Reviews
A book that calls Singapore “Disneyland with the death penalty“ and proceeds to explain why it lacks good rock music. Interesting observations on Germany and Japan, too. Written back when people still thought Germany would retain some global relevance in technology (e.g., Braun electronics, German business software advertising in Zero History, …).
Good non-fiction. If you don't like Gibson, you probably won't like this, but it provides great insight into his thoughts on the last twenty years and how they have affected his writing style.
Highlights
There’s my cybernetic organism: the Internet.
The physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact for decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still employ Newtonian paradigms that tell us that “physical” has only to do with what we can see, or touch. Which of course is not the case. The electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child’s optic nerves. As physical as the structures and chemicals those neurons will encounter in the human brain. We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it. We are it. We are already the Borg, but we seem to need myth to bring us to that knowledge.
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There’s a species of literalism in our civilization that tends to infect science fiction as well: It’s easier to depict the union of human and machine literally, close-up on the cranial jack please, than to describe the true and daily and largely invisible nature of an all-encompassing embrace.
This is about what science-fiction writers call “Steam Engine Time.” The observable fact that steam, contained, exerts force, has been around since the first lid rattled as the soup came to a boil. The ancient Greeks built toy steam engines that whirled bronze globes. But you won’t get a locomotive till it’s Steam Engine Time.
I remember the people I’ve heard complain about the very texture of digital images, filmless film: how it lacks richness, depth. I’ve heard the same thing said about CDs. Someone once told me that it was Mark Twain who turned in the first typewritten manuscript, and this was generally thought to be a Bad Thing: Work composed on a machine would naturally lack richness, depth.
I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn’t.
And it may also have begun to dawn on me, around that same time, that history, though initially discovered in whatever soggy trunk or in whatever caliber, is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretation and further discoveries.
Writers before and after Wells have enjoyed the heady pleasures of reducing the great monuments of their day to imaginary ruin, but few have attained the degree of symbolic elegance, nor the convincingly forlorn realism, of the Palace of Green Porcelain.
The content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains … everything we have lost?
A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness.
Prescient
Shinjuku at night is one of the most deliriously beautiful places in the world, and somehow the silliest of all beautiful places—and the combination is sheer delight.
They have had one strange ride, the Japanese, and we tend to forget that. […] They must all have gone briefly but thoroughly mad, then pulled it together somehow and plunged on. […] The Japanese, in the course of being booted down the timeline, have learned to keep it together in ways that we’re only just starting to imagine.
Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary. Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss watches are priced like small cars. But mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They’re pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they’re comforting precisely because they require tending.
We are all curators, in the postmodern world, whether we want to be or not.
If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese.
Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future.
Conspiracy theories and the occult comfort us because they present models of the world that more easily make sense than the world itself, and, regardless of how dark or threatening, are inherently less frightening.
VENDING MACHINES in Tokyo constitute a secret city of solitude. Limiting oneself to purchases from vending machines, it’s possible to spend entire days in Tokyo without having to make eye contact with another sentient being.
In Hong Kong I’d seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention. I’d caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too. Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down.
Ordinarily, confronted with a strange city, I’m inclined to look for the parts that have broken down and fallen apart, revealing the underlying social mechanisms; how the place is really wired beneath the lay of the land as presented by the Chamber of Commerce. This won’t do in Singapore, because nothing is falling apart. Everything that’s fallen apart has already been replaced with something new.
There is less in the way of alternative, let alone dissident, style in Singapore than in any city I have ever visited. I did once see two young Malayan men clad in basic, global, heavy metal black—jeans and T-shirts and waist-length hair. One’s T-shirt was embroidered with the Rastafarian colors, causing me to think its owner must have balls the size of durian fruit, or else be flat-out suicidal, or possibly both. But they were it, really, for overt boho style. (I didn’t see a single “bad” girl in Singapore. And I missed her.) A thorough scan of available tapes and CDs confirmed a pop diet of such profound middle-of-the-road blandness that one could easily imagine the stock had been vetted by Mormon missionaries.
at dawn […] a city’s ghosts tend to be most visible,
The physical past here has almost entirely vanished. There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.
Singapore is a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation. If IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore.