The headline had me cringing in expectation for a brain dead article, but how stupid of me! It's fricking William Gibson. Almost everything he said in this article seems to be spot on, then and now.
In case you have any remaining worry that Gibson is some crotchety "get of my lawn" type, check him out on twitter. He is one the most prolific, bizarre, and interesting users I follow: https://twitter.com/GreatDismal Recent examples:
>Once saw fake Zippo lighters with Confederate flags with swastikas in Shinjuku. Mindless mashup getting it right anyway.
>I've had the tv-in-the-mirror in bathrooms of a few hotel rooms. Have never turned one on. Feels like bad sci-fi prop-design.
>Fellatio illegal in 11 states. Lawmakers afraid to risk being known ever after as "the blowjob senator", if they act to strike them down?
But I think the most relevant artifacts are what were referred to as "broadsides" Explosive or dramatic one pagers were printed (often as advertisements) and pasted on sides of buildings usually at night under the safety of darkness.
Seeing the link is akin to passing the newsstand from a medium distance. Clicking the link is akin to picking up the newspaper and seeing the small print. Skipping the ad is akin to opening the newspaper to the continuation of the story inside.
It still makes me kind of wistful considering how their headlines today are usually completely anodyne to the point of euphemism, which it sound like the author was in some Valium-induced fugue state.
The swastika symbol in Japan is the sign for a temple. It was used in Japan and many other cultures well before the Nazis adopted it. /end off topic reply
If you'll read to the last paragraph, you'll find Gibson's very profound conclusion: that the 1996 Web was the early "test pattern" for what he predicts will be a world-changing, but "less fun" medium. How right he was.
That closing paragraph really is a fantastic one. It contains a Gibsonism that really resonated with me: "gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes."
Even with all the order that we've consented to have imposed by various hubs over the past 17 years, it inspires a certain swell of optimism for me to consider that we've never really abandoned that spirit. The frontier may be long settled and built up, but YouTube, Tumblr, Imgur, and other gated communities still play host to the kind of spectacularly diverse, ham-radio aesthetic of 1996. And there are still frontier sites. Cult webcomics, improbable enthusiast projects, random artifacts of odd genius.
I hope we never lose this spirit, and given the past two decades of the web, I don't think we need to worry.
Interesting in light of some of his more recent thoughts, too:
We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google. -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html
This is what McLuhan called the "agenbite of outwit", riffing on Joyce:
"With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.
A special property of all social extensions of the body is that they return to plague the inventors in a kind of agenbite of outwit. As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body. Driving a car or watching television, we tend to forget that what we have to do with is simply a part of ourselves stuck out there. Thus disposed, we become servo-mechanisms of our contrivances, responding to them in the immediate, mechanical way that they demand of us. The point of the Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves."
Less fun? Are you high? I get more intellectual stimulation of a single site's content on one day than I've ever gotten from every dumbed-down newspaper editorial I ever read before the Web took off.
I think the internet is more fun now - there is the boring mainstream but there is also an absolutely huge lunatic fringe. The web now is more chaotic than in 1994 because its so much more accessible to chaotic minds now. In 1994 it was all just monty python scripts and references to barney the dinosaur.
Perhaps a reference to the commercialization of the web? As various SEO masters monetize every nook and cranny of the long tail, even Google will have a hard time finding the crazy.
His book "Distrust That Particular Flavor" is full of his old articles, such as this one, and his thoughts on them after looking back at them in 2012. I really recommend it if you're into William Gibson at all.
That was a mostly prescient and enjoyable blast from the past. One thing though I was glad Gibson was wrong about:
>"It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun"
While his point was/is true of many systems and organizations, the internet is one example that has really outdone itself in terms of sustaining an unrelenting resistance towards a global monoculture.
Perhaps, like some older HN users here, when I go looking beyond the walled gardens of social networks, I feel just as fascinated by what I read today, as I did in the mid 90's.
I decided to stick my head into the "firehose" of Facebook's public graph API last night and ended up finding some strange spambots creating pages and posting thousands of Amazon links. I followed the trail, trying to figure out what they were doing and what the point was. No one had liked the pages, so it didn't seem to make sense that they were building links to Amazon and not their own site (which I could understand for SEO). Anyway, I ended up going to the furthest reaches of the internet, never really finding an answer, but I got that same feeling: holy hell, this is amazing!
It's like being an explorer, going where only a few people have gone before. The internet can still be this, if you want it to be. You can still dig around the trenches, take the back-roads, see what you find, see what's going on behind the surface of the social networks and media.
