William Gibson: Beyond Cyberspace

William Gibson: Beyond Cyberspace
Originally uploaded by erasmus.

A slightly blurry photo from the "William Gibson: Beyond Cyberspace" event at the 2005 Chicago Humanities Festival. Bill Savage, who teaches English at Northwestern U, interviewed Gibson, still best known for coining the term cyberspace in his 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer about topics generally related to time. technology and futurity.

Gibson downplayed the notion that his novels display a gift of prophecy on his part. He said that he envisions his authorial role not as being "a game of predicting the future." Rather, he tries to identify places where the future has "violently and precipitously arrived in the present." Gibson confessed that recently he feels as though he no longer knows where the future is and that places like Tokyo, which had previously seemed emblematic of what the future would be like, had come to seem quaint and indicative of what the future might've looked like.

Although Neuromancer is often described as a darkly dystopian novel about the future, Gibson noted that when was writing the novel back in 1981, when the Cold War was again heating up, he regarded his fictional vision of the future as being "heroically optimistic," because it imagined a future in which the danger of nuclear war had dissipated. He said that he took it for granted that in the early 1980s various places around the globe (which he did not specifically identify) were far worse places to live than in his fictional Chiba City. The same observation, of course, holds true today.

Having just taught DeLillo's Underworld, a novel all about Cold War secrecy, I was skeptical about Gibson's suggestion that secrets, particularly state secrets, were no longer sustainable because modern societies have become so interpenetrated with communications technologies. That is, the duration for which a secret can be kept a secret from the public has shrunk greatly, and 'leaks' (a concept that he argued is a recent phenomenon) are more or less inevitable.

While I take Gibson's point, I have a hard time feeling so optimistic about either the phenomenon of the leak or the notion that communications technologies have made possible a more transparent society. As Bill Savage sort of hinted at in his follow-up question, the same communications technologies also facilitate the widespread dissemination of misinformation and propaganda that make it difficult for the public to know what information they can trust.

Moreover, I would add, the accelerated pace of our culture means that a secret doesn't have to remain undisclosed for as long in order for it to be effective. And once a secret has been exposed, such as, say, the crimes committed at the Abu Graib prison, it takes a disturbingly short amount of time for it to be forgotten by the mass public, which seems to depend upon the commercial mass media (especially network TV) as a sort of collective memory. If an event isn't being covered and commented upon incessantly on TV, it probably won't register in the average person's psyche.

I should get going. At present, Ira is downtown listening to Patricia Williams. If I hurry around, I can make it downtown in time to meet Ira and catch Roddy Doyle, one of my Mom's favorite writers...