William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned
npr.org
npr.org
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.
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.
At least that's the reason I just made up.
(This kind of cyberpunk dystopia is very plausible from the intersection of military contracting grift and lowest-bidder IoT design!)
And then converted the landmines to remote-operated as part of a legal fiction about victim-operated devices. Which is the military version of the concern about robots taking jobs: to what extent is it acceptable to have munitions making their own decisions about taking lives?
Anyway, in the Shadowrun universe you'd definitely be able to hack the mesh network of landmines.
The US allegedly has something like this for MANPADS missiles given to not-so-trusted allies.
https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10642-harry_potter_and_the_not-s...
Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control… everything is monitored and kept under control.
War… has changed.
Well, then future came and with all the insanely insecure IoT devices all around I'm no longer so sure. :P
Eloquent way of saying that normies ruined the internet.
One could argue that, in some aspects, it has substituted it.
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".
This is what I think was so original about The Handmaid's Tale--a possible iteration of our own culture and technology that moved backwards-sideways instead of forward. (Disclaimer: we read this years ago in school, and I haven't had a chance to see the recent adaptation.)
Only early plup SF Gernsback etc had that view
Notable exception: Cloud Atlas (pub. 2004), which admits that "Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword."
> a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events
I think we used to call this the Singularity.
This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
It took him hours to realize a Hillary presidency wouldn't have been a utopia?
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.
> 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.
I accept that. But I'm commenting on the article that OP linked which quoted Gibson.
Isn't that a Harry Turtledove novel, or am I thinking of some other mil-SF writer? It's also similar to the plot of the original Deus Ex game.
> shoehorning politics into my work?
Tom Clancy sold a hundred million novels.
And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is not “if only democrats would save us” but rather “our whole system is built on corruption and will destroy us.”
So your comments make zero sense. Your critique is aimed at an abstract idea of what you think a book should be and has no relation to the text itself.
"After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either"
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I can only interpret it as: he was writing it as a somewhat happy world, then thought he would need to revise to make it less happy, and then realized that it should never have been happy at all. Which just seems odd, given his style.
That being said, he did discuss a lot of revision due to current events in this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gi...
Anyways the whole article is hard to follow, I love me some NPR but this misquote was rough: Gibson is quoted as referring to "an uploaded healing consciousness" whereas if you listen to the audio it is clearly "an uploaded human consciousness", which makes _much_ more sense.
We're talking about William Fucking Gibson here. Next you'll tell me you hate it when Ursula Leguin 'shoehorned politics' into her work.
https://www.salon.com/control/2001/08/29/bradbury_2/
https://books.google.com/books?id=rRmlA33pEcsC&pg=PT192&lpg=...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080521050300/http://anthony.gn...
(Even when taking positions, the really good stuff will still make sure than the people on the wrong side have some sort of insight applied to them and some effort to understand them on their own terms, rather than just crafting strawmen of bad people who are bad, who deserve to lose, because they are bad.)
I think if you look back at the good political work, you'll find most of them fit this pattern. I'm sure exceptions exist, but they are not common.
Gibson is no Alighieri but the Peripheral was still a great book.
I'm been watching "The Plot Against America" miniseries and realised that a similar scenario played out in the early 1800's. Imagine a SciFi writer of the time (If such a thing existed) publishing a novel where a time traveller travels back from 2020 to stop the Federalist Hamiltonian conspiracy to bring the U.S back under British rule/Democratic-Republican Jeffersonian conspiracy to enter the war on the side of France and bring the Reign of Terror to America.
It would be 100% political shoehorning of course but people would lap it up all the same.
But as others have pointed out, Gibson was simply trying to salvage his existing manuscript.
But also, I'm blanking on what 2015 event you're referring to. Do you mean 2005 and Katrina?
the Clinton/Trump election is mentioned offhand a handful of times through the book, the protagonists didn't have anything to do with it, and it's just not about that at all.
I've occasionally thought that a good alternative history novel would be one where someone went back to 1930 and assassinated Hitler, only to find that with less insane leadership in the inevitable war (less resources wasted on superweapons and the occult, stalls Russia with diplomacy, doesn't waste resources in Africa) Germany wins the war and unites all of Europe under a fascist regime.
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.
And who doesn't want Otaku denim made on heirloom looms ;-)
Personally, as a software craftsman, I appreciate anyone who dedicates themself to craftsmanship. Japan seems to have a great deal of very dedicated craftspeople (NHK Online videos rule!), and Gibson is definitely a word- and idea-smith, Otaku-grade.
[[And because people need things to watch nowadays, our family personally loves NHK Online's shows 'Design Talks Plus' and 'Trails to Oishii Tokyo', as well as Grand Sumo. We find them fascinating glimpses into a very different culture, one that seems to honor craftsmanship in a way we, as Americans, find beautiful.]]
As to the characters not having 'an impact on anything', that's really how it's always been, unless you're a part of the klept. The only question is, "How you developed yourself in your lifetime to fight oppression and seek to uplift the most disadvantaged?" Because, if you don't, you're just a poorer version of the callous bastards that run the power organizations that do have an effect, effects that have, for example, facilitated global heating for short-term profit at the expense of the rest of us and our heirs.
[ETA: To see the klept in action, check out the parallel HN story about Bloomberg killing reporting on CCP officials getting wealthy in office.]
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”.
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.
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.
Since the results of the 2016 election prompted a total rewrite of Agency, discussion of that is hardly a wild turn.
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.
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.
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.
