16 ms·

William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned

242 points by hhs 7y ago

baryphonic 7y ago
This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change-induced apocalypse.
- toyg 7y ago
  It's a junket for his new book, probably summarized from a longer interview for the radio.
- _red 7y ago
  >[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
  - machello13 7y ago
    > "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either." It took him hours to realize a Hillary presidency wouldn't have been a utopia?
    - toofy 7y ago
      That’s a pretty uncharitable assumption to make regarding one of the better authors of modern times.
    - arkades 7y ago
      Is giving his sentence the least possible charitable reading to make a quip a good use of your time, or anyone else's?
  - justin66 7y ago
    Have you read the book, or are you relying on literally half of a sentence drawn from an abbreviated blurb summarizing a short radio clip to draw that conclusion?
  - arkades 7y ago
    > But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present." I don't see this as a pathetic premise.
    - _red 7y ago
      >I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up.... Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come across as hysterical and insulting to the future? The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
      - Proven 7y ago
        Well said!
      - justin66 7y ago
        You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read, a problem which the radio clip obviously didn't remedy. Although in fairness to NPR, it's just radio, it's not exactly the New York Times Book Review. > The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris. Agency, and its' predecessor The Peripheral, are set both in (a version of, or more precisely multiple versions of) the present day or the very near future, and in the future. There's no way to not take the present day into account. But the politics of Gibson's future are not reminiscent of "MSNBC vs Fox News," if that makes you feel any better. Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with what you are writing about.
  - lpah4all 7y ago
    There is no time travel in The Peripheral or Agency. The future folks figure out how to create a communication channel back to their past, that contact then immediately causing their past's timeline to diverge. It's actually a brilliant device (not created by WG) because, as he has stated, all sci-fi is really speaking about the "now" of the author who wrote it, in terms of what they believe is possible or probable, whether the author does so consciously or unconsciously. By presenting alternate timelines where certain major political events occurred differently, Gibson is able to comment on their effects on the "fuckedness quotient" of the moment. By far, however, his most important message involves his introducing the concept of the "jackpot", which will eventually eclipse his notoriety for having introduced the term "cyberspace" a million years ago. The jackpot is the sum total devastation we have slow-wrought upon ourselves that leads to more extreme weather and pandemics while providing cover for political groups to form kleptocracies. The term comes from the fact that those with money are always able to profit from change, and that they tend to be rewarded for their brutal competitiveness and ability to leverage any opportunity. And the bigger, the better, therefore a jackpot for them. What he is really saying is, "The future you are heading for is ugly and is the direct result of the policies we are making right now as entire nations full of unconcerned people." Then, if you read his work even more deeply, you'll find that what he is really saying is that we will always fuck ourselves up when we make decisions based upon any other reason than a compassionate, thinking heart. It's just that the problems caused by global heating have been brewing since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
    - futureproofd 7y ago
      Thanks for the summary on Gibson's new work. I really needed some clarification because I couldn't really get a sense of the plot in this one (Agency). The characters don't really have an impact on anything...They do nothing in particular except move around to/from various locations, focusing on the aesthetic detail of their surroundings, more than driving the story forward (What would a new Gibson novel be without mention of Japanese denim?). I suppose since most of the characters that make up our present (stub device) are being strung along by the stub masters from the future, that they really have no idea of what's going on/ or at stake. That's understandable, but apparently in the future, stubs are created and manipulated to the whims of their admins and aren't really important, but rather as a 'hobby'. Makes the whole struggle to 'fix' our stub seem kind of pointless.
  - whyleyc 7y ago
    Have you actually read the book? Or it’s precursor “The Peripheral” which began the development of these concepts. Surprisingly the various plot lines are somewhat more nuanced than this description! It’s like describing The Old Man And The Sea as “a book about a fishing trip”.
  - naravara 7y ago
    >>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election. Not only would that be a more impactful long-term change that would likely have prevented the systemic failures that elevated Trump in the first place, but it would probably be easier to enact. You just need to park a handful of people outside a handful of voting precincts to say "Hey, just so you know this ballot is really badly designed. . ." No first Black president, though. So we'd have to deal with that.
    - anotherman554 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure there's a limit in the book as to how far back they can go with the time-travel technology. I think it's something like 100 years but don't remember.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      Eh, maybe Colin Powell beats Gore for reelection or wins in 2008.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Makes more sense when you see his twitter feed these days is mostly retweets of political stuff like your uncle on facebook (or... everyone on twitter). You just can't become the guy who seriously posts political shit on social media all day and spends so much time consumed by the "them bad, we good" faction war.
  - subsubzero 7y ago