Speaking of the furthest reaches of the internet - just last night I ended up on a website dedicated to warning us about the coming race-war between Neanderthal-humans (introvert/autistic/asperger spectrum), Cro-Magnon humans ("normal" people), and "melonheads" (psychopaths? maybe?). It appeared to be entirely serious. You see, 40,000 years ago the melonheads decided that the neanderthals needed to be wiped out, so they sent in a slave army of cro-magnons armed with high-tech weaponry such as spear throwers. And then.....you get the idea.
Well, at least it's true there are some expectations now that there were not before: you can't show up with a "personal homepage" full of silly animated gifs, random midi music in the background and a photo as a repeating background image and likewise you cannot post a comment that sounds stupid, silly or random on any site and expect it to be accepted, so to speak. Most people would agree this is for the better, but hey, it is true there is less randomness and less fun, in a way.
It's the eternal september. When only a select few avantgardists are on the internet, you can generally assume that a random stupid comment is, in fact, brilliant (you just don't get it yet) - when everybody and their moms (literally) are there, you have to assume that a stupid comment is just that.
The great thing is that the internet has infinite capacity for people to create and congregate in increasingly smaller communities where the initial assumption still holds - ie. if you're posting on HN, you're already within 4-5 sigmas of someone whose opinion I'd care about than the average person on the net.
It's hard to remember what the Internet was like in 1996. I do it by remembering that in 1997 I started an ISP to offer blazing-fast 56K dialup to the indifferent grandparents of Long Island for $19.95/month. We had a computer on display in the front of our office so the skeptical could poke around and see what the web had to offer. Windows did not come with a browser installed, so many of our new customers had to wait for us to mail them a Netscape CD-ROM. People frequently got upset at us for high phone bills when they discovered too late that their local calling area did not include our POP. The writing was on the wall, of course.. dialup wasn't going to be around forever, and I already had the future of telecommunications installed in my apartment: ISDN.
It's actually pretty funny. I'm in the middle of writing a paper for my philosophy class, about Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and this is the first article I click on when I start slacking off.
The points Gibson makes about the importance of down time are almost the same as Josef Pieper's. I guess I'm still working on that paper after all.
William Gibson is a strange person. I remember him making a comment at a convention once where he said he was shocked at what computers looked like on the inside, he expected them to be weird crystalline contraptions.
"On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them."
Until computers stop generating so much heat that their cases become hot to touch, they're just advanced Victorian 'engines' rather than exotic futuristic. I love my SSD though, and we are getting closer to the crystalline cyberspace decks.
I love how things have changed so much but they remain exactly the same. We're still hooked - to our smartphones. We're still wondering what the experience will be in a few years. Just like he did. Awesome.
I just shipped my first AR app to a customer, and I have been having serious Snow Crash moments in real-life, lately. As a mobile developer, all I can think about now is the death of the native interface, and the new age of the rule of Augmented Reality. Yikes, I've slipped and fallen into the digital hole that is: reality with overlays.
For example I've quite literally got a little 3d animated ghost that sits in the corner of my favourite hangout, which only I can see through my phone when I point its camera in the right angle, which tells me the name of the track being played on the house speakers .. it really is a moment like Snow Crash, played out in real life, I have to say..
Nope, its only in my AR app, which has a very specific set of ImageTargets only I have any interest in. ;)
But! Its an awesome tech, and I'm pretty sure its going to hit the store soon enough. I'm currently working on ways to embed tons more stuff within the target matrix .. its mind-boggling to think that any recognizable surface can be the human interface mechanism, now.
> The Web is new, and our response to it has not yet hardened. That is a large part of its appeal. It is something half-formed, growing. Larval. It is not what it was six months ago; in another six months it will be something else again. It was not planned; it simply happened, is happening. It is happening the way cities happened. It is a city.
I've always loved metaphors comparing the Internet to a growing city. The Web used to be a Wild West-style town that was ventured into only by the most daring of people and businesses, but it's now become a much more established and secure city, still full of possibilities, where everyone and their mother wants to move and try to make their fortune, but at the same time has lost a lot of its original "flavor" that made it so special.
And... I don't really know where I'm going with this...
I think it holds beyond that too. Still have the ugly neighbourhoods, properties designed in a way that give away their age, dangerous parts of town, etc.
I would say it is. I don't think you can talk the concept of the data driven world without looking at how Gibson and later cyber-punk authors imagined how it might be.
We may think that the word "cyberspace" is a bit twee now, but it was an investigation about what the future might be. And it was a way to present that investigation to an audience who most likely had little to no frame of reference.
Yes, I have. As far as I know the word was not there before Gibson coined it, so I'm assuming that everyone using it today refer back to that, whether they know it or not.
