For so long, sci fi envisioned shining future cities... so far from the rough and real America that William Gibson saw struggling to find itself in a modern world.

Is it just me or has the art/visuals/however_you_wanna_call_it been getting better lately? Mad props to the ilustrator of these episodes!

You know, with all this talk of ditching the shiny optimistic future in favor of a dirty depressing future I'm left wondering if my own preferences for said shiny optimistic future arn't rooted in the fact that I grew up with the "garbage future" as the default and that shiny optimistic future appeals to me for the same reason the dirty depressing future appealed to those old authors, It's different than the mainstream prevailing vision.

I found the last minute or so of the video particularly compelling, specifically: "In many ways you could argue that our subcultures and political identities today are grasps at meaning; that they are just some of our modern semiotic ghosts." I think it's interesting to consider that symbolism, by its very definition, is an effort to assign meaning to something else; to create metonymy or otherwise establish a substitution which implies meaning. I think you could even further this argument to say that by continually attaching and associating with the semiotic ghosts, we create a symbol, and thus give meaning to ourselves in the greater world. This coincides with Stanford's definition of personality: "The way we deal with the outside world." We all create, adopt, remove, and otherwise furnish our lives by associating with symbols, whether they are semiotic ghosts or just contemporary symbols. I think that this confirms a fundamental truth of humanity; that we are inherently social and dislike isolation. By constantly associating or assigning ourselves to something, we avoid those fears, we fill in our personality in dealing with this part of the human condition, and we almost become a symbol ourselves for the amalgamation of things that establish our uniqueness. I don't know how this really relates to sci-fi, but it's thought provoking, I feel. As mentioned in a previous episode, sci-fi is about getting ourselves to self-evaluate and ask ourselves questions about our direction, intent, and consequences. Perhaps this examination of semiotics that Gibson employs is another method through which we can self-evaluate. This evaluation is more at the individual level, I feel, asking us to consider what we really are seeing in front of us -- the art-deco future we imagined, or the brutal reality of modern society -- and if it reinforces our beliefs, motivation, and actions. I think this is a logical read of Gibson and semiotics given the context of the 80's; how can we dream of flying cars when oppression and death surround us? Furthermore, how can we continue to associate ourselves with the same personalities, ethos, ideas, and actions if our symbols that defined us are absent in our present world? As a result, I think Gibson was successful in asking us to reconsider our own views of the future by highlighting the dissonance between the optimism of the 30's and brutalism of the 80's via these long standing semiotic ghosts in our collective thoughts. Or maybe I'm dumb and don't know what I'm talking about.

I want someone to list all the references in this video! Props to the animator, dang there’s so many cool details!

What I wouldn't give to see Gibson's reaction to VRchat

Whoever added Blacksad into the animation, I love you

Haha plumbus, but I cannot imagine a plumbus without a schleem rubbing and spitting on it.

man i miss that Art Deco look...it was amazing

Eyyy, Exurb1a!

Imagine if semiotic ghosts were literal. Where if we made enough people think about Nyan Cat, it would summon Nyan Cat.

"Language is a form of telepathy. If I have a model of the world in my head, I can place that model of the world in your head simply by making sounds with my mouth. Written language is more powerful yet. If I have a model of the world in my mind, I can make marks on a piece of paper that can symbolize that entire state of reality. Furthermore, you don't need to know me to gain access to my model of the world. You might be 5000 miles away from me, or two centuries removed, and yet by tracing with your eyes the symbols I wrote, you internalize my vision of the world, allowing my thoughts into your head. There's a reason knowledge is considered dangerous. The old notion of the mage, chanting in powerful old languages from his huge leather-bound spell book - be it in Latin, Greek, Enochian or Sanskrit - comes from an archetypal, but largely unconscious, knowledge of the power of language." -Blackwelder, Gentile, and Snead, _Mage: The Ascension - Forged By Dragon's Fire_ (p. 65-66)

so....memes? In the literal sense of the term.

hey little GG cameo there. nice

This was the first extra scifi that was compelling to me. This talk about semiotic ghost put to words some things I've been doing since childhood, immortalizing certain symbols in my mind not specifically for the stories they came from, but the ideas, ideals, and emotions they represent.

This series is so dense, I really gotta take my time unpacking these. Ideas are such wonderfully fascinating things.

This is my favorite piece of Gibsons writing, thankyou so much for producing this.

Another proof that this is your best series yet. Congratulations.

@7:44 for so many years i thought that no one else had read the Bone series. 10/10

Gibson is a real gem. One of my favorite authors.

