After a cascade of piffle recently about the evils of the internet, and how it is destroying lives and laying waste to culture and creativity, it's refreshing to hear an author like William Gibson, who infamously popularised the term 'cyberspace' back in the early 1980s, give the greatest invention for the growth and sharing of human knowledge since the printing press some due respect :
(Gibson has) argued that the creation of the internet is a human event comparable to the invention of cities. Even make-believe is, as a result, no longer quite the simple act it used to be.
'I'm really conscious, when I'm writing now, how Google-able the world is. You can no longer make up what some street in Moscow looks like because all your readers can have a look at it if they want to. That is an odd feeling. It is a genuine way that cyberspace is, to use a word from Spook Country, everting the world. It is turning itself - and us - inside out. It's where we transact so much of who we are these days.'
'You could say, in some ways technology and entertainment culture does not look that good from outside. I mean, if you looked at the internet objectively, sometimes you would think it was just a tsunami of filth, something you would not want anywhere near your children.'
It is though, he believes, an intimately human form of culture. 'I think that one of the things that sets us most thoroughly apart is the ability to preserve our individual memory. The information of the cave paintings becomes Borges's library, Borges's library becomes a laptop computer.' The internet is the shared memory of the species.
I wonder if Gibson, an inveterate blogger, thinks it possible to have human relationships in cyberspace that are as close as in the real world?
'If they are text-based, I would say yes. I have some friendships conducted almost entirely through email that are very intimate. I think we are getting to the point that a strange kind of relationship would be one where there was no virtual element. We are at that tipping point: how can you be friends with someone who is not online? In a couple of years, we will be no more disturbed by our relationship with virtual worlds than we are by our relationship with broadcast television.'
This story also supplies a solid, and fascinating 'genesis' tale of the inspirations that led to Gibson writing his first, and most famous, novel Neuromancer back in 1982 :
One day, waiting for a bus, he saw a poster for the Apple 2c, a relatively small personal computer with a handle on it, like a briefcase. 'I stood there and remember thinking: Wow, computers can be small.'
It was also about the time of the first video arcades and Gibson would look in and see kids playing. 'I was always struck by the idea that the kids pushing the buttons wanted more than anything to be on the other side of the screen. The look on their faces suggested that.'
He started to invent a world where subcultures, particularly urban youth subcultures, might meet digital technology in a way that had not happened yet. He evolved the language for this place in part from overhearing conversations at science-fiction readings. He'd go to Seattle and 'just eavesdrop guys in a bar or whatever, guys who were maybe in working at the early days of Microsoft'.
Once he overheard two women who worked as keypunch operators at an army facility have a brief conversation about viruses on the machinery. 'I didn't ask, I just took it home and thought: this sounds good. The idea of computer viruses was generally unknown at that time, but I could see how it might work in Neuromancer.'