    agree the premise is really quite pathetic, you have a plot where people travel 100+ years in the past to try to get .... Hillary Clinton elected??? I much better idea would be to have gotten Al Gore elected instead, I think history would have been very different in the 2000's/2010's, think no trillion+ wars in the middle east, possibly no financial crisis, no tsa or patriot act, the change for the past 2 decades would be profound and make for a much more interesting story, also prb why I haven't read Gibson since the pattern recognition trilogy.
    - atombender 7y ago
      That's not the premise of the book at all. First, there's no time travel. Secondly, the plot is set after Clinton is elected.
- justin66 7y ago
  The article is an abbreviated version of the radio clip. There's a bit more information and context if you listen to it, although I got the impression the editor might have cut him off mid-rant at the very end. Since the results of the 2016 election prompted a total rewrite of Agency, discussion of that is hardly a wild turn.
- nsfw-wfsn 7y ago
  Gore/GWB was the most important climate election
- bitwize 7y ago
  Everything took a wild turn after the 2016 election. Electing Trump will be remembered as the time when America's history took a massive nose dive. One thing I think we'll see is the rise of a left-wing version of the Dark Enlightenment wherein a contingent of leftists, disillusioned with democracy after Trump, just go full tankie and start calling for the purges to begin. And then we risk a civil war between the left authoritarians and the right authoritarians, each side convinced that America's survival depends on the utter crushing defeat of the other side.
mcv 7y ago
> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here." Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun, a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here). In the earlier editions, from 1989 through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Matrix (their 'internet') was all virtual reality, and the 'Decker' using it would disappear into that world and barely interact with the rest of the team. In more recent editions, written after smartphones and wireless internet became common, everything was connected. Everything is connected to the Matrix. In combat, a Decker can hack the opponents' guns to disable them, for example. It's not a world to disappear into; that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.
- pdpi 7y ago
  That's an interesting example, because it's something of a case of convergent evolution. The earlier Matrix rules had two big issues. First, the pace was wildly different — Matrix turns took like a tenth of the in-game time of meatspace turns. Second, deckers wouldn't share the same space as the rest of the team, so you had two separate, barely interconnected spaces. The new rules both match how real world technology evolved, but also, and more importantly, solve the pacing and separateness issues.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  There were also gameplay reasons behind that for flow. One of the criticisms of the newer model is that the needless connectivity without so much as a logistical benefit doesn't make the decker/hacker feel smart so much as make it feel like the world is set up by colossal idiots who would think giving the army hand grenades which are always remote detonatable without a manual safety fuse would be an excellent idea and be utterly shocked that their entire army got blown up by one hacker.
  - ses1984 7y ago
    Whoever paid for that grenade doesn't trust the soldier / mercenary they gave it to very far, that's why the network connection exists in the first place, hackers can exploit that. At least that's the reason I just made up.
pjc50 7y ago
> "And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'" Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it gets harder and harder to write near-future SF as the present is in flux. Especially to write post-apocalyptic SF. SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards. This remains true even in apocalyptic scenarios, which are always tied to the worries of the present at the time of writing. But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events. Things like the "5G causes coronavirus" nonsense remind me of what Carl Sagan called the "demon-haunted world".
- joering2 7y ago
  Actually, there are some interesting facts about COVID and 5G radiowaves.
  - ragebol 7y ago
    Such as?
    - joering2 7y ago
      There was a video done by scientist who worked in Wuhan 5G station that explained how 5G is messing up balance in cells. But its being taken down now. Its okay. Downvote me into oblivion! We been there before. I still can find my posts from many years ago accusing Verizon and other carriers of spying on Americans and closely working with NSA, and I also been called "conspiracy theorist cook" and that there is no evidence at all. Until we had Snowden came to the light of course...
      - anigbrowl 7y ago
        You're being downvoted for teasing. When you are asserting facts you should just provide them, not beg for attention. Hinting and sharing rumors (but not providing anything for people to evaluate) just wastes others' time. This is not the same as speculating on your own account; but you didn't speculate, you asserted facts and then ducked out of providing any.
Symmetry 7y ago
We're definitely in more of a Bruce Sterling cyberpunk future than a William Gibson cyberpunk future. Distraction has been feeling eerily prescient recently.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  We are actually in the Mike Judge Idiocracy cyberpunk future and it terrifies me. Our president is a reality TV freak, the citizens are so science-retarded that they think Covid is a hoax, the population all sit in our homes watching testicle-kicking videos on huge TVs while drinking Mountain Dew and eating Cheetos while the world melts down outside.
  - icedchai 7y ago
    Idiocracy was oddly prescient. I really enjoyed that movie. Now that it's reality, not so much...
    - kaibee 7y ago
      In Idiocracy , the president recognized his limitations and looked for the smartest person to put in charge of solving the problem.
      - jandrese 7y ago
        More importantly, the president was able to discern who was smart in the movie. In real life we have Jared Kushner.
      - threwawasy1228 7y ago
        It clearly wasn't realistic enough.
  - newsbinator 7y ago
    That's all true. The difference is in Idiocracy there's no fracture- everybody's an idiot and perfectly content to be one. In our time, there's still push-back to any descent into idiocracy.
dr-detroit 7y ago
We'd all be living on a bridge if it were up to that guy.
kerkeslager 7y ago
I dunno, I think the future described in i.e. Neuromancer can still happen, it's just farther down the road.
- dr-detroit 7y ago