I haven't been around in the English-languaged internet back then, so I don't have firsthand information, but it seems to have been more commonly in use everywhere in the past (I remember some hacker's handbook telling me not to associate with people calling themselves 'cyberpunk', for instance). Nowadays the only mentions I see are from governments who plan taskforces to anwer "threats in the cyberspace", which, in my eyes, makes them look incompetent. I think it's interesting that they use that terminology though. </rant>
"Cyber" - a prefix used to let you know a shitty metaphor is coming.
I'm sorry but I grew up in "cyberspace". There is no need to make the distinction between online and offline, for me and many others they are one in the same, we don't need cyber task forces to go after cyber criminals in order to uphold cyber laws inside cyber space. Its a stupid & redundant term, and coining it is not something to be proud of.
> And it was a way to present that investigation to an audience who most likely had little to no frame of reference.
That doesn't even make any sense. Lets tell people the internet is like a place they can run around in, that makes total sense yea? No, no it doesn't not in the fucking slightest. Have you seen Tron? This is what happens when idiots get a hold of shitty metaphors.
Gibson's point seem to be that the 1996 Web is not so much itself a waste of time as a great tool for wasting time, and that that's not necessarily a bad thing. He also notes how this state of freedom and freeform-ness that encourages "surfing the Web" is fleeting and will pass to be replaced with something more conventional and structured.
I came back to this essay several times over the years and each time I read it I take a moment to appreciate how true its core observation rings. It can be considered a successful if somewhat vague prophecy about what the WWW has since in large part become: a delivery mechanism for traditional, one-to-many media. You could see that same thing happen in miniature on YouTube throughout its short history: the many-to-many system of its early days has been overshadowed by prepackaged shows. I'm not saying it's a bad thing (personally, I enjoy some of the shows), but it's different.
He might have been saying it basically was at the time, like the analogy to television. I don't see how he could endorse the idea that it was a fundamental time-sink though. He expresses his inability to predict it, and prior to its widespread popularity he wrote of a cyberspace that was as woven into the fabric of daily machinations as ours is today, and not in the sense television is.
But he was right about it not feeling like a conversation. It still doesn't. We are still connected mostly to the things other people have done in the past. Even this particular mode of conversation, comment threads, is guilty of that.
" Wonder what headlines we'll make fun of in 17 years?"
"Smartphones are a waste of time"----if you waste your time on them with useless apps and especially if you get in the stupid game of telling everyone, every bite you take.
Gibson realized it was a double edged sword, useful but also a procrastinator's dream.
My point is that as the fidelity of signals become stronger we acclimate to it. Turn back 6 years and the connectedest Gen Y lighting up on the internet felt the same way, in the circles I traveled many espoused the same self-aware sentiment as this, some even without the benefit of being Gibsonites.
Now that Gen Z is lighting up, crowding into Instagram, inheriting Reddit, rebuilding Tumblr, you know what I see? The most connectedest again are repeating the same sentiment and make believing they're the only ones in all of history to hold such perspective.
It's the same generational gap meme. Over and over again. Eventually the Gen Z grow old and grow out of using whatever trends charmed them. Then we get the reverb about how awkward of phase it was in the aughts and 10's that we became a generation addicted to black mirrors in the palm of our hands like the 70's was about sparking up and 80's was about indulging in cocaine in social situations.
And as I get older and on my march of filing out of the 18-35 demographics the more I learn and realize it's always been this way, but took awhile for the education to reveal itself. From the times of pulp fiction to radio surfing. And it will forever be this way as each generation arrive.
Just wait until the babies having grown up entirely with glass become self aware.
Are you implying that the generations that have already come to pass on the net still don't fundamentally understand its true potential? And at some point one generation will harness that potential and until then we are just stepping stones?
tldr: get off my lawn kids will forever be the sentiment of the current old generation while lol we r so hip will be the sentiment of the 18-20somethings. I don't think this realization is as profound as he is making it seem though, c'est la vie
In case you have any remaining worry that Gibson is some crotchety "get of my lawn" type, check him out on twitter. He is one the most prolific, bizarre, and interesting users I follow: https://twitter.com/GreatDismal Recent examples:
>Once saw fake Zippo lighters with Confederate flags with swastikas in Shinjuku. Mindless mashup getting it right anyway.
>I've had the tv-in-the-mirror in bathrooms of a few hotel rooms. Have never turned one on. Feels like bad sci-fi prop-design.
>Fellatio illegal in 11 states. Lawmakers afraid to risk being known ever after as "the blowjob senator", if they act to strike them down?