The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson (1981)
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This story is thirty-nine years old now. Gibson's Neuromancer is only three years younger, and it feels as laughably innocent to our future-dwelling eyes as anything he was making fun of in this story.
Time makes fools of us all.
Whereas the malefactors of great wealth in our present did not forget the average consumer and instead manipulates our emotions with cutting-edge marketing, algorithmic analysis of our deepest desires, and use of primary colors and comfy fonts. The copy is nonthreatening or hip language. The reality is grim, but the appearance isn't. More Brave New World and less 1984. More Disney, filtered through Banksy.
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. Among the big names, Neal Stephenson did a great job of it with Snow Crash and The Diamond Age because he remembered that the megacorps had to sell to someone at the end of the day, and had to have shiny customer-facing dross.
I just reread Neuromancer and Count Zero, and the main thing I was struck by that Gibson didn't predict was today's omnipresent surveillance.
The people in his novels don't voluntarily carry around tracking devices and recoring devices. What they read and watch isn't tracked, and neither are their preferences or the opinions they express. They tend to have much more privacy than most people do today.
In this respect, I find today's society closer to 1984 than to Brave New World. It's 1984, complete with Newspeak, doublethink and Two Minutes of Hate for the boogeyman of the day, telescreens that combine televisions with security cameras and microphones what monitor what you do.
It's interesting that Gibson chose not to incorporate such dystopian themes in his books, and opted for what is in many ways a more optimistic dystopia.
I would assume Gibson simply didn't consider the technological ramifications of ubiquitous surveillance, or it's just his setup of a decentralized oppressive world of feuding megacorps and criminal super-gangs would have less thematic use for it than 1984's setup of one (or three) totalitarian governments able to monitor everyone.
If this sort of thing scratches an itch you have, try Lawrence Sander's The Tomorrow File, from 1975. The author rather gleefully throws as many dystopian tropes into the mix as is feasible (and then a few more for good measure), and makes it work, oddly enough.
In Neuromancer there is an episode (second half, when they have already moved away from Earth surface) where a character is targeted by a sort of drone/service droid.
But I also sorta remember that in a subsequent story (I think it was Count Zero? Not sure anymore) one of the characters... cuts a videocall or something similar by actually yanking the cord out of the wall.
That being said, there's plenty of ubiquitous surveillance happening in the Sprawl Trilogy. Marly's pursuit by Virek in Count Zero springs to mind here.
But that's an exception, only made possible by Virek's virtually limitless wealth.
When Marly becomes aware of this surveillance it's a shock to her, because she and most people in that world are not used to that level of surveillance.
Contrast that with today's world, where most people know they're being tracked and surveilled, but are ok with it, or even willingly participate in surveillance of themselves.
No one today would be surprised to be told they were recorded in public (due to ubiquitous cameras in public places) or that someone knew where they were (due to the tracking built in to their cell phones).
Gibson did not foresee this.
When I originally read the Sprawl trilogy in the early 2000s, these instances of omnipresent surveillance really made an impression on me. Particularly those of Wintermute monitoring and protecting Case. The scene where Wintermute intercedes in Case's arrest ( which someone above mentioned ) stands out in particular.
There's a playthrough on Youtube ( with commentary ) of 1993's Cyberpunk classic game System Shock by the original developers. They laugh together about their lofty predictions of video mail becoming the normal mode of communication. Instead we're still sending 120 char text messages in 2020. The future is hard to predict for many reasons.
Cory Doctorow does a fairly creditable job explaining that in his Little Brother / Homeland/ Radicalized series.
I had a discussion with someone - "if the 21th century is the century of biotech" (the cliché in the Silicon Valley since the late 90s) is true, why are we seeing little progress? My reply was: perhaps biotech history will be similar to electronics history, and it's just too early for now. Spark-gap transmitters were put into service in the 1900 and started the electronic age. In the 1910-1920, vacuum tubes were invented (the entire radio industry started before we even had an RF amplifier). In the 1940s, the first generation of electronic computers came into existence. Transistors were invented in the 1950s and practical ones didn't exist until the 1960s. VLSI started in the early 70s, and it's only in the 1980 that the microcomputer revolution was finally here.
Although Moore's Law arguably is much older than VLSI, but it still took 40 years before the new science of electronics invented the computers, and another 40 years before VLSI's exponential growth. Thus, I wonder, is the Human Genome Project the spark-gap transmitters of our era? Then CRISPR-Cas9 is the vacuum tube? And today we see a Hacker News headline "AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology" [0], a breakthrough of protein folding using deep learning. Well, we are probably reaching the biotech equivalent of electromechanical computers right now. This "electronics-biotech" analogy seems right, if it's the case, brain-computer interface will be invented in the 2070s, like 1970s VLSI.
On the other hand, classic cyberpunk is always about the near-future. Its plots were usually based on a quick interpolation of the extreme growth of computing power we were seeing in the 80s, combined with the caricature of post-capitalism, it is only from this assumption that leads to radical social changes. If the story took place in the 22th century instead of 40 years later, it would be very "uncyberpunk". Cyberpunk's predictions has failed to materialize from this perspective. But it may still have a chance - if the singularitarianism are correct, the singularity will be there by 2050...