  Well for one thing Real Estate just doesn't work that way. It may sometimes feel like half the US is a giant suburban sprawl but in reality the elites own 40% of all real estate in America and they keep it nice, private, and undeveloped.
- dpau 7y ago
  that is exactly what those of us simply waiting for a Neuromancer movie have been saying to ourselves for years :(
yellowbat 7y ago
The hacker spirit of the early Internet has been replaced by corporate shenanigans and capitalist greed. Just like "hacker" in "hacker news".
- bawana 7y ago
  +1. I just watched Eric Weinstein on Lex Fridman's podcast. He is angry about how students have been emasculated by the establishment. That the death of Aaron Schwartz was a tragedy and the students should 'rise up and take back' MIT. Yet he himself has a net worth over 100mill and is doing nothing about it.He promises betterment through revolution like Batista and Castro, yet he himself is busy amassing wealth. Why does he think youth will waste itself on anything else except the pursuit of the dream that made him successful? Internet has just become another tool for control because that's just what humans do - make tools out of anything including their fellow humans.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    Talk is cheap. It's easier, more lucrative, and less costly to build a media personality as a counter-cultural revolutionary than to actually be one.
    - achillesheels 7y ago
      Precisely. Courage requires actual conquering of fear, which doubtlessly involves confrontation with the status quo rather than a few microphone jibber jabbers. Who in the Western World has a contempt for convenience?
  - pjc50 7y ago
    This guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein I can't understand why anyone would even begin to take calls for revolution from someone like that seriously, when he's so obviously a grifter.
    - germinalphrase 7y ago
pharke 7y ago
I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. The current generation of VR seems like the first halting steps into that world. Progress towards realtime raytracing and massively online social worlds look like the next steps. The lofty goals of brain machine interface companies whisper faint possibilities of "jacking in" at some distant date.
- cryptica 7y ago
  >> I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. In the year 2000 up to maybe 2004, it was definitely a mysterious and sexy place... The absence of good search engines made it mysterious and pornography made it sexy.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  I'm with you there. I think as long as we keep up the old visions and cherish them, somebody will make it real. For me it looks like logical way forward but it may not to everyone. The popularity of AR may break VR in the future.
- smolder 7y ago
  We need to have a stable and sustainable enough industry and society for technological advance to keep occuring. We may never populate space or even get our act together soon enough to prevent early destruction of what we've got. The mundane issues of trust, politics, human nature, etc, may prevent us from exploring many possible futures. I'm saying this not to be a downer, but to impart that we should all have an eye on solving or mitigating those mundane problems, so we can get on to solving the more fun ones.
- tim58 7y ago
  The human brain processes ~40gigabits/second of information. Current direct brain interfaces are probably closer to 400bits/second Computer to Brain. I think it's very possible that we will hit wetware limitations for direct brain interfaces an order of magnitude or two less than ~40gigabits/seconds. With less information to process the digital worlds created by brain machine interfaces will be significantly less stimulating than the real world. In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine interfaces. Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy place.
ceilingcorner 7y ago
"And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'" Honestly, if you were deeply, dramatically surprised by Trump's election, you weren't paying enough attention. The causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt. It lead me to wonder if there is a term for such a phenomenon: the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of.
- metabagel 7y ago
  The election probably hinged on the handling of “her emails” by the FBI Director. I don’t see how anyone could have predicted the extent to which he would bungle that. His investigation found no wrong-doing, but he publicly excoriated her anyway. Then, he opened a new investigation, which again found nothing. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probab...
  - ceilingcorner 7y ago
    1) The "FBI emails changed the election" narrative is a thesis, not a statement of fact. I seriously doubt the average person knew or cared about this. This sounds like the news media over-emphasizing their own relevance. 2) I don't think it really matters for the point I'm trying to make. Even if Hillary had won, the election would have been close, thus showing that the support for Trump's platform was still widespread. If he lost, we'd probably just see a different right-wing populist candidate arise in 2020. The issues that led to his rise would still exist, which is precisely my point.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    It was a close election, there's probably a lot of single things that could have changed it. One side or the other winning a close election shouldn't fundamentally change your worldview.
HONEST_ANNIE 7y ago
> I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present." TV show The Good Fight Season 4, Episode 1 "The Gang Deals with Alternate Reality has brilliant dark humor take on alternate reality where Hillary Clinton won the election. spoiler alert --- (spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  > (spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH) that's eerily close to current reality. (#MeToo only when politically expedient; Weinstein's damage control advisor is now a senior campaign adviser to a 'liberal' contender for the WH)
arbitrage 7y ago
I disagree, the cyber fighting is almost exactly how he described it. Tons of misinformation, requiring personal compute agents to sort through it for you. Attacking high-profile targets by buying zero-days, creating distractions, then pivoting to more obscure vulnerabilities in the corporate firewalls. Attack & parry, then riposte. I find his descriptions more apt now than when his books were first published.
ashtonkem 7y ago
> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here." This is a common mistake utopians of all stripes; the short comings of the world as we know it isn't a consequence of external forces imposing badness on us, it's a consequence of the fallibility of humanity. Unless if you have a concrete plan on how you're going to organize society differently, any attempt to start something fresh will end up recreating all of the ills that drove you from "society" in the first place.
- monknomo 7y ago
  Pretty sure Neuromancer isn't a utopian novel, and that Gibson isn't a utopian.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    Arguable; I’m not enough of a literary person to argue it out. But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude, and I’d argue that my original point still holds; escapists often fail to recognize the source of the problems they’re escaping from, and recreate them wherever they escape to.
    - the_af 7y ago
      It's not really arguable. Gibson wrote punk literature, at least back then; he identified himself as a punk subculture writer, and punk isn't utopian. He was not describing a desirable future, but a depressing one where soulless corporations rule the world. > But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude Escapism can be pessimistic, as in Gibson. It's not him who "escapes", it's the denizens of the soulless world he described, and the "world" they escape to can be just as alienating. It's no triumph to "escape" to Gibson's matrix, and his world continues to be a crapsack [1][2]. ---- [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literature https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literat...
gfodor 7y ago
Why does one assume the Internet is in its final form? I'm about 99% certain the phase we are in is a transitional phase. Upon the arrival of ubiquitous immersive computing, it will go through what may be its final phase shift, but right now it'll be looked back upon similar to the previous eras.
- cwp 7y ago
  Yes! What's interesting about Gibson's vision is that he assumed connectivity would be hard, but VR would be easy. It's a world of payphones, fax machines, and "simstim" where you can receive someone else's sensory input and ride along inside their head as they move through the world. That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we nail VR.
  - germinalphrase 7y ago
    Simstim is - at least in part - being worked on by a company called Openwater[0]. Mary Lou Jepsen did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while back that speaks to the ambition of thought/memory recording via an MRI-like device and the "insertion"/playback of the same in other people [1]. [0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/
    - cwp 7y ago
      Yeah, I was at that talk. A little out there, but pretty awesome.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
        Have you seen Brainstorm from 1983? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/
        cwp 7y ago
        No, just the clip that Lou showed at the talk.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> "Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff." That is the story of all technology. The horse was the super weapon used by kings and warriors. It ended up being something that farmers used to plow their fields. Same with ships, cars, telephones, radios, televisions, computers.
narrator 7y ago
>"Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff." Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.
- tim58 7y ago
  I think one of the things it was easy to miss in 1984 when Neuromancer was published was how accessible the internet and computers is. I've watched two year olds interact with the modern internet. If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in 1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Microsoft's unofficial mission was "a computer on every [office] desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software". It sounded overly ambitious, even into the 90s.
  - armitron 7y ago
    You're confusing the map with the territory I think. It's safe to say that Gibson's early work is full of insinuations. He zooms into specific criminal subcultures and describes them in detail but that doesn't mean that the rest of society follows the same principles. It's pretty obvious that there is plenty of "banal" and "average" in the Sprawl trilogy, it's just not overtly described because what would be the point?. The same is true today. There is excitement and novelty to be found on the Internet. But it's certainly not going to be discovered by the sheep, the 99% that spend their time on Instagram, Youtube and Amazon. Similar characters to the ones found in Gibson's books exist, but similarly, are not visible from the popular sphere. In that sense, Gibson definitely misses the mark when he describes the Internet today but that's to be expected. The genius of his early work lies in it being IMAGINED, or channeled if you will. Definitely not reasoned. Somehow his imagination tapped into the technological currents that define us today. Now, having lost his imagination and overcompensating with reason, he has become yet another sheep and his view reflects that.
  - satori99 7y ago
noah670 7y ago
I strongly believe we need more separation from the real world and the internet. Every year it seems like more of our physical lives are being placed into social forms on the internet which should be more of an escape than bringing it all over.
Animats 7y ago
"Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time and effort to understand." Yes, that's Gibson's new book, "Agency". It's complicated because it's contrived, not because the subject matter is complicated. Probably his worst book to date.
IDtootwoThough 7y ago
i'D fuck you and jerk off to your conclusions; in inseparate orders. Sign me in
RichardCA 7y ago
The current season of Westworld is very Gibsonian. The main new character (Caleb) is introduced as a vet with PTSD, but as the season unfolds we see he's been augmented, and it's strongly implied that he's living with implanted memories to cover up the horrible stuff he did in the military. In the most recent episode he got to use a drug called "Genre" that moves you through different states of mental alteration. Whoever wrote this read lots of Gibson. But the idea that everyone is jacked in to the same network, the hand of corporate control is always present, and shady things are happening all the time, no one thinks of that as unique or novel any more.
agumonkey 7y ago
The reasons why society decided to re-root itself on top of internet are to be investigated. Capitalism logic caught in a loop looking for virginial spaces to re-grow with even less constraints ?