We ARE haunted by one symbol in the real world. Ever heard the lament "Where's my jetpack?"

I always loved EC, but these Extra SF series is truly phenomenal. They should be preserved in memory crystals and enshrined in the 400th floor of Hall of Memories.

I sincerely love and admire you for this series.

So awesome to see coverage of what I consider some of Gibson's best and least-known work! I can't wait to hear what you have to say about "The Belonging Kind" ... that one still, every now and then, haunts me and I haven't read it in years.

I'm loving this series on Gibson! Nice work!

7:46 love that you put Dream there, now I just want you to do a series on Sandman. It's easily one of the most beautiful things I've read, and a shining example of how comic books can be "real" literature, not just spandex tights and capes.

The art of this episode was so great and interesting! It also gave great insight into what characters run in your minds as symbols. Awesome to see ^^

YES! BONE reference! Whoever did the artwork here, you just made this Bone fan very happy. You cool. ;)

Just went back and watch over dozens of your Extra history videos again, and even after watching them again (some of them for the 9th or 10th time) I still love them all. I just wanted to thank you on behalf of thousands for providing a great series and insight into periods and parts of history many miss or never hear while in school. Also, watching you D-day series again, I would love if you were to do another talking about the “heroes” (while I see all men and women who served in combat throughout history as heroes, I more mean in this sense the ones that are more recognised in history and a few that are not. Like Michael Wittman and Kurt Knipsel for the Germans, Norman Cota and Richard Winters for the Yanks, mad Churchill and bill million for the brits, and Mariya Vasilyevna Oktyabrskaya and Mikhail Alekseevich Yegorov for the soviets, etc; I just think it be awesome to hear some of the stories of soldier and officers of WW2 and hear you tell their tales and depict their trails and stories in your awesome fashion)

:D welcome back guys thanks for more of this great content

I wanted a refresher and breakdown of this story before I took my quiz and this video helped a lot! Thank you

Extra history is asome i have whached all episodes 3 times

What terrific insights the clash of the future we envision full of hope and the stark contrast it often has with the real world has often fascinated me and I was only able to reconcile the two through the various worlds I explored in scifi to think that all came from this can't wait to find out more next week

The art is outstanding and the script is fascinating!

Awesome work guys, thank you for a lighthouse in the dark

Nice fallout reference at 0:50! Excellent episode as always guys, thanks for giving us such a cool series

Love this series is going to be a great source of new books for me to read

A lot of folks here have compared the idea of semiotic ghosts to Jung's collective unconscious. I find Gibson's take is far easier to grasp than Jung's, plus it creates a nice link to our current understanding of memes. On a different tangent, I realized with some small amount of horror while watching this that there is a certain subsection of the American populace who are *still* haunted by post-war semiotic ghosts, not of a glittering future, but the idealized view of what was then the present.

I can share the same feelings of this story when I see the dead malls dotted all over America. When I see these empty large concrete shells, I see visions of life in the 70's and 80's of vast indoor complexes filled with shops and places for people to gather. The visions are faded and dark but linger on in my mind when ever I see the images and videos of these dead malls.

Holy crap! Your breakdown of semiotics describes something I think about a lot!

Thanks! Been waiting for you're release today. I have never heard of this so thanks for a little education. :)

So does this mean memes are ghosts? And is the internet the shell?

ohh my god!! Soooo many nerdy references!! LOVE this!!

Love the content keep it up

Have to admit, I'm kinda curious as to what you'd say about Snow Crash....though I'm at least as fascinated by these books that I've never read (or heard of, in this case). Glad you decided to do this series.

sooo much comprehension !!

Really, really nice artwork in this episode.

Damn this series is good!

Nice! Very well done.

Amazing job by David with the art on this one!

Yayy, they’re back!!

This is so interesting! I need to read more

The Voice Over Always Gets Me 😂😊 I Like These Videos ✊

I read "semiautomatic ghosts" and got excited

i love the art

I just bought the ebooks for the Sprawl trilogy a few days ago and now I see this! So excited to start reading!

Thanks for making me re-read Burning Chrome again. It's the Martian Chronicles of the 80s, and like MC still has a lot of resonance.

Intro game ON POINT, Ner Vod.

Can´t get enough of Gibson. Read em all. Hope you´ll do The Peripheral at some point, so vastly different from his early work yet basically the same.

"Ceci n'est pas une pokeball" great callback

Thanks for this analysis. I remember reading this back in the 80s in an anthology and not getting it at. I thought that it was filler. As if he was close to deadline and grabbed a bunch of notes and tried to collate them into a story.

