*Безымянная овца

Интервью с Уильямом Гибсоном, 1996, Дублин, Ирландия

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 09:10:16 GMT

[![](@/assets/media/2025-04-gibson-via-protein.webp)](https://vimeo.com/1077352792) 20 minute press interview with William Gibson in Dublin, Ireland whilst he was promoting Idoru on 1st November 1996. (via Protein)

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**Interviewer: Can you tell us something about your literary influences?** William Gibson: My native literary culture is science fiction. That’s what I began with, that’s what really turned me on. I read the American canon. I read Bradbury, Sturgeon, everything I could get my hands on. And then when I was about 15-years-old I discovered William Burroughs, and that completely blew my mind, although I didn’t really have a clue what he was doing but I recognised he was using the toolkit of science fiction to do something very different than this genre stuff that I’d grown up with. I went on from Burroughs to Ballard to Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, that whole ’60s thing. **What about people like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hemmett, because there’s a kind of hard-boiled aspect to your writing...** Well, you know, I’ve never been a big Chandler fan. I’ve always sensed the author of these books was kinda a cold fish. The man himself was really quite puritanical. I admire the technical finish of the language, but I felt much more in sympathy with Dashiell Hammett. Hammett actually invented that riff, and Chandler came along and did very well with it, but Hammett was the first person to actually do that. **Japanese culture also seems to be a strong theme. Where did that come from?** I live in an Pacific Rim city: Vancouver probably does more trade with Japan than it does with eastern Canada. We are also a big tourist destination for the Japanese, and my wife taught English as a second language to mostly Japanese students for about 10 years. So I had a lot more exposure to Japanese youth culture than most North Americans would. **In other interviews you’ve said that you’re not particularly interested in computers or technology...** I’ve moved up to an obsolete Mac PowerBook these days, but it’s not connected to anything. I’m at the bottom of the food chain of computers in our house: when my son gets an upgrade, his sister gets his old machine, my wife gets her old machine and I get my wife’s old machine. They move from the upstairs bedroom to the basement. I’m really interested in what people do with the stuff and how it affects us. But I’m not into the gadget fetish aspect of it. **Was this mentality there from an early age?** I can’t literally remember a time when there was no television, but I can remember my father bringing our first television home from the shop. It was a big wooden box with a little round black and white screen. When we turned it on there wasn’t any signal, so we had this thing sitting in the living room for two months before the first broadcast started coming in. People would sit there all night and watch it anyway. I probably didn’t think that was unusual at the time, but it’s the sort of observation that leads to the kind of work that I do today. **Are you better off not being too much in tune with it so you retain a fresh perspective on what this technology could do?** I think a relative lack of interest in real technology means I can see the forest for the trees. It gives me an overall picture. **Concerning contemporary social culture and the whole club scene and music scene – are they influences?** I like pop. I like watching pop cultures. I’ve lived long enough to see dozens of them rise and fall. I like bohemians. One thing I’m really interested in is whether we can still do bohemians now. Has the mechanism of recommodification become so fast and so sophisticated that we will never have anything like punk again? That scene in Seattle that they called grunge – it took two weeks to go from the streets of Seattle to the runways of Paris. The machine has never worked more quickly, and it killed it. It always kills it. It took about a year and a half for them to recommodify punk, in 1978, and it took them about two and a half years to do it to the hippies. When they did it to the hippies was when they actually invented the mechanism that does it, and it’s just been getting faster and more efficient all the time. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to have scenes like that anymore. **Is cyberpunk going the same way?** I never really bought into the idea that there was such a thing called cyberpunk... It was a funny drifting idea. I think what the word means today is another flavour of popular culture, so you can say, “did you see that video, it’s kinda cyberpunk.” Or you could say, “those are really cyberpunk trousers”. People would know what you meant. But I think that’s all you can really do with it these days. **Is it important as a writer to draw influences from contemporary culture?** When I’m writing these books, I become a major magazine addict. When my newsagent sees me coming, he gets a huge smile because I’ll buy hundreds of dollars worth of magazines, almost at random, and haul them home and start flipping through them, just looking for stuff, for texture, for things I can use. **In your previous books, before _Idoru_, the reality seemed to be very different.** _Neuromancer_ is probably set around 2035, _Virtual Light_ is probably set around 2005. It’s really our world with a lot of knobs turned up. I did that deliberately because I find it challenging and also I wanted to get away from the idea that what I’m doing is the traditional and supposedly predicative SF thing. When I wrote _Neuromancer_ I had no Internet and no World Wide Web to extrapolate from, when I wrote _Idoru_, the web was there so I had something to base things on. I think that’s the difference. **Is it strange to have reality catching up with you?** I think that what is eventually going to happen – given that the world has become such a drastic science fiction scenario in its own right, and seems to get more so everyday day – is that I’ll be able to write a naturalistic mainstream novel that describes the real world. It will have exactly the texture of a William Gibson novel. But it won’t have to be science fiction, but it will feel like because so much of the world we live in today feels exactly like science fiction. **In the opening pages of _Idoru_ you mention images of Kowloon Walled City and how important they are to you. What was so special about the photographs?