Bibliopath #19: In which we get a bit crude
Dear reader,
Here's a sentence that I think about a lot:
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: if they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude.
It's from the opening of "Johnny Mnemonic", an early short story by William Gibson. William Gibson famously coined the term "cyberspace" and spearheaded much of what we think of as "cyberpunk" with the novel Neuromancer.
However, even as things that Gibson imagined have come to life—the "shared consciousness" of the Internet, virtual idols, hacking as a real and present danger—he has also shifted his attention to the present. I remember reading an interview where he said that what was happening now was far beyond the realm of anything science fiction ... and that was back in the George W Bush administration.
I like how this sentence evokes the future by conjuring details of the present as an ancient, antiquated past—later in the paragraph, the protagonist describes how he has to use a lathe and dig up microfiche instructions to know how to load it.
But I also think a lot about that opposition in the second part of the sentence: "if they think you're technical, go crude". The reality is that I spend most of my time, most days, is in front of this silver box. I'm a technical boy. But that's why the 'crudeness' of the analog is appealing—the idea that a thing might do one thing and do it well, without providing a portal to the rest of the world at any moment.
The way that I live my life (or send my newsletters) would not be possible without computers, or the shared consciousness of the internet. But sometimes, often, I wonder if I need to purposefully aspire to 'crudeness': finding ways that are less ephemeral and more effective: whether it's a creating a to do list in pen and paper, or writing on an electric typewriter.
That's how Gibson, the science fiction 'prophet', wrote this sentence—on a typewriter—and it was enough to send me on a thought trajectory which I've never really recovered from. And that's something for a sentence to aspire to.
Always yours,
Guan