Alberto and Bobby need BUGs!

I'm currently reading William Gibson's latest release, Spook Country. I've been a fan of him since first stumbling through Neuromancer as an early teen. It was a very important book for me at the time because of the concepts that technology is not just in the domain of math nerds, NOCs, and ROI, but interacts with almost every aspect of the human universe. Gibson's stories usually involve some kind of hacker immersed in a crime or scandal and, for me, the biggest thrill is in how Gibson's characters modify and subvert top-down megacorp driven consumer products into things of real human interest. How the world, as designed by focus groups and industrial designers, is never really how it turns out in the end. The essence of this of course is Gibson's statement: "the street finds its own uses for things" ("Burning Chrome", 1981).

Back to Spook Country. There are a couple of characters that are involved in an emergent underground art-scene known as "locative art". A viewer goes to a specific physical location and visual art accessed through some network-enabled hardware. Typically pieces have some direct connection to the physical space and there is a direct connection between the digital art and the physical world. One problem Gibson's characters have though, in this near-future tale, is the hardware. There is some vague reference to a cell phone ducted taped to a GPS receiver. More specifically, the problem is that Gibson essentially sees technology as always being generated by massive, top-down systems, and hackers, artists, and criminals subvert these systems for their own needs, but only in highly localized ways.

Is Gibson right? Are we forever doomed to Maas-Neotek decks, Sense/net media, and Sony camcorders? Or will bottom-up, user-directed technologies become popular and skew us all from Gibson's near-term future worlds?

Comments

[Boris]

Cool! Along these lines, I think you would be interested in this old interview with Gibson, where he discusses his inspiration for Neuromancer, along with a bunch of other interesting stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

[Roland Tanglao]

gibson is wrong, but he's cool and lives in vancouver and i see him all the time in various parts of the city