** [Ryūji] Miyamoto is a Japanese photographer who usually photographs ruins. He went into the Walled City and cut a deal with the heroin dealers who actually ran the place and got sections of it pretty much cleared out. He then shot black and white, incredibly slow exposures that might take two or three days. These pictures are so staggeringly evocative – it’s Blade Runner squared. They’re just fabulous. They stuck with me for years and I wound up buying all of the remaining stock of a small collection. I bought out the Japanese edition of his work, and I’ve been giving these books to friends for years. I think I’m down to a single one now. I always wanted to find a way to work with that material and those photos also inspired the bridge environment in _Virtual Light_. **The book also features a Tokyo that has been rebuilt after a massive earthquake, which is based on fact. Is it important blend reality with fiction when you write?** I pride myself on airbrushing the gaps between reality and fiction as smoothly as possible. The super science fictional toilets that Chia keeps encountering and disliking in _Idoru_ are real. The Japanese have pretty much all of those features. I love decontextualising things like that, or recontextualising them and creating a science fiction facade out of something that's really just a piece of late 20th-century hardware. **And that gives a sense of reality to the books?** I like the idea that two different readers would have very different responses to this technology. Someone who had been to Japan would recognise this as a high-tech Japanese toilet and someone else might think, “Oh Gibson, he’s got a wild imagination”. **One character in the novel also mentions putting out a negative mental field. There’s new technology being developed to this effect...** That I haven’t heard of. They’re working on that? **Sony Research Labs are doing some work. Is it something you could see happening in the future?** Well, I don’t know, the future is wide open... I don’t like to say that anything is impossible. I love the idea that Sony is working on machines that produce negative mental fields, that’s very _Gibsonian_. **One of the main themes in _Iduro_ is fame. In the last 12 years your lifestyle must have changed enormously. Has that been a big influence on the book?** I’m very lucky because I’m a writer – the level of celebrity that writers receive is very low compared to sort of celebrity that a rock star or film star has. In the last 10 years, I’ve met rock stars and film stars, so really this book comes from observation of real celebrities than it does from anything I’ve experienced myself. **There is also reference to the view from Bono’s house. He’s a rock star that you know at this stage, and fairly familiar with?** Yeah, well, he’s one. I’ve met a few. There’s rumoured to be a curse on rock and roll in science fiction books – none of them have ever done very well, so I wanted to stay away from trying to depict the music. I wanted to depict that sense of the machine that surrounds it. I wanted a rock star who has security men and accountants and managers and three million other people working for him. **The whole cyberspace thing almost being not a revulsion from the body, but in a way distancing yourself from it. It’s quite a puritan thing, really. Is that something that is quite consistent in your writing?** The take on of cyberspace in _Neuromancer_ actually came from a reading of DH Lawrence that a professor of mine championed in university. He talked about that Lawrence mind-body dichotomy and what was essentially wrong with Western culture. In _Neuromancer_ I think it’s actually put forward as a critique of something we do with our culture. I am no longer sure that’s what I think that is actually happening. The way the Internet is going is very different from anything I suggested in _Neuromancer_. **On the issue of the direction of the Internet, the whole corporate take-over bid for the Internet, do you think the Internet could be the Big Brother scenario of the future, and the whole idea of democracy on the Internet could disappear?** If the Internet becomes top-down hierarchical in the way broadcast television is top-down hierarchical, it won’t be the Internet anymore. It will be something else; at that point it’s going to stop evolving. Actually, I don’t think that can happen. I’m hoping that it’s nature prohibits that. **The whole democracy side of it is very important to you as well: not being elitist, not bering only available to the wealthiest section of society.** Anything that increases ubiquity of the Internet is a good thing. There’s talk of a $100 Nintendo-style box that you stick on top of your television set and it turns your box into a dedicated web browser, and I think it is definitely a step in the right direction. As long as computers cost the price of a small used car, this stuff can only spread so far. I think market forces will drive the price of computers down. I think one day they will give away computers to encourage the sale of software. **That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed access to it either, it just a way of getting there, but it can still become quite elitist. Do you think it could become feudal with the big companies in control?** I hope that it doesn’t become neo-feudal. It kinda delights me that big companies haven’t figured a way of making real money out of this stuff. **You celebrate the culture of the hacker – are they important? What are their relevance?** _Neuromancer_ actually predated the culture of the hacker. I have to say I am not a champion of random vandalism. My son downloaded a Macintosh virus last week, this Trojan horse that ate his computer, that cost me a great deal of money. **In terms of immortality, people like David Zindell are writing about webware and downloading personalities onto computer chips. What is your attitude on this whole concept?** I’ve always found the downloading/immortality thing as vaguely laughable. I suspect people who download themselves will wind up running chip frying machines in the 23rd century. **In terms of your capacity to anticipate the future, have you thought you would have been better off designing these products you write about? You would make more money than writing...** I actually have a lot of fun in _Idoru_, more or less deliberately spinning out a lot products that I would like to see designed. I’ve loved to have a virtual Venice; I would happily accept one from the first software company that puts it together. _This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity._ |SEED|#8313| |:--|:--| |DATE|24.04.25| |PLANTED BY|[WILL ROWE](https://www.protein.xyz/william-gibson/)|

