Blade Runner on electro-steroids

The cyber world of Neuromancer is
brought to the big screen in
Johnny Mnemonic. Martin Walker talks
to author William Gibson
The Hollywood launch of Johnny
Mnemonic, William Gibson presided over the ultimate
premiér: the first time in entertainment history when an
author saw his book launched simultaneously as a movie
and as a CD-ROM interactive video game.

Starring Keanu Reeves, Johnny Mnemonic 
(opening in South Africa today) is based on Gibson's short
story of a secure human courier, secure because gigabits of
data and corporate research are sealed and coded inside his
 brain synapses. This is not just another sci-fi movie.

It's the big experiment in synergy: to marry Sony's
hardware of consumer products with Hollywood's
software of dreams. Sony put $30-million into the
movie, then spent another $3-million making
another movie on Betacam for the CD-ROM game,
and then even more money on the new interface
system.

"It's so sweet you don't even know it's an interface,"
marvels Gibson. You can use a mouse, or a clunky old
keyboard. The hero faces trouble. Hit numeral one, and
he kicks. Numeral two to punch. Numeral three to block
the enemy attack. The plot re-adjusts itself accordingly.
Hit shift, and you control Jones, the cyber-dolphin,
programmed by the US Navy to break codes in return
for regular shots of pure heroin.

We are in Gibsonland, a place "like a deranged
experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored
researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the
fast-forward button".

As the man who coined the term cyberspace, Gibson
can very nearly claim to have invented it. Not that he
even owned a personal computer at the time.

"I wrote Neuromancer on an olive-green
Hermes portable typewriter, a 1927 model, that looked
to me as the kind of thing Hemingway would have
used in the field. Even now, I write on an ancient
Mac, and my son has the real powerboard, a Sentra
with a 520C Powerbook on the side. When he trades
up, that'll go to my daughter, and her rig will go to
my wife, and I'm at the bottom of the food chain."

Gibson provided an aesthetic of nerdish

machismo, the computer jock as hero,

that suddenly offered a literature for a

technology still being invented

Neuromancer was the first cyberpunk novel.
It won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for 1984, which
is the sci-fi writer's version of winning the Goncourt,
Booker and Pulitzer prizes in the same year. His short
stories in Omni magazine had already begun to
earn him a name, but Neuromancer invented
a genre.

It begins in Japan, the seamy underside of Tokyo,
with a loner called Case. He used to be a brilliant
cowboy surfer of the data nets, a thief who stole
corporate software for even richer thieves.
When he tried to steal something for himself,
they burned out his nervous system, and he is
reduced to hustling.
From then on, it's a cybernetic western, a
solitary anti-hero who uses his contacts of the
scum world to recover his skills, go up against
the big, bad guys, confound their knavish tricks
and survive.
But the vision was the dark new cyberworld
itself, like Blade Runner on electronic steroids.

(When he first saw Blade Runner, Gibson
staggered from the cinema in despair, fearing that
someone else had already cornered his nightmare
future. Slowly, he realised they had the street scenes
and the landscape but not the mindscape, not the
alternative sensory universe of the Net.)

Gibson saw a future where nation states rotted
beneath a new triumph of corporate feudalism,
where the matrix of the data banks and computer
networks was the sharp reality. For his hero, Case,
to lose his status on the computer networks was
to lose the only reality that mattered.
"For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation
of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd
frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance
involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh.
The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of
his own flesh."
Gibson provided an aesthetic of nerdish
machismo, the computer-jock as hero, that
suddenly offered a literature for a technology
that was still in the process of being invented.
From Neuromancer and his next books to
 Virtual Light (1993), he began writing of the
Internet and of virtual reality and of nerve-splicing
that would merge and hardwire human synapses
into the cyberworld, just as the computer labs began
dreaming how to do it.
A collection of essays entitled Cyberspace, 
published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
tried to map out the blueprints for Gibson's vision.
The scientists at the cutting edge of the software were
starting from the assumption that the embryonic
Internet of a decade ago had already been defined and
its possibilities explored by Gibson's imagination.
Where would Gibson's manic dreams take us next?
A bunch of hippy acid-heads

invented the personal computer. I love

this revenge of the hippies stuff
They tried to define the way the interfaces and
the software would need to be sculpted to create
Gibson's "consensual virtual hallucination", in
effect hard-wiring human sensory perceptions into
the limitless eco-system of the datanet, using each
individual human brain as its own central
processing unit.
"What I love about this is the revenge of the
hippies," Gibson remarks. "A bunch of hippy
acid-heads actually invented the personal
computer. Then, think about the Internet, the
idea of a free and accessible space for knowledge
and communication that no central power could
control. That really develops with the Well,
which grew out of Bruce Sterling and that
1970 hippy bible, The Whole Earth Catalogue."
Think back to what the computer was in 1970,
Gibson goes on. It was the big brain, so expensive
that only governments and huge corporations
could afford one, a monopoly of computing
power that reinforced centralised authority.
Along comes the PC, and, like an inchoate
army of guerrillas, it becomes a subversive force,
chipping away at big brain and big government too.
"Tired as I am with all the hype about the
Internet and the info highway, I suspect that
from a future perspective it will be on a par
with the invention of the city as a force in
human culture. People still don't understand
that the Internet is transnational. Cyberspace
has no borders, and that's fine with me
because I had my fill of nationalism in the
Vietnam war.
On the Internet now, you can see

corporations trying to extract maximum

profit from public cyberspace
He is no longer confident about the
subversive role of the PC and the Internet.
Watching the Los Angeles riots on TV,
Gibson shrugged despondently when he
saw the looters stripping a Radio Shack
store of TV sets and tapedecks. Just next
door, the windows were still unbroken
on a computer store. Apple Powerbooks
and laptops were stacked up for the taking,
their electronic empowerment lurking
inside their casings.
"I wanted to tell them they were
looting the wrong store. I'm fondest
of the idea that the minorities and the
poor can be empowered by this technology,
but I don't see it happening in the real world. 

"I guess what I see coming is what I wrote in
Virtual Light, an end-stage capitalism, in
which private enterprise and the profit motive
are taken to their logical conclusion. You see it
now on the Internet, corporations trying to find
ways to impose private ownership and extract
money from what should be a public cyberspace.
"The characters in my books live between
the cracks of this kind of system. And there
will always be misfits, the tenacious weeds in
the cracks, people not wanting to be consumers,
living on their own terms."

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