No Maps for These Territories Page #6

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Where did that come from?

My input for doing that was, uh, my experience of the very first SONY Walkman

as a really intimate interface device that I could carry around.

My observation of the body language of kids playing those early, plywood-sided arcade games

I saw the kids playing those games and I knew

that they wanted to reach right through the screen and get with what they were playing with there.

And I thought, Well, if theres space behind the screen,

and everybodys got these things at some level, maybe only metaphorically,

those spaces are all the same space.

And as soon as I thought thatI, you knowI had it.

Its interesting that its become common parlance.

I had no idea.

I had not idea that that wouldthat would happen.

Its aits aits a strangeits a strange thing for me. I mean, I see it

I see it in every newspaper

that I open. Its becomeits become part of the language.

which is very, which is very nicebut I simply marvel that thatsthats happened.

Cos I had no idea. I had no idea that no one else would do it.

Itsits a very singular and peculiar thing.

Cyberspace, one day, might be the last usage of the...

prefix, cyber,

because cyber is, I think, cyber is going to go the way of electro.

We dont use the prefixwe dont use the prefix electro in

in pop-cultural parlance much anymore.

Electricity beingit being taken for granted that most things are electrical.

And I think that, at this point, it could be most

taken for granted that most things are computerized.

William Gibson's limousine...good morning?

Err...Jack Womack, here.

[Jack Womack - Writer] Hello, Jack. Tell me...would you describe William Gibson as a "visionary"?

I would definitely call him a "visionary."

I mean, it's like, you know...

I quite honestly feel that if he had not written NEUROMANCER when he did,

that the world as it is, and much more about the world which is to come,

would not have taken place in the exact way it has.

We would have, uh, computers.

We would have the Internet. We would have cyberspace as it presently exists.

But I think of so many people who weren't in computers at that point,

writing, working away on their programs,

writing away on their designs, thinking of what might be done with this new media.

if they hadn't read NEUROMANCER and thought,

"Boy, what a cool idea this is...let's see if we can't make it happen,"

I'm not sure that precisely things would be happening in the same way.

So it was less about predicting and more about affecting the shape of things to come?

He and I have talked about that and, uh... you know...

and he told me. He said, you know, "When I first thought of cyberspace, I thought of it as a metaphor."

And then NEUROMANCER came out,

and everyone said, "Huh! Oh, dude, this is very cool,"

and took it seriously.

As you know, something beyond just the fashion to wear for that season.

They just, uh, took it as something very, very real.

Initially, it was just, like, a literary conceit.

I've always been marketed as "Your Hot Ticket to the Future."

And because I've been so uncomfortable with that,

I've had to, you know, I devote a lot of time to attempting to debunk my own...

my own sort of "inherited marketing category."

Because I don't think that's what I do. I think we live in an incomprehensible present.

And what I'm actually trying to do is eliminate the moment,

and...and make the moment accessible.

I'm not even really trying to explain the moment.

I'm just trying to...trying to make it accessible.

Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen.

"You haven't told me what I'm looking for."

"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan,

which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience."

Slitscan...the fictional culture of Slitscan is my extrapolation from the existence of People magazine,

The National Enquirer and Hello!...that sort of thing. It's just pushed...

all the knobs have been cranked over in my version

and the brakes are off. And that's the result.

"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience.

Which is to say, Laney,

anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience.

Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant,

perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed.

Personally, I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo,

the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark,

in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes, and it sweats constantly.

The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting.

It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals,

and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire,

by changing the channels on a universal remote, or by voting in presidential elections."

This is now...that's now, you know. That's...that's, like, the end of the '90s.

But to me, it's not so much about defining the Slitscan audience,

which is the audience for this highly vicious form of tabloid

TV journalism

but of defining the producer's contempt for her audience.

What do you find yourself focusing on these days?

I think I find myself thinking more in historical terms.

I've sort of been looking at, you know,

where this whole crazy thing came from. All these cities...

I think I'm happiest in...I'm happiest in cities,

because they don't oppress me, generally, at all.

They really...they really fascinate me.

I think of cities as machines.

Each one is a...is a sort of mechanism.

Sometimes, walking, walking through Manhattan, I'm just...

I've been struck with just some very simple kind of wonder

and amazement - at the fact that this thing works!

That, you know, that it's possible to have something as singular,

and crazy, as Manhattan island.

And, by and large, it works. You know, people walking around,

doing...doing what they do.

Have you been to Detroit?

No, but I've seen pictures.

The urban core, you know, the skyscraper core of Detroit is...

t's a ruin. It's a complete...a complete Ghost Town.

Someone proposed several years ago that the place simply be allowed to fall apart,

and that it would be "The American Acropolis."

And, of course, the good burghers of Detroit

flipped out and said,

"You can't do that; the Downtown is coming back! You gotta have faith...we have this beautiful city."

But they can't get anybody to live there.

There's nobody, nobody after dark but a few homeless people,

and some deer that have wandered in from the country.

It's like the city's turning back into countryside, there.

I find this a pretty haunted,

haunted neighborhood. All these big cinemas turned into wholesale jewelry stores.

This was all very grand in the sort of 1911, 1920s.

There's the Union Trust Company, there, which is now Hill Center Mart

was built with this optimism that expected it to be used for...

the purpose it was intended for, for obviously, for hundreds of years.

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