Tim's Reflection Connection

Gibson William 200. V30893990 I read a small excerpt from an interview with William Gibson*, as part of his new book (Spook Country) promotion. Here are some interesting notions: because everyone Google's everything, even printed book media now has a hyper-text cloud that swirls around it, a Google ether cloud. And because you construct your own Google searches, your own mind is the most significant limitation to your capacity to use this tool. Except for sheer luck, when Google plops something before you that you've never seen before, something completely unanticipated, you're "still really inside some annotated version of your own head."

Gibson said that eBay is annotating and cataloging the world's attic. "The tentacles of that operation extend into every flea market and thrift shop and basement and attic in the world" making it possible for a person in some remote location to be a curator of the absurd, of "some tiny obscure area of stuff. ... It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement."

Gibson's last two books, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition, are more about the world we live in now than his science fiction vision of the future. He stated,

"Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I'm going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I'm going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. 'Cause I'm going to have to go beyond that. And I think definitely over the course of these last two books--I don't think I'm done yet--I've been getting a yardstick together. But I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. I don't know if I'll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s, as strange as it may seem to say this, we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future."

And I think he's right, the 80's and 90's were a period of some stability. Since the turn of the century, we have lost our national sense of security and stability. Yet I would argue this has far less to do with the terrorists than with the use of fear to shift the balance of power to the office of the presidency (republican or democratic being irrelevant) and the significant aggregation of wealth to fewer and fewer people.

Gibson visited Second Life last December and made these observations about the experience:

Well, you know I didn't go as myself. I went as the guy that I cooked up when I signed up, so nobody knew it was me. ... It's deserted. It seems like functionally it has to be deserted. If it's not deserted it crashes. So there's all this empty, empty architecture. There's whole cities where there's only one other person and they don't even want to get close to you. And when you do succeed in finding a group of other avatars, people aren't very nice. ... They're meaner than they are in the real world. ...

You know what really worried me about Second Life? It's that after I'd spent maybe like four or five hours checking it out last December, I was walking around in the Christmas shopping crowds here, and every so often I would see somebody from Second Life walking down the street. There are people, always well under 30, who look like they've escaped from Second Life. ... They dress like an avatar, they're built like an avatar. It's a very spooky thing. And I think somewhere in my file of lines for fiction there's one about a guy, his girlfriend looks like he found her in Second Life.

Source: Amazon Bookstore's Blog: Writing Fiction in the Age of Google: William Gibson Q&A;