POST Cyberpunk

There’s a nostalgia around the world “cyberpunk" for me. A quarter of a century ago, I co-wrote an article called “What is cyberspace?" for the “Computer Law and Security Report” (Volume 8, Issue 2, March–April 1992, Pages 74-76) [PDF]. In this article I asked whether it was possible that, much like Arthur C. Clarke's much vaunted prediction of the communication satellite, the Canadian author William Gibson had produced works which were not so much science fiction as informed predictions?

Gibson had, after all, coined the term “the matrix”, and his books were core to the cyberpunk canon.

The point of the article was to explain the idea of cyberspace to a legal audience (this was before Netscape, the year zero of the modern age, so most lawyers had never been online) and it turned out to be rather popular. I like to think that one of the reasons was the conviction back then that we were exploring the actual future, not some hypothetical future. I can’t remember where the idea of the paper came from, but I do remember that it was the extracts from Gibson’s brilliant writing that so effectively illustrated the key concepts and I still get a thrill from reading them now. We bandy around the word genius all too lightly, but Gibson certainly is one. As my good friend the futurologist Ross Dawson wrote...

It’s worth noting that Gibson has never claimed to predict the future [but he] has an unmatched knack for analyzing trends and behaviors inherent to modern life and extrapolating them into vivid themes that reveal a kind of raw truth about humanity—much of which centers on our relationship with technology.

From Best futurists ever: How William Gibson’s Neuromancer shaped our vision of technology - Ross Dawson.

Vivid is the word. I can still remember the shock of reading Gibson’s “Neuromancer” for the first time. Gibson himself called that novel an “optimistic" view of the near future, since it involves only limited nuclear exchanges between countries. Let’s hope he’s right.

Why was it a shock? Well, since leaving university I’d found myself specialising in secure data communications. I worked on one of the first secure LANs for the UK government, on secure satellite communications for banking, on secure military networks for NATO, that sort of thing. For the first part of my career I was immersed in networking, but I didn’t grok it. I didn’t see what the spreading networks were doing and at that time I’d never heard of McLuhan’s global village. I didn’t have any sort of vision as to what was going on.

Reading Gibson was like lifting a veil from parts of my own brain. It took an artist to give me that vision and a vocabulary to discuss it and enrich it and use it. And what a vocabulary it was! Cyberspace, the Matrix, Black Ice and console jockeys!

My very favourite William Gibson quote, right after “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed” is about money. It comes from his novel "Count Zero" and it's about the cashless society...

"He had his cash money, but you couldn’t pay for food with that. It wasn’t actually illegal to have the stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it.”

I’ve written before that we are heading toward a society that is cashless in this sense, a society where cash will still be around but will disappear from the daily lives of most people. It’s not a society where there is no cash but a society where cash is irrelevant. It may have seemed outlandish twenty five years ago, but it’s a pretty accurate description of Sweden now (where only a tiny fraction of retail payments are cash)  and China soon.