Currently Reading: Neuromancer

I’m reading Neuromancer by William Gibson again. 30 years later and it’s still cool and futuristic. Gibson coined, “cyberspace” and described it in chapter three via a children’s program as “a consensual hallucination experienced by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.”

Reading the novel now with the world wide web ingrained into our lives allows a new perspective.

We still don’t have hallucinogenic virtual reality, but we’re beginning to wear our devices keeping us connected, access to encyclopedias and geo-data. We conduct business remotely, or share our lives in online. Some troll the web in anonymity, mine data, bully others. We talk a great deal about gadgets and apps, and some pay more attention to their gizmos than physical persons around them. We’re nearly as addicted to technology as the characters in the novel.

Us poor humans are easily dazzled. We’re also regularly seduced by alternate reality often found in a good story.