I was only 15 years old when I bought a copy of William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”. It was the first thing I ever bought in the Internet, using a 14.400 bauds modem, Winsock and Mosaic. Together with a strange colorful magazine called “Wired” and a couple newspaper articles, “Neuromancer” was a milestone of my teenage years, planting in my brain a few seeds that kept growing forever.
Back then, this whole “future” thing was quite promising. Dial-up modems were getting faster, Yahoo! presented dozens of new links every month, and a few people were creating their own websites, coding HTML on DOSedit and hosting them at Geocities. I was one of them, and created websites all day long — but had to stop at night so I could run my BBS. About 10 people connected every night to play Legend of Red Dragon and Trade Wars, and chat with me.
When I was at school, I couldn’t pay attention to anything. The future of humankind was being reshaped by the hour, and my teachers were ignorant about it. In 1994 I tried to give my fellow students a lecture about the internet, but no one would listen to me. The teacher almost fell asleep.
OK, now fast forward the tape, and everybody knows how things are today: portable internet on your pocket, blogs, twitter, Wikipedia, iPhones, Google Wave and all that. Most people still don’t realize what is actually going on, but everybody feels the impact of the whole thing in their everyday lives, taking technology for granted.
And then, 15 years after reading “Neuromancer” for the first time, in a boring cold night of late May 2009, I talked to William Gibson for the first time in my life. 15 years after having my mind blown by his book, the man who reshaped my teenage dreams was right there on cyberspace, and I could contact him directly using a virtual interface.
This is what we discussed:
- GIBSON: The Slimmy holds drivers license and five cards. The clip gives tactile awareness of cash on hand. (…) I take the rigid, box-like Jimmy along traveling or if I know I’ll need more cards. (…)
- POEIRA: And where may we acquire these currency curiosities?
- GIBSON: Got mine from Koyono http://tinyurl.com/38an68
- POEIRA: Thanks for the tip, my wallet looks disgusting.
And that’s all.
And what else did you expect? A matrix of consensual hallucinational experiences? Unthinkable complexity? Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind? Take a reality check. William Gibson is a busy man, and so am I. Did you want me to go all fanboy on him, with only 160 characters per message? Should I ask for a virtual autograph?
If my 15 year old version saw this, he would try to kill me. There I was, with the “opportunity of a lifetime” to interpelate William Gibson about the world, science, technology, societies, cybernetic implants, smart drugs, punk rock… And I ask him about a wallet?
Why the fuck not?
I am very glad that all that “future” is stuck back in the past. We aren’t living in the strange amazing world described in “Neuromancer”, neither in the cybertechno information-superhighway future predicted by the advertisings on Wired magazine. And I am glad.
When you wake up in the morning, do you feel like you are in the future? When you use your webmail or your net banking, do you see yourself like a bolt of light travelling across a virtual space? Where are those ridiculous VR helmets that everyone was supposed to be wearing by now?
Guess what… Flying cars aren’t here either, and both moon colonization and deep sea living are still just wishful thinking. And yet, we have things that are much more amazing than all that right here with us, and we don’t feel so amazed by them.
Because fantasy and reality are two completely different things. They are like two men who barely know each, exchanging an occasional dry “hello” once in a while. They are not the two sides of the same coin – or the two hemispheres of the same brain.
The beautiful thing about all this is: we’re in the future, but it’s still the past. We’ve got Android cell phones, but people still like paper books, sunsets and furry animals. We are using the internet to buy and sell vinyl records and vintage clothing all over the world. Humanity does not nullify itself every few decades. “Neuromancer” still is a pretty good book and had some visionary concepts, but the whole “cyber trend” that evolved around it and its contemporaries was just a fad like any other. People from all over the world talking to each other using sound, video and text? Nice. A matrixy world filled with people with shades, overcoats and funny nicknames? Not likely.
The dangerous thing here is to be held hostage by the zeitgeist. If you keep reading magazines and blogs and following every single trend and believing in every single word you read, you will have some miserable memories in your near future. One day you will suddenly find yourself out of time and out of step with the rest of the world, and your kids will be ashamed of you and your lame past. Ask the hippies.
Time passes but reality stays. If you stick with it, everything makes much more sense, and you don’t find yourselve lost so often. I’ve been sticking to my paper books and my vinyl records for a while now and they’re still fine. Buying books over the internet has never been so easy, and recording your own band on vinyl is now a possible dream for me, thanks to the magic of e-mails and websites. Digital cinema is nice, but film is alive and well thank you very much.
The things that really matter, they never die. That’s why people still enjoy Mozart’s music after all these years. Because it’s timeless. That’s what makes a work of art a classic. It is independent of its zeitgeist. It is done straight from the heart, with complete disregard for the momentary trends of an illusory future, and thus are able to survive the long journey through history and time.
Like “Neuromancer” is doing.
Gibson’s page on Twitter.
Some vintage graphics of an old Amiga Neuromancer game.
Once I knew a guy who wanted to start a zeitgeist that would last a thousand years!