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> I think most Gibson cyberpunk failed to capture the banality of the future, because they were fixated on the romantic cowboy-gangster hackers outlaws who live

> I think most Gibson cyberpunk failed to capture the banality of the future, because they were fixated on the romantic cowboy-gangster hackers outlaws who lived on the fringes. This is both an excellent encapsulation of where cyberpunk missed the mark, and why its appeal is so enduring today. The real-life cyberpunks of the 2020s aren't staging dramatic data heists or getting in firefights with megacorp-employed super-soldiers; they're selling fake social media accounts for pennies or hanging phones in trees to game Amazon's gig delivery system. Gibson was right on the money that "the street finds its own uses" for technology; his mistake was underestimating just how pedestrian both the tech and those uses would be. In its original milieu, cyberpunk was an escape from the technological unknown. Today, its' an escape from the technological all-too-well-known.

pmoriarty 6y ago
"his mistake was underestimating just how pedestrian both the tech and those uses would be." Nah. Gibson pretty much nailed the petty, pedestrian uses. It's just that most people only remember the glamorous parts of his books. Here's how Gibson described a seedy ghetto bar frequented by one of the protagonists, Bobby Newmark, the eponymous Count Zero: "People paid to get into the place because Leon pirated kino and simstim off cable and ran a lot of stuff that Barrytowners couldn't otherwise afford to access. There was dealing in the back and you could make "donations" for drinks, mostly clean Ohio hooch cut with some synthetic orange drink Leon scored in industrial quantities..." The failed heist that much of the book revolves around was Count Zero's own attempt to steal some of that "soft kino porn". Can't get much more pedestrian than that. In another part of the book, a "sorcerer" explains to Bobby why he uses a critical technology in the book, in terms Bobby can understand: Vodou, he says, "isn't concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it's about is getting things done. You follow me? In our system, there are many gods. spirits Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There's a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Vodou says, there's God, sure, Gran Met, but He's big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can't get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it's street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou's like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don't go camp on the Yakuza's doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?"

pmoriarty 6y ago

"his mistake was underestimating just how pedestrian both the tech and those uses would be." Nah. Gibson pretty much nailed the petty, pedestrian uses. It's just that most people only remember the glamorous parts of his books. Here's how Gibson described a seedy ghetto bar frequented by one of the protagonists, Bobby Newmark, the eponymous Count Zero: "People paid to get into the place because Leon pirated kino and simstim off cable and ran a lot of stuff that Barrytowners couldn't otherwise afford to access. There was dealing in the back and you could make "donations" for drinks, mostly clean Ohio hooch cut with some synthetic orange drink Leon scored in industrial quantities..." The failed heist that much of the book revolves around was Count Zero's own attempt to steal some of that "soft kino porn". Can't get much more pedestrian than that. In another part of the book, a "sorcerer" explains to Bobby why he uses a critical technology in the book, in terms Bobby can understand: Vodou, he says, "isn't concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it's about is getting things done. You follow me? In our system, there are many gods. spirits Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There's a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Vodou says, there's God, sure, Gran Met, but He's big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can't get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it's street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou's like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don't go camp on the Yakuza's doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?"