Letters to the Editor
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My favorite author
Every three to four years, I get the pleasure of reading a new Gibson novel. I always try to savor them, not reading too much at any one sitting. Spook Country is amazing so far. And today, the new Michael Marshall Smith novel showed up in the mail. It's my lucky week.
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DINOSAUR
What a relic.
Couldn't/didn't envision the Bush invasion/youtube/google for bourgeous teens.
totally out of touch.
NEXT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Dinosaur?
You're shitting me, right?
Gibson's books aren't about technology, or politics. They are about the effects of technology and politics on people, and he does this better than anyone else ever has. I know people who hate science fiction but love William Gibson, just as I know people who hate books about war but devour anything by Glen Cook, because the technology is only there to provide context for the motivations, aspirations, and actions of people. And that's what makes Gibson (and Cook) so special - within genres that have historically been about the genre itself, they write about people.
He isn't Nostradamus, nor is he trying to be. But if you're so hung up on Gibson being a prognosticator, you're still wrong.
He didn't predict Bush, but he showed us characters who live in an America where the government doesn't give a shit about it's citizens - actively, aggressively, and with no pretense of caring at any level.
He didn't predict YouTube, but he did understand that the pervasive avalability of video would not only expose us to some fascinating art and further blur the line between reality and make-believe, but become a world-wide obsession.
He didn't predict the world we live in today, but he did show us a world where everything has become monetized, where no secret is safe from anyone who is determined to find it, and it turns out that pervasively available technology doesn't make everybody's lives better after all. Sound familiar?
And like it or not, and I think Gibson himself may not like it, but he did play a large role in creating the world we live in today. Without Neuromancer (and to a lesser extent Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash) there wouldn't be a Second Life - just because the technology today is decidedly second rate doesn't minimize the impact of his ideas - possibly wouldn't be an Internet as we know it. Engineers and entrepeneurs all get their ideas from somewhere, and the influence of Gibson on the creative forces in tech is impossible to overestimate.
Gibson doesn't predict the future, he helps create it.
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re: dinosaur and dinosaur ?
dinosaurs right, this stuff is all about the past, the effects of technology are the past, the result, although gibson makes a good point about technology annointing itself. henry ford started making cars when there were no roads. if people would have gotten together and said, hey wait a minute, we're not ready for this, we could have saved a lot of trouble. but that's all bridges over the water, (which is the role of technology always, break something and then ride to the rescue by fixing it with more technology).
i think its possible technology will enable us to control the world, but then i see men in night goggles hooked up to drones twenty thousand feet in the air looking at the ground with telescopic lenses for pockets of evil directed by a President who just had his colon checked for specks of cancer, in his otherwise healthy body ( a metaphor for the nation he shephards).
the speaker of the house said she was in favor of expanding healthcare. neither she, nor the President understand, thats' not the problem, people getting sick is the problem.
bird flu and aids and bin laden haven't gotten out of hand in a while, thanks to this web of technology, yawn, but we are still an unhealthy culture which is what happens when the shock of new technology wears off. consider the epidemic of diabetes and autism, diseases formerly unknown to any degree, and something from which the President suffers, at least metaphorically.
the big problem being that once the growth of technology slows, the process is less able to react to it's own mistakes. much like an overzealous stock market, we are facing a technology crash, and on the downside of the curve things move much slower. there may be a thousand years of rethinking these things, sorting them out. it will be long, and very discouraging time.
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but will new technology change our lives
I think there was a phase from cars and nuclear missiles to the computer, internet, and cell phones where massive new technologies changed the entire course of modern history. Now I don't want to be too technologically determinist, but obviously most artistic culture, including Gibson about coming to terms with that change that has resulted in globalization. So thats happened, we live in a postmodern world, in a global village etc... and capitalism and materialism have won the day. That shift is huge and can't be underplayed, but now I think things have settled into a strange stasis. Jameson also talks about how the rapid shifts and movement of the postmodern period creates a constant flickering of backdrop essentially but a stasis of systemic change, because there ceases to be an ontological presence upon which to ground new structures. This itself is a product of global capitalism, as the ruling system or code of the postmodern. So what I contend is that new technologies...i.e. youtube, iphones etc... are only illusory changes. They are marketed as paradigm shifts, but only to cast a smokescreen on the dominance of the system that underlies and produces them. Now this is begining to sound like a lyotardian end of history argument, but I am mearly proposing that the human animal is so dazed by that flickering illusory change, that we have yet to adapt to the modern world in a way that allows us to engage with it and challenge its assumptions. I think Gibson from what I have read by him has identified this profoundly... i.e. his futures are not predicative, rather diagnostic of the present, because a further flow of history is as yet unimaginable. So that is our challenge now, adjusting ourselves to that new speed, and understanding the global capitalist and materialist system that underlies it. And as liberals, our imperitive as Jameson has put it, to find the seeds of the future in the present. Or a little less marxist, but still in rebellion, because identifying that system as what it is, you inevitably identify its self-replication of mediocre dehumanizing culture, and its hegemonic imperialism, finding the spaces where humanity, bohemias or alternatives can grow and flourish. But I think it starts with the identification of the false changes of gadgetry as an empty materialism and denying that marketing strategy (essentially) its presumed authority over our futures.