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Cyberjunk

“If you want to know the future, look at the past" - Albert Einstein.

By Blak KatPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
2
Courtesy of a file on my hard drive for 20 years.

Futurism is what brought me to this website, initially. Even though nostalgia was the driving force behind it. Bob Guccione's OMNI magazine was part of my childhood growing up. I remember racing to the corner store every month with a five-dollar bill to buy the latest edition. I was too young to buy the magazine, but the man working behind the counter knew my parents. He would slip it into a flat, brown paper bag and slide it over the counter to me, give me my change and raise his eyebrows as to say, “shhh.” I ran home to read through it and look at the pictures of spaceships, robots or faraway galaxies. I was enthralled in the science facts as well. It was a good magazine to fuel my imagination.

Moving forward to the present day, I always wondered what happened to OMNI. I had this brilliant idea to scan some of the old artwork from the magazines that I have stored in my storage facility. Thinking they would make great NFT's, or Non-fungible tokens. If you aren’t familiar with NFT’s, they are digital properties that exist on a blockchain through smart contracts. That is as simple as I could explain it. Some NFT’s are going for millions of dollars and have taken the amateur artwork world by storm. When you own it, your unique hash attached to the jpeg, gif, video or text file is what makes it unique. There is no identical hash. My thoughts is that NFT’s and smart contracts might signal an end to the digital rights and online piracy dilemma. Cyberjunk problems need cyberjunk solutions.

As for OMNI and the copyrights for that material, it turns out that no one really knows who owns the rights to it. I read a fantastic article written by Glenn Fleishman about the history of the fall of OMNI and the murky details surrounding the copyrighted material on boinboing. I also had a brief discourse with him via email about the rights and my idea. Glenn was nice enough to give me “not so much legal advice” but warned me about the perils awaiting me in court if I infringed on the copyrighted material. As per Glenn’s article I discerned that Jeremy Frommer, who owns Jerrick Media – which has since been rebranded at Creat’d - which also owns Vocal.media, had the luck to buy a storage unit with many of the Guccione estate property in it. I hope I got that bread crumb trail right. It was a deep rabbit hole I fell into, looking for the fate of a magazine that is held dearly to my childhood heart as also my love for science fiction.

And I still love science fiction, however, I tend to gravitate toward the cyberpunk genre more than others now. Which brings me to the most cyberjunky thing I’ve done today. I’ll be brief about it. I used cryptocurrency to by a cyberpunk game called Conglomerate 451 from GOG.com. It made me feel like a child again, running to the corner store with a five-dollar bill to buy that latest issue of OMNI. However, I mine my own cryptocurrency so I didn’t have to use my bank account, I used my Coinbase credit card so it wasn’t even a real five dollar bill I used. How far down the rabbit hole of futurism are we?

I have been reading through some old OMNI magazines to see if there were any stories or articles written about what we know now as cryptocurrency. I haven’t been able to find anything yet. Guessing that was too futuristic, even for OMNI at the time. Also, I don’t read physical magazines anymore, I have them as .cbr files that take up minimal space on a portable SSD drive, repurposed out of an old, broken-down laptop. Rehashed cyberjunk.

~Fin.

science fiction
2

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