AHC: Make "Cassette Futurism" real

baltur2

Cassette Futurism is an aesthetic where technology marches on from the late 20th century level to things like human space travel to Mars and AIs, however, you still have magnetic tape-based information storage, computers are still similar to the Commodore 64 with flickering monochrome CRT monitors and with text-based interfaces, and the internet in its current Social Media format doesn't exist.

In pop culture, Hard Rock, Glam Rock, and Disco, with early Electro continues to dominate, and Electronic Dance Music still has heavy 80s vibes. (all of this music is of course played on cassettes, 8-tracks, and records).

Essentially the 80s never end, and they are a direct precursor to a more sci-fi like society, without the cosmetic and everyday life changes of the OTL 90s, 00s, and 10s.

How could a world like this be possible?
 
Emperor Norton I

Emperor Norton I

While we are on 80s-Aeternea:
Are you guys familiar with Vaporwave and Synthwave? They're interrelated, and both play on nostalgia. However, Synthwave is more New Wave to the New Wave, utilizing ephemeral subconcious ideas and sources (commercials, film soundtrack as a genre, etc) as inspiration for a genre sound. And Vaporwave is more pure subconcious ephemera of consumer culture of all stripes from Gen X, remixed and reevaluated like haunting ghost voices of how your brain actually transmits memories to itself in the context of a Capitalist society. It's a dead digitized mental landcape of echoes. More than Synthwave, Vaporwave is the future we were promised is here, and it sucks.

Vaporwave:

Synthwave:

Maybe a bit of both:
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

baltur2 said:
you still have magnetic tape-based information storage
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This is actually true in the real world. In fact, it's quite possible that more information is stored on tape than on, say, flash memory or optical media, and conceivable that they outweigh even hard drives. It's just that because it's sequentially accessed tape is better for archival storage than everyday usage, so the huge number of tapes that actually exist are all invisibly hiding in server buildings around the world instead of being on your desktop.
 
Emperor Norton I

Emperor Norton I

If you want Cassette Futurism, your best reference is Japan. For all the high tech vibe, the Japanese have a culture of tradition, the professional population is very conformist, there is something to be said for the standards and formats that are existent and supported being the go-to, and the population has more of an older demographic given lower birth rates comparable to the rest of the world in recent decades. Japanese offices still use Fax machines.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine-is-anything-but-a-relic.html
 
Aisha Clan-Clan

Aisha Clan-Clan

there's some archived posts on the various archives of 4chan's /tg/ aout this. one of their ideas on how to create that world was "sovtechnica" where the USSR somehow led the computing revolution, producing a cassettepunk future. some others talked about settings where some sort of EM niterference made networked computing impractical.
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Johnrankins said:
Except things that can't be done, tape systems can't go fast enough to handle AI.
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Sort of, but not exactly. Yes, if you tried to use it by itself, that wouldn't be good. But even in the 1970s they had semiconductor memory for caching while you browsed and read out your tape. In fact, I read a very interesting article in the Communications of the ACM last month that made the case that tape is so cheap nowadays that it no longer makes sense to have hard drives in commercial applications, with solid-state drives and RAM serving to cover up any performance issues with aggressive caching. So one could very well imagine an AI that relies heavily on tape storage as its underlying bulk storage mechanism, but uses other things for second-to-second operations.

Of course, in that case it would be difficult to explain why tapes were in everyday usage, but perhaps you could handwave an argument about capacity--tapes are easily number one for that, so if hauling around gargantuan amounts of data is perceived as typical, there is a reason to have tapes.
 

baltur2

Emperor Norton I said:
While we are on 80s-Aeternea:
Are you guys familiar with Vaporwave and Synthwave? They're interrelated, and both play on nostalgia. However, Synthwave is more New Wave to the New Wave, utilizing ephemeral subconcious ideas and sources (commercials, film soundtrack as a genre, etc) as inspiration for a genre sound. And Vaporwave is more pure subconcious ephemera of consumer culture of all stripes from Gen X, remixed and reevaluated like haunting ghost voices of how your brain actually transmits memories to itself in the context of a Capitalist society. It's a dead digitized mental landcape of echoes. More than Synthwave, Vaporwave is the future we were promised is here, and it sucks.
Click to expand...

Quixotic is great:

 

GlobalHumanism

baltur2 said:
Cassette Futurism is an aesthetic where technology marches on from the late 20th century level to things like human space travel to Mars and AIs, however, you still have magnetic tape-based information storage, computers are still similar to the Commodore 64 with flickering monochrome CRT monitors and with text-based interfaces, and the internet in its current Social Media format doesn't exist.

In pop culture, Hard Rock, Glam Rock, and Disco, with early Electro continues to dominate, and Electronic Dance Music still has heavy 80s vibes. (all of this music is of course played on cassettes, 8-tracks, and records).

Essentially the 80s never end, and they are a direct precursor to a more sci-fi like society, without the cosmetic and everyday life changes of the OTL 90s, 00s, and 10s.

How could a world like this be possible?
Click to expand...

I have nothing to add, other than this is an awesome aesthetic to imagine..

Also Vaporwave is life :cool:
 

Nivek

Just in time when my one action come to home..nah i love how tech evolves, that is what make it unique

Watch less Watchmen buddy
 
Emperor Norton I

Emperor Norton I

Not to turn this into the Vaporwave thread, but the epipheny I had about Vaporwave is that it takes real world interactions with what are things in the brain, and reproduces those as part of the music itself. So music itself is a "thought"; a fictional place you daydream into. Every other genre just takes you into the daydream. Vaporwave will use the way that music is listened to as part of the music itself. So like CD skips and repeats, digital artifacts, and even the space or equipment the music may come from. And the repetition of hooks and music that sounds like how your brain thinks about the music as a memory. Even the mix may sound like you fast forwarding through it or clicking back on part of the song like you're scrolling through it. And it's this odd third eye onto yourself in a place in the context of reality. It both evokes the daydream, but by reproducing it as an experience that is objective (in that it decides what the replicated experience of listening to it is) rather than subjective, breaks you out of the daydream. Because its an artificially reproduced daydream.
 
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