Cyberpunk godfather William Gibson believes that Homo sapiens have evolved a sophisticated methodology of augmenting and altering reality to suit its needs.
“Technologies are us. Technology seems, to me, to be in our nature. We were the only species, that we know of, that evolved in such a way that it began to create prosthetic forms of human memory that could survive the death of the person who encrypted the information,” the prolific writer recently told The Varsity.
“[So], I think the iPad descends directly from the Acheulean hand axe, where if we hadn’t gotten that hand axe we would still be sitting in the trees eating bananas. [Yet], I don’t see any point where…we doomed ourselves to some sort of endless addictive pathology of technology.”
Nevertheless, according to Gibson, the human idea of “self” in our hyper-connected era remains little more than a cultural artifact.
“I sometimes doubt that we have selves. I think our idea of self is very much a cultural artifact,” he opined. ”We [currently] live in this vast LED soup of messages offering to help us define ourselves.”
William Gibson’s new novel, “Zero History” is now available for pre-order here.
Don’t feel like waiting? Well, how about re-reading some of the old classics, like “Neuromancer,” “Idoru” and “Burning Chrome?”
You know you want to.
And besides, Molly and Case waiting!
