Motherboard

Above: an animation of William Gibson recounting his earliest memory of technology, by Jennifer Cox and Chris King.

William Gibson grew up in an Appalachia of the 1950s that was so behind the times it seems like the 1930s when he looks back on it. In the 1970s, he made a living for a while scouring thrift stores for items he could resell at a profit to specialist dealers. He wrote his first novel on a 1930s Hermes portable typewriter. For a long time he didn’t use a computer or really even understand how a computer worked. This is the same man credited by many as being one of the principal architects of “cyberspace.”

His first novel Neuromancer (written on a typewriter) thrilled and inspired a generation that went on to create what we now speak of as the internet. Early tech entrepreneurs would carry copies of the book around in a suitcase and whenever people asked them to explain what they were trying to do, they would whip it out and say, ‘read this!’ As cyberspace and our reality have gradually merged into one, Gibson’s fiction has moved closer to a world we recognize as our own.

In his latest novel ‘Zero History,’ it is not sentient AI’s or ‘icebreakers’ for breaking into corporate mainframes that drive the narrative—it is something as tangible and real as the heavy weight denim used in the world’s most sought after [anti]brand of jeans. Gibson was gracious and down to earth when he recently spoke to Motherboard via phone from his home in Vancouver.

I very much enjoyed ‘Zero History.’ I am a big fan of this latest trilogy and the kind of shift that you’ve made in your fiction. You seem to be moving away from commenting on technology or cyberspace. You’re looking at the way people interact through marketing, exploring new ways of marketing. Can you elaborate on that shift in your work?

William Gibson: I think it’s been a gradual shift. The middle set of books, the ‘Bridge’ trilogy that began with Virtual Life, are set in what was then a very near future and I think it’s actually about where we are now in terms of the imagined year. Those books are deliberately written in an imagined near future, but I was inhabiting them with people from the late 90’s when they were written. A character like Rydell [Virtual Light] is really like one of us. He just happens to be inhabiting an imaginary future.

I think I was influenced by things like Max Headroom, where I suddenly saw more of the comic but still serious potential of the material. So I sort of cranked the science fictional imaginary technological windshield up much closer to the driver or to the reader. I was experimenting with that in a way that I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to get in the reader’s way and I was trying to learn something.

I’m not sure exactly what that was except that it led me to this most recent set of books that have in a way as fantastic, as peculiar, and as unbelievable a universe [as my previous books] and yet they are set in what is recognizably our present and I think that may be the end result of that experiment. I thought that very consciously the first three books [Neuromancer, Count Brass, Mona Lisa Overdrive] were about the time when they were written. That they were really about their moment in real history but they express it through the familiar conceit of, ‘this is your future.’

Reagan’s America. I think can sense a little bit of that era in that first trilogy.

WG: Yeah for sure.

Speaking of the relationship between the present and the future… the Internet, since you wrote Neuromancer, it’s gone from something fairly wonky to something that everyone uses all the time. There’s so much information available to us that the internet sort of acts as an oracle to the future. Ideas are evolving a lot faster because we have access to so much stuff. Do you have any thoughts on whether the internet is allowing us to see a possible future and work towards it, and whether it’s allowing us to evolve in an interesting or faster way?

WG: I think there’s no question that the internet is the most powerful aggregator of novelty that we’ve yet had—exponentially so. And that alone I would imagine should serve as a very powerful driver generally. Anything that hasn’t been thought of before is sort of shoved immediately into the foreground because that’s whats going to get you hits and there are layers and layers and layers of that so there’s this sort of constant foam of the new being driven forward everyday on the web.

The novelty propagates faster than it’s ever been able to propagate before. It’s very, very hard to find something novel and post it yourself. If you do, it propagates really quickly so that means that novelty has a shorter half-life than it ever had before. I haven’t bothered to run the tapes on that to put it through my science fiction module so I’m not sure what it would do to us, but I’m sure its doing something. It’s something that we can’t quite touch but it is very important. It is something that’s been over-clocked and going very, very fast. We shall see.

We’re all living in it. You really have to stand outside of it to figure out whether it is good or bad, if it is really evolution, or if having all this stuff is hampering our development. It’s a double-edged sword. And we’re not sure which side of the blade we’re on.

WG: We’ve never really had the option of knowing which side of the blade we’ve been on with technology because we have always seen it in the very short term, plus whatever we might imagine as a sort of optimal future. People who built railroads weren’t even capable of imagining potential downsides. The people who built the first gasoline engine… they had no clue. ‘This is going to be good, this is all going to be good for years and years and years – and whoa, we just whacked the planetary climate.’