242 points by hhs 7y ago

This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change-induced apocalypse.

toyg 7y ago
It's a junket for his new book, probably summarized from a longer interview for the radio.
_red 7y ago
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
- machello13 7y ago
  > "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either." It took him hours to realize a Hillary presidency wouldn't have been a utopia?
  - toofy 7y ago
    That’s a pretty uncharitable assumption to make regarding one of the better authors of modern times.
  - arkades 7y ago
    Is giving his sentence the least possible charitable reading to make a quip a good use of your time, or anyone else's?
- justin66 7y ago
  Have you read the book, or are you relying on literally half of a sentence drawn from an abbreviated blurb summarizing a short radio clip to draw that conclusion?
- arkades 7y ago
  > But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present." I don't see this as a pathetic premise.
  - _red 7y ago
    >I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up.... Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come across as hysterical and insulting to the future? The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
    - Proven 7y ago
      Well said!
    - justin66 7y ago
      You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read, a problem which the radio clip obviously didn't remedy. Although in fairness to NPR, it's just radio, it's not exactly the New York Times Book Review. > The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris. Agency, and its' predecessor The Peripheral, are set both in (a version of, or more precisely multiple versions of) the present day or the very near future, and in the future. There's no way to not take the present day into account. But the politics of Gibson's future are not reminiscent of "MSNBC vs Fox News," if that makes you feel any better. Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with what you are writing about.
- lpah4all 7y ago
  There is no time travel in The Peripheral or Agency. The future folks figure out how to create a communication channel back to their past, that contact then immediately causing their past's timeline to diverge. It's actually a brilliant device (not created by WG) because, as he has stated, all sci-fi is really speaking about the "now" of the author who wrote it, in terms of what they believe is possible or probable, whether the author does so consciously or unconsciously. By presenting alternate timelines where certain major political events occurred differently, Gibson is able to comment on their effects on the "fuckedness quotient" of the moment. By far, however, his most important message involves his introducing the concept of the "jackpot", which will eventually eclipse his notoriety for having introduced the term "cyberspace" a million years ago. The jackpot is the sum total devastation we have slow-wrought upon ourselves that leads to more extreme weather and pandemics while providing cover for political groups to form kleptocracies. The term comes from the fact that those with money are always able to profit from change, and that they tend to be rewarded for their brutal competitiveness and ability to leverage any opportunity. And the bigger, the better, therefore a jackpot for them. What he is really saying is, "The future you are heading for is ugly and is the direct result of the policies we are making right now as entire nations full of unconcerned people." Then, if you read his work even more deeply, you'll find that what he is really saying is that we will always fuck ourselves up when we make decisions based upon any other reason than a compassionate, thinking heart. It's just that the problems caused by global heating have been brewing since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
  - futureproofd 7y ago
    Thanks for the summary on Gibson's new work. I really needed some clarification because I couldn't really get a sense of the plot in this one (Agency). The characters don't really have an impact on anything...They do nothing in particular except move around to/from various locations, focusing on the aesthetic detail of their surroundings, more than driving the story forward (What would a new Gibson novel be without mention of Japanese denim?). I suppose since most of the characters that make up our present (stub device) are being strung along by the stub masters from the future, that they really have no idea of what's going on/ or at stake. That's understandable, but apparently in the future, stubs are created and manipulated to the whims of their admins and aren't really important, but rather as a 'hobby'. Makes the whole struggle to 'fix' our stub seem kind of pointless.
- whyleyc 7y ago
  Have you actually read the book? Or it’s precursor “The Peripheral” which began the development of these concepts. Surprisingly the various plot lines are somewhat more nuanced than this description! It’s like describing The Old Man And The Sea as “a book about a fishing trip”.
- naravara 7y ago
  >>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election. Not only would that be a more impactful long-term change that would likely have prevented the systemic failures that elevated Trump in the first place, but it would probably be easier to enact. You just need to park a handful of people outside a handful of voting precincts to say "Hey, just so you know this ballot is really badly designed. . ." No first Black president, though. So we'd have to deal with that.
  - anotherman554 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure there's a limit in the book as to how far back they can go with the time-travel technology. I think it's something like 100 years but don't remember.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Eh, maybe Colin Powell beats Gore for reelection or wins in 2008.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Makes more sense when you see his twitter feed these days is mostly retweets of political stuff like your uncle on facebook (or... everyone on twitter). You just can't become the guy who seriously posts political shit on social media all day and spends so much time consumed by the "them bad, we good" faction war.
- subsubzero 7y ago
  agree the premise is really quite pathetic, you have a plot where people travel 100+ years in the past to try to get .... Hillary Clinton elected??? I much better idea would be to have gotten Al Gore elected instead, I think history would have been very different in the 2000's/2010's, think no trillion+ wars in the middle east, possibly no financial crisis, no tsa or patriot act, the change for the past 2 decades would be profound and make for a much more interesting story, also prb why I haven't read Gibson since the pattern recognition trilogy.
  - atombender 7y ago
    That's not the premise of the book at all. First, there's no time travel. Secondly, the plot is set after Clinton is elected.
justin66 7y ago
The article is an abbreviated version of the radio clip. There's a bit more information and context if you listen to it, although I got the impression the editor might have cut him off mid-rant at the very end. Since the results of the 2016 election prompted a total rewrite of Agency, discussion of that is hardly a wild turn.
nsfw-wfsn 7y ago
Gore/GWB was the most important climate election
bitwize 7y ago
Everything took a wild turn after the 2016 election. Electing Trump will be remembered as the time when America's history took a massive nose dive. One thing I think we'll see is the rise of a left-wing version of the Dark Enlightenment wherein a contingent of leftists, disillusioned with democracy after Trump, just go full tankie and start calling for the purges to begin. And then we risk a civil war between the left authoritarians and the right authoritarians, each side convinced that America's survival depends on the utter crushing defeat of the other side.