That being said, I think that biotech is not progressing much because there's a lot of regulations slowing down research, and nobody has really demonstrated a "killer app" yet. I think what could happen, is that we will eventually be able to use gene therapy to really effectively kill cancers, and then funding is just going to pour into the field at 50 times the current rate.
There's a lot of other cool things we could do with gene editing, like fixing incurable depression, life extension, fixing genetic diseases, curing irritable bowel syndrome and dangerous allergies, but there's currently not enough funding, and there's not enough excitement, people are too worried about "ethical" implications.
I think it might be similar with brain-computer interfaces. Someone needs to spend a lot of money to get the first version working. It's possible that Elon Musk will win that race with Neuralink. If we can have a brain implant that allows a paraplegic person to move a robot arm, send texts and make themselves dinner... 10 years later you will have disabled people walking with exoskeletons and hackers hooking themselves up to computers. It could all happen within our lifetime. We just need someone to make that first killer demo, then funding pours in, 100 startups pop up overnight, and innovation really takes off.
Our modern economic landscape of conglomeration over competition is important. It came about in part because of regulation, but repealing regulation would not undo it and return us to a Renaissance of competitive independent businesses. This strained, rigid, highly interconnected economy has made it so that only the big institutions can afford to take substantial risks, and already being the giant wealth funnels that they are, there's little incentive to take those risks.
The greater the share of the economy made up by giant interconnected businesses with an aligned profit motive, the less risk taking, disruption, and innovation there will be. You shouldn't need to be Elon to be entrepreneurial at the cutting edge, but you do, because you can't compete with Elon. You shouldn't need to have Amazon's resources, but you do. Looser regulations are moot.
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.
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?"
That said, I think the bones of Neuromancer could make a great modern story. Particularly the concept of the Tessier-Ashpools being these incestuous, almost pseudo-deities due to their wealth. The wasps' nest metaphor and all. I'd also love to see Wintermute/Neuromancer connected with surveillance capitalism and our mass collecting of data.
[1]: I haven't read all of Gibson's novels so please correct me if there's a novel out there with better Asian characters.
Take one of the protagonists of Count Zero, Marly Krushkhova, "the disgraced former operator of a tiny Paris gallery", who hunts down the maker of the Joseph Cornell-like boxes. She's completely human, and I can't think of any stereotype she would fit in to.
Cyberpunk would have happened without him (Blade Runner was released first), but most things are like that.
He'd also studied English, which helped give him some sensibilities that would appeal to tastemakers. Neuromancer wasn't genre fantasy and it wasn't hard SF. (Even then, the name turned many people off.)
And I guess he won some powerful allies early on in what was then the SF establishment.
In a 2014 interview[1], William Gibson said:
"It hasn't ever really been a monolithic thing. The gleaming kitchens and the monorail and the flying cars, and all of that, in the 1950's coexisted with a strain of left-leaning American sociopolitically aware prose science fiction, which was being published in contrast to its political opposite -- the political opposite was called Astounding Stories and the liberal scifi magazine was called Galaxy, and the writers.. there was a little bit of crossover and they would drink together when they went to science fiction conventions but otherwise they didn't have much to do with one another."
"If you look at the stories that were being published in Galaxy, they were quite dystopian and grittier and more naturalistic, and to my mind altogether more intelligent, but that's sort of a matter of taste, so it's never all one scenario, though we tend to remember it that way."
[1] - at around 18 minutes in to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dlvle5YBv4
Very appropriate given this para in the story: “There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.”
And this phenomenon is perhaps most exacerbated today, as we are experiencing a gradual but terminal decline of former capitalist empires, but nobody can imagine a new revolutionary path out (as Mark Fisher would say, "the slow cancellation of the future") Ghostly ideologies from the past (communism, fascism) are quickly recycled on the Internet for their nostalgic sign value, but as it is quickly consumed and commoditized it fails to offer a solution for the problems of our current world. And more people are listening to music [3] that admittedly makes them feel "nostalgic for a past that does not exist".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave
Some very interesting points there. I wonder the reason for down-voting the text into a faded shade of grey?
And also, there are many literature papers on the connection between the Gernsback Continuum and hauntology on the Internet - I've read a good piece before but the PDF link is kinda broken at the moment and cannot find it anymore.
A leading figure of this design movement was French-born Raymond Loewy:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-product-desig...
Gibson writes that "most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers", but this is not the case with Loewy.
He had an interesting life and career, and his autobiography "Never Leave Well Enough Alone" is a great read. Sadly it seems to be out of print in English.
"One hundred years later, a house in Houston, Texas, caught on fire. In the aftermath, a fire inspector instructed the family to get rid of some of the old, miraculously unscathed junk in the attic. The family complied, and everything was soon landfill-bound.
Among that debris: the 12 illustrated scrapbooks of one Charles August Albert Dellschau, German immigrant, supposed former Sonora Aero Club member. Created between 1908 and 1921, during Dellschau's retirement, the pages document his recollections of the machines, meetings, and men of the erstwhile Club."[1]
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/charl...
https://artbyarion.blogspot.com/2017/07/planetary-18-warren-...