I think there is a lot more content in general being produced too.
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.
> 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].
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[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld
[2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literat...
Regardless of post hoc genre classifications like cyberpunk vs. postcyberpunk, you can still have pockets of hope within a generally dystopian setting, and perhaps Gibson's cyberspace was the place in Neuromancer.
I'm not speaking of cyberpunk in general. Note that Gibson himself has stated the modern "cyberpunk" genre largely misses the point, mistaking a novel counter-cultural idea for its visual trappings.
That theme isn't really present in the Neuromancer series. From the perspective of our viewpoint characters, the matrix is primarily a place that one goes to do a job, not a place to hang out; it's seen primarily as the domain of megacorps and mysterious AIs, not a human space.
I still wouldn't call it escapism though.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment! The backstory to the Sprawl universe is crushingly dystopian -- Soviet Russia has won a nuclear war, destroying a number of European cities (particularly in Germany) and irradiating much of the European continent. In the wake of that war, it appears that the US government has largely collapsed, leaving megacorporations (like Sense/Net), wealthy families (like the Tessier-Ashpools), and street gangs (like the Yakuza and Panther Moderns) as the primary sources of power.
2020 sure isn't great, but I'd still prefer it to the crapsack world that Gibson built.
Gibson and many others have tried to imagine the transition from human to post-human which is largely about the power of brain computer interfaces.
To me, the convergence of advanced and/or general purpose AI, high bandwidth brain computer interfaces, and new levels of immersion in virtual/augmented reality provided by the new BCIs have a potential to transform the qualitative nature of human existence and so there is plenty of room left for science fiction along those lines. Although I will admit that I have not in any way explored much of that genre.
One idea is of a type of video game that involves high-bandwidth neural input enabling a type of waking lucid dream, where the AI reads your brain and modifies the scene to align with it. Maybe several people and advanced AIs are involved in this game. And suppose that there is a type of almost-human level AI being simulated as characters. Or maybe real humans plugged in and acting without lucid dreaming powers but the ability to affect the environment if they activate certain types of triggers recognized by an AI.
That is pretty far-fetched, but I think I have described a scenario where gods and magic are real.
I find his descriptions more apt now than when his books were first published.
In our time, there's still push-back to any descent into idiocracy.
I think the anti-intellectual cohort have been helped in that by the super rich who had their preferred elected leaders as well.
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.
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.
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.
As an aside, I don't think I'd opt for the type of uploading outlined in that novel considering it involves a posthumous destructive scan of the connectome. There wouldn't be any continuity so you'd probably just end up with a copy. The only type of uploading I could see working would be a Ship of Theseus approach where you gradually replace your biological neurons with artificial neurons and even that causes some hesitation.
I'm not so sure about that. Stuxnet, the Shadow Brokers leaks, and who knows what is being sold on the black market; this continuity seems very close to the plot of a cyberpunk novel.
That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we nail VR.
[0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/
Hard to classify that movie, at its time it was pure science-fiction, now it is a technothriller from the past. But very watchable, i think.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probab...
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.
Hillary won by 3 million votes, but she lost by only ~80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
So .. how's that working out?
> 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.
Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.
How's what working out? I'm not in that demographic and I didn't vote for Trump, nor am I a Republican. I'm just detailing a phenomenon. The jury still seems to be out on whether Trump's Rust Belt base is benefiting from his policies, but the coronavirus may end up being more influential in returning jobs to the U.S. than anything the president could do.
> Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.
Cool, I will look into that.
Fantastic book, really interesting perspectives on society to be gained by the absolutely enormous lens the Ship Minds are able to view it from.
I guess I wasn't. Because I distinctly remember when Trump was just one of the Republican hopefuls, I saw that the odds of him becoming President were 1000 to 1 and I recall thinking I should put a £100 bet on it, but thought it would just be a waste of money.
I guess you're retired through your foresight though? Or, wait...let me guess... you don't bet? It would be the fourth time I'd heard that. Is there some future restriction on betting that stops you time travellers with perfect knowledge of the future from cashing in?
Just like "hacker" in "hacker news".
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.
He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the backing of a media arm and an attitude of suing everyone who challenges his views. School of Thiel and all.
> He's clearly very popular with the Breitbart crowd, and about as anti-establishment as any billionaire politician with the backing of a media arm and an attitude of suing everyone who challenges his views. School of Thiel and all.
Actually I do talk to the people you are talking about, and again most of them aren't far right. The actual far-right don't like Weinstein or his brother (they tend to not like Jewish people on the far right).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/overview-of-the-f...
(The report itself doesn't do a particular good job either as they use some dubious sources and I don't agree with half of it, but their definitions of the groups are close enough).
I've listened to a lot of Weinstein on various shows he has appeared as a guest on and I haven't heard anything that can be considered far right. One of the first times I seen Weinstein was when he appeared on Dave Rubin who is a gay liberal/libertarian (the last time I watched his show it seemed to change every other week) that lives in California.
> Perhaps you could be excused for believing someone isn't far right when the overton window among english-speaking countries has narrowed so far to the right of center.
This is a complete nonsense. The Anglo-sphere for the most part is pretty much centre, centre-left. Many conservatives and paleo-conservatives complain their conservative parties aren't really conservative (which isn't far-right either btw).
The term far-right in itself is a poor description. A better term is a "reactionary right". But that is a whole other discussion between the "reactionary right" and the "traditional right". Right and Left are really poor descriptions of political positions and that is why many tests online now are multi-dimensional.