mcv 7y ago

> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here." Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun, a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here). In the earlier editions, from 1989 through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Matrix (their 'internet') was all virtual reality, and the 'Decker' using it would disappear into that world and barely interact with the rest of the team. In more recent editions, written after smartphones and wireless internet became common, everything was connected. Everything is connected to the Matrix. In combat, a Decker can hack the opponents' guns to disable them, for example. It's not a world to disappear into; that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.

pdpi 7y ago
That's an interesting example, because it's something of a case of convergent evolution. The earlier Matrix rules had two big issues. First, the pace was wildly different — Matrix turns took like a tenth of the in-game time of meatspace turns. Second, deckers wouldn't share the same space as the rest of the team, so you had two separate, barely interconnected spaces. The new rules both match how real world technology evolved, but also, and more importantly, solve the pacing and separateness issues.
Nasrudith 7y ago
There were also gameplay reasons behind that for flow. One of the criticisms of the newer model is that the needless connectivity without so much as a logistical benefit doesn't make the decker/hacker feel smart so much as make it feel like the world is set up by colossal idiots who would think giving the army hand grenades which are always remote detonatable without a manual safety fuse would be an excellent idea and be utterly shocked that their entire army got blown up by one hacker.
- ses1984 7y ago
  Whoever paid for that grenade doesn't trust the soldier / mercenary they gave it to very far, that's why the network connection exists in the first place, hackers can exploit that. At least that's the reason I just made up.

pjc50 7y ago

> "And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'" Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it gets harder and harder to write near-future SF as the present is in flux. Especially to write post-apocalyptic SF. SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards. This remains true even in apocalyptic scenarios, which are always tied to the worries of the present at the time of writing. But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events. Things like the "5G causes coronavirus" nonsense remind me of what Carl Sagan called the "demon-haunted world".

joering2 7y ago
Actually, there are some interesting facts about COVID and 5G radiowaves.
- ragebol 7y ago
  Such as?
  - joering2 7y ago
    There was a video done by scientist who worked in Wuhan 5G station that explained how 5G is messing up balance in cells. But its being taken down now. Its okay. Downvote me into oblivion! We been there before. I still can find my posts from many years ago accusing Verizon and other carriers of spying on Americans and closely working with NSA, and I also been called "conspiracy theorist cook" and that there is no evidence at all. Until we had Snowden came to the light of course...
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      You're being downvoted for teasing. When you are asserting facts you should just provide them, not beg for attention. Hinting and sharing rumors (but not providing anything for people to evaluate) just wastes others' time. This is not the same as speculating on your own account; but you didn't speculate, you asserted facts and then ducked out of providing any.

Symmetry 7y ago

We're definitely in more of a Bruce Sterling cyberpunk future than a William Gibson cyberpunk future. Distraction has been feeling eerily prescient recently.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
We are actually in the Mike Judge Idiocracy cyberpunk future and it terrifies me. Our president is a reality TV freak, the citizens are so science-retarded that they think Covid is a hoax, the population all sit in our homes watching testicle-kicking videos on huge TVs while drinking Mountain Dew and eating Cheetos while the world melts down outside.
- icedchai 7y ago
  Idiocracy was oddly prescient. I really enjoyed that movie. Now that it's reality, not so much...
  - kaibee 7y ago
    In Idiocracy , the president recognized his limitations and looked for the smartest person to put in charge of solving the problem.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      More importantly, the president was able to discern who was smart in the movie. In real life we have Jared Kushner.
    - threwawasy1228 7y ago
      It clearly wasn't realistic enough.
- newsbinator 7y ago
  That's all true. The difference is in Idiocracy there's no fracture- everybody's an idiot and perfectly content to be one. In our time, there's still push-back to any descent into idiocracy.

dr-detroit 7y ago

We'd all be living on a bridge if it were up to that guy.

kerkeslager 7y ago

I dunno, I think the future described in i.e. Neuromancer can still happen, it's just farther down the road.

