I’m a huge fan of William Gibson’s work. Many people love him because of his early works and his role in the definition of the cyberpunk aesthetic and the invention of the term and concept of cyberspace way before the internet was a thing. I belong to a smaller group of Gibson’s fans: the fans that love his works set in the contemporary world more than his works set in the future. Specifically his trilogy of novels known as the Bigend trilogy (or, in some cases Blue Ant trilogy): Pattern recognition, Spook Country and Zero History.
Since 1993, Gibson has been saying that «the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed». In these novels, the quote comes into full realization. The stories Gibson writes about are deeply rooted in our present times but push in multiple directions, exploring odd realities that already exist but haven’t blossomed yet or have not become normalized yet. More than 10 years ago, Gibson was writing about unbranded and unidentifiable fashion brands, broken narrative works distributed online in micro-chunks, wide scale face recognition, augmented reality art installations…
Gibson said that he writes in a peculiar way. While many writers try to isolate themselves when writing, trying to focus on the words, Gibson said in an interview that he works with Word open above a browser window.
Q: So are you able to google during your writing day, or do you have to block that off and say, all right–
A: No, I’ve got Word open on top of Firefox.
Q: That’s very courageous–
A: It’s kind of the only way I can do it. It’s replaced looking out the window, but I have to have–
Gibson is extremely good at catching these strange events and wicked hints. He observes the world we live in from the prospective of the micro changes that will shape the one we will live in tomorrow. That’s why the worlds that Gibson describe feel familiar and also completely alien. And that’s why despite being written in 2002, 2007 and 2010 the Bigend trilogy still feels incredibly contemporary.
As many people have noted, our reality feels more and more like something out of a William Gibson novel. Things are getting stranger and stranger, and harder to explain.
Recently one of these glimpses made headlines when the fitness tracking application Strava published an anonymized heatmap of all the areas in the world where their users work out. The map, turns out, revealed way more than Strava intended: by observing carefully users and journalists where able to find locations of secret military bases and to map out their perimeters. Suddenly some of the most guarded secrets on the planet were observable by anyone.
Can you see it? Can you see the beginning of a gibsonian novel? Something extremely odd and unlikely happened and people in strange places will scramble to deal with it or take advantage of it.
These glimpses are interesting windows in the unevenly distributed future we are collectively building. And catching them may help us understand where we are headed.
The Gibsonian (@the_gibsonian) is a human-operated twitter bot that tries to catch these stories. Glimpses of the world as seen through William Gibson’s browser. The algorithm will get smarter over time but I’ll start with a crowdsourced approach: retweeting anything that contains variations of «from a William Gibson novel». Some of this glimpses will be bad and out of focus, some will be good. Let’s see what futures it will be able to hint.
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