???
From the afterword of the book:
Think pieces, profiles, book reviews, scholarly essays, message board posts, midnight yawps of awe and admiration—how many thousands, millions of words have been written about Gibson’s work? How many of those words focus on Gibson’s uncanny knack for accurately imagining the future? And for good reason. He nailed it, okay? In about a thousand ways, from nano to macro. Gibson wrote stuff thirty years ago that, when you read it today, feels fresher than the nth generation of his literary offspring and imitators. He’s the before and the after and the during, he’s the origin story and today’s news. He was a piece of twenty-first-century fiction dropped into the twentieth. Genius here, just unevenly distributed, a disproportionate share of it clumped into his brain.
I almost wish the book were written in the style above than how it's written at some points; This is a collection of essays written by different authors, with varying levels of success.
Compare the quotation above with the following, by another author:
Interestingly, Burges and Elias’s instance on the illusionary quality of capitalist temporality and Rancière’s attention to the fictionality of homogeneous time create a vision filled with space and potential for cultural resistance.
It's some wordy effort.
Thankfully, there are a lot of bits and pieces in these essays to save it from becoming an intellectual abandoned shipwreck.
The first essay that I really liked in here is named No future but the alternative or, temporal leveling in the work of William Gibson by Kylie Korsnack. From it:
Halfway through William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, the protagonist, a New Yorker named Cayce, reflects on the early days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers. She recalls sitting on a bench in Union Square, surrounded by the burning candles of newly erected monuments to the dead and the missing: “She remembered sitting there, prior to her tears, looking from the monument that was still taking shape at the base of Washington’s statue to that odd sculpture across Fourteenth Street, in front of the Virgin Megastore, a huge stationary metronome, constantly issuing steam, and back again to the organic accretion of candles, flowers, photographs, and messages, as though the answer, if there was one, lay in somehow understanding the juxtaposition of the two.” Whereas Gibson offers a thorough description of the emerging, memorial art forms taking shape in Union Square, the “odd sculpture” across the street is suspiciously understated, especially considering it is “one of the largest private commissions of public art in New York’s history.” Designed by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, Metronome was installed in 1999 on a building that stands just south of Union Square. Composed of eight separate elements with names like “the vortex,” “the infinity,” “the passage,” and “the phases,” Metronome presents an overwhelming array of temporal signifiers. The artists describe the work as “an investigation into the nature of time” that “references the multiple measures of time that simultaneously inform and confound our consciousness of the moment.” Metronome also serves a functional purpose. In a review, artist and critic Robert C. Morgan commented: “It is questionable whether Metronome is less pragmatic than other utilitarian aspects of the building. After all, it does tell the time. Not only does it give the exact time of day in the most literal sense, it also extends the concept of time into geology and astronomy; in essence, it projects time from what is literal to that which is metaphysical—time beyond measure.” In this sense, Morgan’s review seems to align with the artists’ hopes for the project as a catalyst for temporal rumination, inviting viewers to contemplate, “geological, solar, lunar, daily, hourly, and momentarily, revealing the factions of seconds in the life of a city—and of a human being.” What neither of these perspectives takes into account is the fact that this “public art wall” adorns the outside of a building owned by the private company that funded its construction. What lies within that building? A luxury apartment complex with a website that proudly invites prospective residents to “Live Luxuriously in a Work of Art.”
Korsack defines the path in her essay:
In this chapter, I trace Gibson’s long engagement with the concept of temporal multiplicity to highlight the importance of the framework to his narrative thinking. Across his work, we can identify a variety of narrative approaches that foreground his interest in temporality. Whether in the form of alternative history (The Difference Engine), psychological movement through time (“The Gernsback Continuum”), multiverse (The Peripheral), or machine-powered time travel (Archangel), it is often through overlapping or multiple timelines that Gibson explores the relationship between art, aesthetics, and culture. Although it might seem too obvious to suggest that time is important to Gibson’s aesthetic, I want to explore the possibility that there is something very particular about the how Gibson thinks about, represents, and problematizes temporal experience, especially in his most recent fictional works.
If you've ever read Gibson, you'll know he deals in time and context. Time is not necessarily a problem but as open as an ocean, seemingly endless, sprawling with opportunities, framing a human protagonist's paths through it all.
Gibson has, to me, never been far from Jonathan Franzen. I believe they have more in common than they are different, especially in considering how they have their fingers in knowing how humans work and getting it into their art. Sure, they can both be ham-fisted as hell and even obtuse, but largely speaking, there's few authors like them out there.
These essays don't question or critisice Gibson, but more delve into his way of writing.
Photo by Ryan Tang on Unsplash
I quote Andrew M. Butler in his essay Gibson and the Question of Medium:
Cyberspace has no fixed identity, relationships, or history; it lacks authentic height, width, depth, and mass and can be thought of as an addition to the catalog of “nonplaces” of supermodernity identified by French anthropologist Marc Augé.
Augé distinguishes “nonplaces” from “places” as lacking identity, relations, and history. The eras of industrial capitalism and supermodernity have erased distinctions between space and time, leading to the emergence of nonplaces such as: “the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself.” While the traditional town was centered on a few specific economic, political, and cultural nodes—such as the market, town, or church square—the supermodern city sprawls across networks and toward other cities (compare the Sprawl or Boston-Atlanta-Metropolitan Axis in the Neuromancer trilogy). Augé argues that the nonplaces are “formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and [by] the relations that individuals have with these spaces.” These relations are constructed through texts and contracts.
Maria Alberto and Elizabeth Swanstrom paint an interesting picture of what humanity is in their essay William Gibson, science fiction, and the evolution of the digital humanities:
In 2017 Chris Sevier filed a lawsuit against the state of Utah for the right to marry—his computer. The case was promptly dismissed for several compelling reasons, including the fact that Sevier’s computer was not at least fifteen years old and therefore did not satisfy Utah’s age-of-consent requirement. As ludicrous as this case might seem, however, it was neither the first—nor will it be the last—attempt to wed a computational entity. In 2009, Japanese gamer Sal9000 married Nene Anegasaki, “a character in the Nintendo DS dating simulation game ‘Love Plus,’” and in November 2018, Akihiko Kondo wed Hatsune Miku, “a hologram that was created by a computer as singing software.” Moreover, such realworld unions have multiple literary precedents, dating back to Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s depiction of Thomas Edison and the gyndroid Hadaly in L’Ève future (1886), farther back still to E. T. A. Hoffman’s automaton Olimpia in “The Sand-man” (1816), and arguably even to Pygmalion’s marble-carved lover Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE)— examples that demonstrate a long-standing interest in these unusual accords. But the contemporary penchant for an amans computans finds its most vivid literary blueprint in the work of William Gibson, whose cyberpunk fiction delights in merging computational and human entities. In Neuromancer (1984), which provides the master template for subsequent unions in Gibson’s oeuvre, this type of merger occurs when two artificial intelligences, code-named “Wintermute” and “Rio”/“Neuromancer,” consolidate to form the titular singularity, Neuromancer. This pattern is repeated in “Winter Market” (1986), when disabled artist Lise “dry dreams” with editor Casey, merging her consciousness with his as a first step toward merging with the digital ’net. A similar pattern surfaces in Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), when simstim star Angie and her lover Bobby Newmark merge their consciousnesses with a vast, newly formed computational storage space called the Aleph, and again on a smaller scale in Pattern Recognition (2003), with the piecemeal creation of “the Footage” and its subsequent reconstitution by fans. Later the sustained dialog between proximate and distant futures in Peripheral (2014) follows such unions in temporal rather than spatial terms, as enabled though the medium of a quantum computer. Perhaps most visibly, in Gibson’s novel Idoru (1996) the marriage is literal, as eccentric rock star Rez weds Rei Toei, an “idoru” or computer-generated “synthetic personality” who exists only in virtual space. Though itself an interesting phenomenon, this pattern of integrated mergers between distinct and seemingly incompatible entities in Gibson’s fiction has ramifications beyond the romantic plotlines that often surround them. In fact, we assert that this trope in Gibson’s fiction— which itself has been fundamental in shaping popular and scholarly notions about computation since the early 1980s—has particular resonance with the emerging field of the digital humanities, or DH.
Christian P. Haines paints an interesting picture of Gibson's art in relation to the world of videogames in his essay "Just a game": Biopolitics, video games, and finance in William Gibson's The Peripheral.
In January 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) added the diagnosis of “gaming disorder” to its eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases. WHO defines the disorder as “a pattern of gaming behavior (digital-gaming or video-gaming) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.” Instead of the moral panic linking video games to violence, a diagnosis emphasizes the disruption of daily routines because of an inability to properly manage one’s time. However, gaming disorder isn’t pure disruption, for, as the WHO suggests, it has its own pattern. The problem is that gaming threatens to go viral, subsuming the rest of life and colonizing the pleasures and obligations of the everyday with the yearning to escape into digital fantasies. That the threat gaming presents is not only psychological but also economic can be seen in think pieces that worry over gaming’s contribution to rising rates of unemployment, especially among young men. The specter of young men opting out of the labor force in favor of digital play indexes a more general fear of economic stagnation and political disaffection, an anxiety that so much time might go to waste and that this waste might return to haunt the social body of capitalism. To his credit, Ryan Avent, an editor for The Economist, recognizes that this social pathology is less cause than symptom of an economy in which long-term careers have been replaced with contingent employment and consumer credit: “A life spent buried in video games, scraping by on meagre pay from irregular work or dependent on others, might seem empty and sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one spent buried in finance, accumulating points during long hours at the office while neglecting other aspects of life, is a matter of perspective.”
Gaming disorder is a symptom of financialized capitalism. It is less a suspension of capitalist temporality than an element of the more general transition toward an economy in which temping (temporary labor) has become the norm. Financialization is, at least, a twofold phenomenon. First, it is, in Greta Krippner’s words, “a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than trade and commodity production.” This aspect of financialization pertains not only to the restructuring of corporations so that they are more responsive to the interests of shareholders but also to how companies not traditionally associated with finance increasingly rely on financial revenue streams. Since the 1970s, corporations and nation-states have relied more and more on financial speculation to compensate for declining profit rates. Second, financialization also names the spread of financial techniques into everyday life. Randy Martin writes: “Financialization integrates markets that were separate, like banking for business and consumers, or markets for insurance and real estate. It asks people from all walks of life to accept risk into their homes that were hitherto the province of professionals. Without significant capital, people are being asked to think like capitalists.” Financialization generalizes the ethos of speculation so that it encompasses all kinds of social conducts, from parenting to leisure activities. It replaces the ascetic worker-subject described by Max Weber with an opportunistic freelancer always seeking to transform a situation into another revenue stream. Opportunism is the mood of financialization; it’s the background hum of subjects compelled to speculate on contingent possibilities to survive in conditions of economic stagnation.
To me, Haines's essay could be the most interesting of the bunch; gaming oneself into the capitalistic sphere? No: gaming is capitalism. I urge you to read his essay about gaming and temporality in relation to Gibson's writing.
I have skipped quotes from some of the essays that didn't excite me; I have not read much of what Gibson has written, so I'm possibly not the target audience for this anthology, but where I found the essays to be engaging and not trying-too-hard, I really got some bang out of it. I can imagine fans of Gibson would eat this book up, have a ponder, and a strong urge to re-read his books and re-watch everything he wrote the script for.
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