dr-detroit 7y ago
Well for one thing Real Estate just doesn't work that way. It may sometimes feel like half the US is a giant suburban sprawl but in reality the elites own 40% of all real estate in America and they keep it nice, private, and undeveloped.
dpau 7y ago
that is exactly what those of us simply waiting for a Neuromancer movie have been saying to ourselves for years :(

yellowbat 7y ago

The hacker spirit of the early Internet has been replaced by corporate shenanigans and capitalist greed. Just like "hacker" in "hacker news".

bawana 7y ago
+1. I just watched Eric Weinstein on Lex Fridman's podcast. He is angry about how students have been emasculated by the establishment. That the death of Aaron Schwartz was a tragedy and the students should 'rise up and take back' MIT. Yet he himself has a net worth over 100mill and is doing nothing about it.He promises betterment through revolution like Batista and Castro, yet he himself is busy amassing wealth. Why does he think youth will waste itself on anything else except the pursuit of the dream that made him successful? Internet has just become another tool for control because that's just what humans do - make tools out of anything including their fellow humans.
- keiferski 7y ago
  Talk is cheap. It's easier, more lucrative, and less costly to build a media personality as a counter-cultural revolutionary than to actually be one.
  - achillesheels 7y ago
    Precisely. Courage requires actual conquering of fear, which doubtlessly involves confrontation with the status quo rather than a few microphone jibber jabbers. Who in the Western World has a contempt for convenience?
- pjc50 7y ago
  This guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein I can't understand why anyone would even begin to take calls for revolution from someone like that seriously, when he's so obviously a grifter.
  - germinalphrase 7y ago

pharke 7y ago

I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. The current generation of VR seems like the first halting steps into that world. Progress towards realtime raytracing and massively online social worlds look like the next steps. The lofty goals of brain machine interface companies whisper faint possibilities of "jacking in" at some distant date.

cryptica 7y ago
>> I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. In the year 2000 up to maybe 2004, it was definitely a mysterious and sexy place... The absence of good search engines made it mysterious and pornography made it sexy.
Krasnol 7y ago
I'm with you there. I think as long as we keep up the old visions and cherish them, somebody will make it real. For me it looks like logical way forward but it may not to everyone. The popularity of AR may break VR in the future.
smolder 7y ago
We need to have a stable and sustainable enough industry and society for technological advance to keep occuring. We may never populate space or even get our act together soon enough to prevent early destruction of what we've got. The mundane issues of trust, politics, human nature, etc, may prevent us from exploring many possible futures. I'm saying this not to be a downer, but to impart that we should all have an eye on solving or mitigating those mundane problems, so we can get on to solving the more fun ones.
tim58 7y ago
The human brain processes ~40gigabits/second of information. Current direct brain interfaces are probably closer to 400bits/second Computer to Brain. I think it's very possible that we will hit wetware limitations for direct brain interfaces an order of magnitude or two less than ~40gigabits/seconds. With less information to process the digital worlds created by brain machine interfaces will be significantly less stimulating than the real world. In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine interfaces. Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy place.

ceilingcorner 7y ago

"And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'" Honestly, if you were deeply, dramatically surprised by Trump's election, you weren't paying enough attention. The causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt. It lead me to wonder if there is a term for such a phenomenon: the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of.

metabagel 7y ago
The election probably hinged on the handling of “her emails” by the FBI Director. I don’t see how anyone could have predicted the extent to which he would bungle that. His investigation found no wrong-doing, but he publicly excoriated her anyway. Then, he opened a new investigation, which again found nothing. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probab...
- ceilingcorner 7y ago
  1) The "FBI emails changed the election" narrative is a thesis, not a statement of fact. I seriously doubt the average person knew or cared about this. This sounds like the news media over-emphasizing their own relevance. 2) I don't think it really matters for the point I'm trying to make. Even if Hillary had won, the election would have been close, thus showing that the support for Trump's platform was still widespread. If he lost, we'd probably just see a different right-wing populist candidate arise in 2020. The issues that led to his rise would still exist, which is precisely my point.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  It was a close election, there's probably a lot of single things that could have changed it. One side or the other winning a close election shouldn't fundamentally change your worldview.

HONEST_ANNIE 7y ago

> I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present." TV show The Good Fight Season 4, Episode 1 "The Gang Deals with Alternate Reality has brilliant dark humor take on alternate reality where Hillary Clinton won the election. spoiler alert --- (spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
> (spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH) that's eerily close to current reality. (#MeToo only when politically expedient; Weinstein's damage control advisor is now a senior campaign adviser to a 'liberal' contender for the WH)

arbitrage 7y ago

I disagree, the cyber fighting is almost exactly how he described it. Tons of misinformation, requiring personal compute agents to sort through it for you. Attacking high-profile targets by buying zero-days, creating distractions, then pivoting to more obscure vulnerabilities in the corporate firewalls. Attack & parry, then riposte. I find his descriptions more apt now than when his books were first published.

