A little kernel of wisdom (in min. 26) from the musing mind of cyberpunk high priest William Gibson, who is currently on a book tour for his newest, Zero History, set in the future that is today. Gibson’s oeuvre is weighty and brilliant, and it’s undisputed he’s a visionary. This interview (from Dangerous Minds) is a little naive, though through no fault of Mr. Gibson’s. Still, there are some lovely observations about media, the genius of Twitter as an aggregator (really?) and a future that had been imagined long ago by the c-punks. My apologies if you’ve already seen this, it has made the rounds a bit…
September 16, 2010 at 5:57 am |
I hadn’t seen it, thanks for posting! I grew up on Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I also love your cyberpunk post…Reminded me of some books I’d forgotten, like The Hacker Crackdown. Cryptonomicon has been on my to-read list for a while.
And wouldn’t you know it, the kids reading these books were also the ones who, with me, used our school library to explore the early beginnings of the internet, our cyberspace.
It’s a blurry line, rebelling against our inevitable techno-future and being the first ones to accept and adopt it as our reality. Sometimes I wonder how these old sci-fi novels, written by those in the know, played with my head.
September 16, 2010 at 7:17 am |
@Noble: You’re welcome. You really need to check out Cryptonomicon, Stephenson’s best after Snow Crash. Indeed, that’s just what my c-punk post was getting at…How much reading these guys almost wired some people for what was to come…Like reading an instruction manual to the future.
September 16, 2010 at 7:31 pm |
Postscript: This was only further confirmed to me today when I witnessed a prominent contemporary academic fully admit that she Googled a pertinent element of her main subject’s biography and nobody in the audience even batted an eyelash…