Пост 160942104989

Mon, 22 May 2017 12:08:23 GMT

https://untitled.urbansheep.com/_astro/160942104989.EhzcxDs4.jpg ([Noor - Charbel BouezCharbel Bouez](http://charbelbouez.com/noor/))

Золотой век и оптимизация культуры

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 09:10:16 GMT

В давних черновиках у меня лежали и ждали своего часа слова об «алгоритмической культуре», и за эти десять лет алгоритмическая культура пришла во плоти. За генеративной музыкой с гармоничными тонами и эволюцией «самоиграек» мы наблюдаем давно. В живописи нейросети разбираются и пытаются покорить рисунок через эксперименты с анализом характерных стилей художников и созданием на этой основе новых — и произведений, и стилей. Трёхмерная печать даёт искинам способ для экспериментов с пространством. В кино по сценарию нейросети Бенджамина сняли экспериментальную короткометражку.

По мере того, как искины и нейросети станут цеплять за все возможные предметы и темы, нас ждёт, кажется, великий ренессанс мировой культуры — сначала со шквальными волнами из непостижимых историй и безумия, из которых выкристаллизуются локальные оптимумы. Умение быстро, технологично и потому эффективно экспериментировать с кирпичиками выдаёт на выходе тысячи артефактов и произведений, которые максимально совпадают с эстетическими и творческими вкусами — отдельных людей, отдельных сообществ, отдельных субкультур. Процесс немного завязнет, потому что обратная связь от людей, даже если их миллиарды, идёт слишком медленно по сравнению с работой нейросетей, но несравнимо быстрее с тем, как культура формируется и развивается сейчас (не говоря уж о мире прошлого, где на то, чтобы произвести что-то из ряда вон выходящее, распространить и получить признание, времени уходило заметно больше средней человеческой жизни).

Благодаря работе алгоритмов на другой стороне у нас есть ещё и шанс увидеть автоматическую классификацию всего этого потока. Автомагические кураторы, автомагическая критика, генераторы незанятых ниш — все они ускорят и производство, и освоение с осмыслением. Больше мусора, но и больше вытащенных сетями на поверхность шедевров.

Развлекательная функция культуры с этого момента расцветает на 146% — каждый видит именно то, что нравится ему, и при этом сможет получить столько интересного в своём меню посещений, просмотра, чтения и прослушивания, насколько хватит свободного времени. И не просто набрать, потому что вместо статических списков «сто две книги, которые надо прочесть за жизнь» человек живёт и эволюционирует вместе с системой, которая подрезает плейлист под его время, вкусы, приоритеты и комфортный уровень сложности. Путешествия, прогулки, разговоры, места — всё это легко сопроводить аккуратными подсказками «а ещё посмотрите на это, и вам с друзьями стоит на выходных зайти на набережную, там расцветёт перфоманс с драконом».

С понятием «уровня сложности» приходит и вторая функция культуры — развивающая. Когда много разных людей постоянно сталкиваются с рекомендациями для эффективного обучения, экспериментируют с ними, и по результатам открывают следующие рекомендации, культурные коды и столпы неизбежно сместятся. А с ними и расширяется выбор студента. В зависимости от планов на будущее можно сделать акцент на каких-то географических и тематических якорях («восточно-европейская визуальная культура конца XIX — начала XXI века»). Или наоборот, быстро поднатаскать ключевые понятия следующего поколения, чтобы не выглядеть в разговорах и чатиках старомодным чемоданом.