I don't know if you plan on going outside literature, but doing episodes on Serial Experiments Lain or Ghost in the Shell (any, but especially Stand Alone Complex) would be amazing.

Wow so many little easter eggs in your animation for this video I'm going to have to go back and watch it frame by frame to identify them all! Is it just me or was there a little Gaijin Goomba from The Game Theorists? I love Extra Sci-fi and I love this segment on Gibson. I only ever read a tiny bit of cyberpunk, and I think the only Gibson book I've read was The Difference Engine. So this is not only new info for me, but also is giving me a new perspective on this particular subgenre. Thanks, guys!

The artist for this episode really outdid themself. All the detail.

Missed you guys!

Gotta give a shout out to my professor for recommending me this video. Shows more to why I'm doing a paper on William Gibson...

Plumbis! Thanks for that, it's going to be a long time till season 4.

hey just wondering can you please do a video on the strange future of Battle Angel Alita by yukito kishiro. as it has a variety of different "visions of the future" throughout the series.

Semiotics ghosts are a by product of our species method of development. Instead of instinct teaching us everything like most animals, we have to be taught how to be a human. After enough generations this process is boiled down to symbols. What’s fascinating and what is also eluded to in the bridge trilogy is how these symbols are the literal building blocks of narrative; from letters and grammar to imagery and references and even allusions to other narratives. Semiotic ghosts are the other side of Gibson’s profession: making new stories

Space heck!

While I love the bright Tomorrowland future, I also like the more realistic futures

I see you Mr exurb. One of my favorites right next to extra credits.

a great story. and the Belonging kind... that should be an interesting video.

Thank you for including my language. It isn't popular, so seeing it once in a while is cool

0:58 we have two of these movie theaters in Jacksonville, Florida! They are so neat looking!

I like all these references

I love all those references so damn much! the Sandman looked pretty great in the comic character panel, do you think you could talk about Geilman work at some point or in any way?

You know your a pop culture junky when you can name every single reference and shout out in an eight minute video.

Wow, Symmiotic Ghosts and the Gernsback Continuum seem like perfect analogies to describe the premise of the Persona series of games...

7:31 Discworld! :D

7:47 FONE BONE!!! JEFF SMITH!!! WHERE MY BONE PALS AT?!?!?!

Again, really excited for each of these SciFi episodes. Very much enjoyed this episodes topic, very cool. If I could criticize one thing it's that almost throughout the hold episode I couldn't parse out what the book was about. All I glimpsed was that the book was about a photographer who took pictures of the old sci fi dream of america, and this was getting to him. Was... there more to the story in the book or am I just missing something?

Heck Snek is my favorite running gag with Extra Credits

This makes me have a renewed appreciation for the art direction Fallout series. They really did an excellent job showing us this "Raygun Gothic" taking true root in American culture and just never fading into our timeline where the application and interest in atomic power gave way to the transistor. Though the game frequently veers into the realm of total impossibility /Science Fantasy I think the way they have applied this "could be future" imagery to their in-game assets from weapons to buildings was very well executed.

We really need to cover Cordwainer Smith and the Instrumentality of Mankind, given this topic.

I feel like I'm going to have to remember that semiotic ghost concept next time I watch Utena. Alienation is also a pretty prevalent theme in that. Interesting how it deals with so many of the same post-modern subject matter in a totally different genre.

I just read the Gernsback Continuum in an anthology of Gibson stories called Burning Chrome. It's freaky that you guys are doing this episode so soon after that.

We need to really develop these neat versions of cyberspace from these sorts of stories. Let us make virtual utopias...but not to forget the world we leave behind and shall always return to, but to remind us, of where and what is ought to and can become.

Nice intro bro keep it up the good content

Drinking game: take a shot every time Dan says "madness" or "mad".

Omg, this is so true.

omg that bone character love the reference

Nice video

1:23 It took me a couple seconds to find the snek. You're getting better at integrating or hiding them.

I like the opening phrase; it’s an apt reference to the London blitz, how the rockets that were supposed to take us to the stars were instead used to drive humanity to its brink.

1:32 and 4:56 Nice to see you this evening Cthulu, how have you been, hope you get your own series someday. Seriously I hope this is foreshadowing for the next series

I would love an episode talkimg about the perspective of Utopia, like in Brave New World.

Nice, subtle shoutout to Boogie2988 in there

Jesus, the Bridge Trilogy! I loved those books but haven't thought about them once for... what, almost twenty years?

I like william gibson on many levels ;-)