This link is all the proof I need to simultaneously confirm two things that I have long believed would come to pass:
- I would live in the future.
- The fiction of Cyberpunk/Shadowrun role playing games would become reality.
I have long felt that I live in the future. Every day I see things, or read about things, that I once read about in science fiction, or simply imagined whilst playing with Lego when I was 7. We, as a planet-wide society, drive remote control cars on another planet, have sent civilians sent into space and returned them safely (ok, it costs a lot right now, but I remember when CD players cost $1200), and increasing numbers of us are connected together by this global Interwebs thingy. I am in the future of my younger self’s dreams, and it’s all so incredibly commonplace.
And so is spam. I can still remember when spam didn’t exist, when I only receiving email from the half dozen people I knew who actually had internet access. Hell, I remember dialling into BBSes and using FidoNet, but this isn’t an essay about how old I am. Spam is now so commonplace that it is regularly… regularly!… written about in newspapers. And now the concept of botnets, networks of compromised computers systems used to do the bidding of their nefarious masters, and they send spam.
This is stuff straight out of Shadowrun or William Gibson novels. Forget out the outdated ‘cyberspace’ that was all the rage in the 90’s, this is the real deal. Here, we have Intrusion Countermeasures, and hackers competing with each other for control of computer systems.
All this future stuff happens around us every day, and it’s easy to accept it all as just average, everyday occurrence. The thing is, though, that 15 or 20 years ago, I was dreaming about stuff like this, and now I get to live it every day.
Rather than thinking about how old that makes me feel (has it really been 20 years!?), I prefer to marvel at just how awesome it all is.
Don’t you agree?