Так из рекомендаций для обучения вырастает и третья функция культуры — коммуникационная, ненавязчиво передающая ценности и нормы. С возможностью быстро получить срез того, что и как любят в разных местах, многим будет проще определяться — и с тем, кто они есть, и как должна быть устроена жизнь, и насколько им лично комфортно там, где они оказались (и где искать тех других, кто сходен с ним по вкусам и ценностям).

Если первый интернет стал великим средством объединения маргиналов, то искины-брокеры сделают понятие «маргинальности» исчезающим. До тех пор, пока вся глубина человеческой культуры будет в одном клике, всегда найдётся кто-то, кому нравится то же, что и тебе. Их будет много, а эстетические максимумы таких людей будут приятно потрескивать в унисон при виде в небе китайского огненного дракона, составленного из тысячи пиротехнических дронов с биофидбеком, меняющих цвет пламени под вкус эмоций зрителей внизу на площади.

Пост 128772456634

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 15:20:23 GMT

This reminds me of an event which vastly contributed to my discouragement about academia, and which I think illustrates the vacuity with which certain editors of scientific journals treat the review of scientific works that may have taken years to perform. I was in a scientific meeting in Switzerland a couple of years ago and I was having a discussion with the editor of one of the two most important scientific journals in the world. He was asking me and my PI about different young scientists to know what we thought about them. He did not seem so concerned about the quality of their work or the insight they provided on the world. He was asking about their reputation. I remember a question that he asked very seriously but that was hilarious to me:

“And David Eagleman, I saw his book, is he a good one?”

The editor later proceeded to explain to us why he was inquiring about the reputation of these scientists: “I’m asking to make sure that I accept articles from reputable people. Because you see, at ******, we want to do real science, not Richard-Dawkins-type science.”

It is hard to express how many mental facepalms I have experienced in my head when he completed that sentence. A swirl of facepalms, a googol of facepalms +1, an embedded infinity of facepalms.

I remember discreetly shedding some tears for an hour that night at the conference’s bar, not because that man was unjustifiably mean to one of the most intelligent scientists in the world, but because I had come to the realization that our system of scientific publication is governed by people who have no idea what knowledge is.

Jean-François Gariépy в фейсбучном посте о том, что он думает о современной академии.

Пост 103451122961

Mon, 24 Nov 2014 12:30:26 GMT

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Пост 103356423092

Sun, 23 Nov 2014 12:30:13 GMT

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Пост 103112161498

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 12:30:00 GMT

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Только из тегов узнал, что это, оказывается, Надя Толоконникова

Пост 102286687864

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:45:22 GMT

Инцидент произошел в понедельник, когда депутат с двумя помощниками возвращался после чаепития в Законодательное собрание через Исаакиевскую площадь. Неизвестный молодой человек со словами «сейчас я вас буду лишать здоровья» снял куртку и попытался применить в отношении Милонова удушающий прием.

«Молодой человек попытался произвести определенные действия в мою сторону, но гибкое тело было перехвачено стальною рукой», — сказал Милонов.

По его словам, злоумышленник не был достаточно подготовлен физически.

Милонов о нападении: гибкое тело перехвачено стальною рукой. ФЦП «Больше ада».

Теперь ужасно хочется использовать в своём нанораймовом тексте эпическую фразу про «гибкое тело было перехвачено стальною рукой».

Пост 102191856339

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 19:53:29 GMT

The internet security world has for years had white-hat hackers—people whose job it is to test code for security flaws. It’s time for designers to adopt the idea. Next time you’re working on a long-term project, appoint a designated white-hat jerk; someone whose job it is to keep thinking about how a person or group with a bit of time on their hands might try to bend and twist your system for a few laughs. This isn’t simply asking someone to be a tedious Devil’s Advocate—it’s ensuring that someone is always thinking “How could someone fool around with this, and what would that mean for our end product?”

If you want to make it next-level, create a Jerk as a user persona, create some stories for them, and work out if your system is ready for them.

Your next project needs a white-hat jerk - Floate Design Partners

Пост 101081876459

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 15:16:43 GMT

Если кому-то вдруг непонятно, что случилось тогда со всеми взаимными обязательствами, то извольте: все всех кинули. Ваня Засурский не получил обещанных денег за сделку с ICQ, «Рамблер ТВ» не получил обещанных частот, а мне, разумеется, не выплатили ни рубля после выхода «Ленты» в прибыль. Так уж устроен русский бизнес, бессмысленный и беспощадный: на неисполнении обязательств тут делается больше денег, чем на любой коммерции. Если в «Яндексе» все устроено иначе, то исключительно потому, что он – спецпроект ЦРУ США, как нам недавно объяснил один известный эксперт рынка.

Антон Носик в книге про Ленту.ру