Burning Chrome

by William Gibson

‘like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.’

The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.

I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own,