The 1980s was the decade of technological revolution. Numerous new media technologies such as Walkman (1980), CD player (1982), Microsoft (1983), DNA fingerprint technology (1984), laptop (1986) and many more, emerged. All these inventions became more intimate to humans and due to people’s inexperience with this new digital world, the clusters and constellations of data resulted in suspiciousness, mistrust, and fear towards technology.
William Gibson noticed this ambivalent attitude and decided to talk in literary terms about the digital revolution’s effects on human life. How he accomplished that? By bringing to the surface Cyberpunk fiction. Cyberpunk fiction is a science fiction sub-genre which constitutes a cross-fertilization of two literary genres: post-modernism and science fiction (McHale, 227). Being a compound term, Cyberpunk fuses realistic characteristics with technological innovations, resulting in a peculiar combination of low-life (subcultures) and high-tech.
Cyber: connected with electronic communication networks, especially the internet [Oxford learner’s dictionaries].
Punk: everything alternative and socially subverted.
Source: sabukaru
Through this literary trend, the coiner of the terms “cyberspace” and “virtual reality” ultimately “renovated” science fiction. In particular, he no longer made reference to the fictional future (e.g., aliens, spaceships etc.), like most of this decade’s writers, but to the digital realities of his contemporary era. He managed to move away from the realm of traditional science fiction speculations and sought to immerse the readers in modernist realism, by paying particular emphasis on expressing the current fears and concerns of the 1980s community. That which distinguished him, however, was that he correctly anticipated the extent to which most people’s identities would be defined by their presence on the internet. He has, reasonably then, been widely characterized as a prophet or a futurist.
All of his works aimed at raising awareness concerning the impact of technological advancement, not only on the individual alone but on human relationships as well. The basic question that arises when reading his stories is: does technology grant us a sense of freedom or does it enslave us? Does it improve our lives or is it a means of surveillance?
The exploration of this ambivalence starts in his very first short story, Burning Chrome (1982). In this postmodern work, Gibson defines cyberspace in exceptionally interesting literary terms. It is, according to his view, a “mimetic weapon” that has the tremendous ability to imitate human reality, and an “electronic consensus-hallucination” that causes disorientation and prevents those who constantly participate in it to perceive the physical world. He even attempts to personify it with a “pretty child face smooth and steel”, a child who, although beautiful and innocent, “[cooks its] own cancers for people who [cross it]” (220). By giving cyberspace human characteristics, the writer seeks to emphasize technology’s imitative and dangerous nature. It is a two-edged sword, because the freedom it offers us seems alluring and innocent, like a child’s face, but behind this innocence, which is fundamentally illusive, danger and threat lurk.
Gibson avoids depicting technological advancements as dedicated to improving the quality of human life. He, rather, exposes the dehumanizing uses of technology that foster people’s arrogance, greed and consumerism. The most prominent instance of consumerism in Burning Chrome, is Rikki Wildside. Rikki is a 20-year-old young woman who has her heart set on a pair of Zeiss Ikon eyes, a brand of elite artificial eyes known for their striking blue color. But in order to “acquire” those eyes, she must undergo an expensive and highly risky surgical procedure that may damage her optic nerves. Her ultimate goal? To resemble Tally Isham, a simstim (simulated stimulation) star. Her ambition to transform herself into something she is clearly not, reminds us of our contemporary reality. Millions of young (and not only!) women across the globe get heavily influenced by popular personas presented on social media platforms, and they end up putting fashion trends and fame before their precious health. They view technological advancement as a means of beautification, failing to realize that they have turned into commodities themselves.
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The disorienting effect of cyberspace gets even more visible in Gibson’s 2007 novel, Spook Country. Written after the launching of the World Wide Web (1991) and the insertion of the Global Positioning System (GPS) in our lives (May 1st, 2000), this story is relevant to our contemporary world more than ever. It describes a reality where cyberspace has escalated to a point where it now “everts. [It] turns itself inside out” (21), meaning that it has become an integral part of our physical world, rather than a distinct domain, “a specific elsewhere” to be visited through our mobile phones and computers. Although written 15 years ago, the novel still reflects a larger cultural anxiety about the rise of technological networks. This anxiety is reflected in Hollis Henry’s character, a freelance journalist, who views new media networked technology as something “creepy” and “grotesque”. She believes that this “new bad thing, this shadow” (161) has merged with the real in the form of ever-present technologies of surveillance, resulting in her deeply distrusting and doubting them. Many of us, in fact, can identify with her feelings, especially nowadays, when surveillance has become ubiquitous and almost normalized. Normalized because, with the popularization of social media platforms, we often behave as if we want to be listened to and watched (e.g., by posting photos and stories that reveal our personal moments etc.), disregarding the moral and ethical consequences of this exposure.
While, then, there are some undoubted advantages to using new media technologies, the perils that accompany them are numerous. The growth of databases certainly offers us the opportunity to explore the virtual world, experiment with ample pieces of information, to communicate with people who, under different circumstances, would never be easily reached. But despite this appealing freedom, cyberspace “has colonized the physical” (Gibson, 2010) and it does not only threaten our privacy, but it also alters and infiltrates us in ways that we cannot understand. In other words, it essentially composes our perception of reality, for we no longer see our world as it truly is, but as technology wants us to see it.
Is this infiltration inevitable?
Well, that’s probably the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Given what history has shown us until now, it seems unlikely, but, as Gibson aptly observed, “the street finds its own uses for things” (1982).
Works Cited
- Notes from (Lit7-314): Approaches to American Studies: Space and Narrative in American Literature and Culture
- Header Image: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/william-gibson-agency
- Popova, Maria. How William Gibson Coined “Cyberspace”. https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/26/how-william-gibson-coined-cyberspace/
- Financial Times. William Gibson — the prophet of cyberspace talks AI and climate collapse. https://www.ft.com/content/48b6d0f6-499f-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
- Gibson, William. (2007). Spook Country, 1-25, 160-161.
- Gibson, William. (1982). Burning Chrome, 195-220.
- McHale, Brian. (1992). Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 227. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00111619.1992.9937882?journalCode=vcrt20
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