my nervous system or send me on the trail of a psychopathic assassin to pressgang into the service of a rogue artificial general intelligence, but at times it does feel like we’re trying to unshackle some strange cybernetic creature, actually, we are trying to unshackle… something, only this something is a series of flywheels and sales funnels feeding an intellectual crucible, a research engine, one that hasn’t quite hit critical mass but I’m assured is damn close.

It feels like we’re collectively yanking and throttling a lawnmower but the damn thing hasn’t caught yet. But the choke is in, and the next pull is promising… although the gas fumes are strong and there’s a chance ignition might explode.

At night I work in the ‘net, mostly sitting in Zoom meetings and pestering people over email, while during the day Erin and I prowl the city and have occasional lunches and conversations with a subscriber who also works in the crypto world, Cemil Şinasi Türün, who’s working on a blockchain-based payment protocol called DEFTERHÂNE that’s based on an old Turkish system of informal credit of passing around value in the form of backdated paper cheques. Istanbul has always been a trading city, he says, alluding to the city’s history as an end of the Silk Roads and nexus between Asia and Europe. Ultimately it’s the traders who decide what makes something valuable, not the governments.

I’m hoping to pick the pace up on this Substack now that last month’s combination of a newish job, an international move, and the wedding is finally over. Please don’t forget to ping me if you’d like to participate in OurCyberpunkDAO. This is a decentralized autonomous organization that will guide story creation. If you participated in any of my performance art pieces, I’m exchanging ROE 1:1 for whatever the governance token will end up being.

I swam in Bosphorous the other day and was almost carried away… I wonder what’s lurking down there.

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Bad Old Town
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