ashtonkem 7y ago

> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here." This is a common mistake utopians of all stripes; the short comings of the world as we know it isn't a consequence of external forces imposing badness on us, it's a consequence of the fallibility of humanity. Unless if you have a concrete plan on how you're going to organize society differently, any attempt to start something fresh will end up recreating all of the ills that drove you from "society" in the first place.

monknomo 7y ago
Pretty sure Neuromancer isn't a utopian novel, and that Gibson isn't a utopian.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  Arguable; I’m not enough of a literary person to argue it out. But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude, and I’d argue that my original point still holds; escapists often fail to recognize the source of the problems they’re escaping from, and recreate them wherever they escape to.
  - the_af 7y ago
    It's not really arguable. Gibson wrote punk literature, at least back then; he identified himself as a punk subculture writer, and punk isn't utopian. He was not describing a desirable future, but a depressing one where soulless corporations rule the world. > But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude Escapism can be pessimistic, as in Gibson. It's not him who "escapes", it's the denizens of the soulless world he described, and the "world" they escape to can be just as alienating. It's no triumph to "escape" to Gibson's matrix, and his world continues to be a crapsack [1][2]. ---- [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literature https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literat...

gfodor 7y ago

Why does one assume the Internet is in its final form? I'm about 99% certain the phase we are in is a transitional phase. Upon the arrival of ubiquitous immersive computing, it will go through what may be its final phase shift, but right now it'll be looked back upon similar to the previous eras.

cwp 7y ago
Yes! What's interesting about Gibson's vision is that he assumed connectivity would be hard, but VR would be easy. It's a world of payphones, fax machines, and "simstim" where you can receive someone else's sensory input and ride along inside their head as they move through the world. That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we nail VR.
- germinalphrase 7y ago
  Simstim is - at least in part - being worked on by a company called Openwater[0]. Mary Lou Jepsen did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while back that speaks to the ambition of thought/memory recording via an MRI-like device and the "insertion"/playback of the same in other people [1]. [0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/
  - cwp 7y ago
    Yeah, I was at that talk. A little out there, but pretty awesome.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
      Have you seen Brainstorm from 1983? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/
      - cwp 7y ago
        No, just the clip that Lou showed at the talk.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> "Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff." That is the story of all technology. The horse was the super weapon used by kings and warriors. It ended up being something that farmers used to plow their fields. Same with ships, cars, telephones, radios, televisions, computers.

narrator 7y ago

>"Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff." Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.

tim58 7y ago
I think one of the things it was easy to miss in 1984 when Neuromancer was published was how accessible the internet and computers is. I've watched two year olds interact with the modern internet. If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in 1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Microsoft's unofficial mission was "a computer on every [office] desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software". It sounded overly ambitious, even into the 90s.
- armitron 7y ago
  You're confusing the map with the territory I think. It's safe to say that Gibson's early work is full of insinuations. He zooms into specific criminal subcultures and describes them in detail but that doesn't mean that the rest of society follows the same principles. It's pretty obvious that there is plenty of "banal" and "average" in the Sprawl trilogy, it's just not overtly described because what would be the point?. The same is true today. There is excitement and novelty to be found on the Internet. But it's certainly not going to be discovered by the sheep, the 99% that spend their time on Instagram, Youtube and Amazon. Similar characters to the ones found in Gibson's books exist, but similarly, are not visible from the popular sphere. In that sense, Gibson definitely misses the mark when he describes the Internet today but that's to be expected. The genius of his early work lies in it being IMAGINED, or channeled if you will. Definitely not reasoned. Somehow his imagination tapped into the technological currents that define us today. Now, having lost his imagination and overcompensating with reason, he has become yet another sheep and his view reflects that.
- satori99 7y ago

noah670 7y ago

I strongly believe we need more separation from the real world and the internet. Every year it seems like more of our physical lives are being placed into social forms on the internet which should be more of an escape than bringing it all over.

Animats 7y ago

"Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time and effort to understand." Yes, that's Gibson's new book, "Agency". It's complicated because it's contrived, not because the subject matter is complicated. Probably his worst book to date.

IDtootwoThough 7y ago

i'D fuck you and jerk off to your conclusions; in inseparate orders. Sign me in

RichardCA 7y ago

The current season of Westworld is very Gibsonian. The main new character (Caleb) is introduced as a vet with PTSD, but as the season unfolds we see he's been augmented, and it's strongly implied that he's living with implanted memories to cover up the horrible stuff he did in the military. In the most recent episode he got to use a drug called "Genre" that moves you through different states of mental alteration. Whoever wrote this read lots of Gibson. But the idea that everyone is jacked in to the same network, the hand of corporate control is always present, and shady things are happening all the time, no one thinks of that as unique or novel any more.

agumonkey 7y ago

The reasons why society decided to re-root itself on top of internet are to be investigated. Capitalism logic caught in a loop looking for virginial spaces to re-grow with even less constraints ?