We haven’t been capable of that kind of foresight. And we’re not even necessarily that capable of good hindsight with technology. We don’t know what these things do to us. We get something new and it starts changing us. But we don’t know. I’m kind of agnostic about technology. I think it is for the most part morally neutral until we do something with it. And we never know—the person who invents it and develops it has no idea what the end user is going to do with it.

One of the things I’m really struck by with your work and particularly this new book is your attention to detail. I was wondering where that attention to detail comes from.

WG: It’s probably driven by the increasing extent to which my characters are in some ways deliberately living virtual lives. They have electronically extended sensoria—as we all do. They can have instantaneous conversation over vast distances. Visual distances have sort of been abolished for many years. And many of their most important emotional relationships are long distance ones. And that’s the world now so maybe the focus on physical detail has been heightened in the narrative to balance that. But it’s not deliberate. It’s just sort of the way it is. I don’t try to play those things. I just try to find the way the narrative grows truest.

It’s interesting also that in Zero History there are these amazing sections where you talk about the pop up stores that appear in covert ways to sell Gabriel Hounds denim. There is great attention to detail in the way the characters find out that jeans are going to be on sale, they go to the location, they wait… as if on a pilgrimage. There’s something that seems almost religious or spiritual in your description of these moments, something about the spirit of the work that goes into making something real. Something about being able to touch real things that people made with their hands.

WG: I don’t know exactly what to call it. It’s like a backfire, not the kind when your exhaust blows out but the kind firefighters light in the face of some huge conflagration and the only way they can stop the conflagration is to build their own little fire in its path, and there is a kind of defiance in doing that. And going, watching for the pop up store on the internet and going out, standing in line and getting the real thing that isn’t ever going to be advertised. In some sense it’s a defiance of the system – that those artifacts even exist. People do it out of some stubbornness that I find admirable. It’s crazy. But if that’s crazy then I’m crazy that way myself to some extent.

I share that craziness. What was your earliest encounter with technology or science as a child? Was there some gadget or something that you learned that sticks with you?

(See his response in an animation above.)

I can remember my father having to do something, maybe it was having to turn on or off the main power switch for the entire farm that we were renting at the time and I remember him putting a rubber shower mat on the ground. Putting a wooden box on the rubber shower mat and putting on rubber rain boots and enormous black rubber gloves and explaining he was doing this to absolutely insulate himself in case he received a shock from what I imagine was extremely primitive wiring that he was about to shut down.

I don’t actually know whether he was crazy being overly worried or whether he was being perfectly sensible, but it’s one of my very earliest memories. I can’t remember what I thought about it. I don’t remember being frightened, but the idea that there was power in this weird gray box bolted on a telephone pole is one the earliest things I can remember.

That’s an amazing memory in terms of thinking about technology as power and that we need to handle it with care. Switching gears – Wikipedia says you were talking with Bruce Sterling who said to you, “You and I get paid to be charletans. We write stuff and people believe it.” Obviously ‘Neuromancer’ had a huge impact on a generation of people that were then working on creating what we know now as the web, and of course there are a lot of important people in Silicon Valley who read that book when they were younger. Can you talk about your role as a writer predicting a future, and how that then becomes a little more real as a consequence of your work.

WG: The feedback I’ve had on Neuromancer’s impact over the years that I think probably most accurately describes it is feedback from people who became quite successful later. Silicon Valley people—what they tend to say is that when they were starting out they had these ideas. They didn’t get from me. These ideas were floating around. They got them from the same place I got them.

But when they found ‘Neuromancer,’ they realized that they had a tool in ‘Neuromancer,’ a sort of brochure, because they had been going into people’s offices for a while and saying I want to do this thing and the guy would be like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So when they got ‘Neuromancer,’ and the guy would say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” they would say, “read this.” And they said it really worked because it sort of transferred this whole holistic if cartoon-y idea of a digital world really quickly. And the guy would go home and read it overnight and the next time they talked to him the guy would be… “yes, cyberspace!” And I think it worked that way. It sort of greased the wheels for some stuff.

One last question: intellectual property rights—a very contentious issue right now. A lot of people are trying to control them. Do you have a sense or a personal stance on the issue, if limiting our ability to reference other works is limiting our ability to evolve as a culture?

WG: I haven’t yet been able to give that the sort of attention that it would need. I mean I’m leaning counter over-control, but I don’t actually know where I am with that one and it’s too bad in a way because it should be my topic but I’m still trying to work out where I might be with that.

William Gibson’s new novel Zero History hits bookstore shelves on September 7. See another interview with Gibson on Viceland