The future is unevenly distributed
“The future is already here it’s just unevenly distributed” - William Gibson
My Cyberpunk broodings of late are inspired by the above quote. Love him or hate him, William Gibson is often hailed as the father of Cyberpunk. His books are some of my favourites.
I remember reading about Arthur C Clark (or maybe Isaac Asimov?) saying they had the idea of geosynchronous telecomunications satellites and wrote about it decades before people actually did it.
In the book “The Shockwave Rider” we have the first mention of Computer Worm, written by a guy to hide and cover up his identity in the network. This was written in 1976 ! Even pre-cyberpunk by most reckoning, and before people had the concept of a global computer network.
I guess what I call Cyberpunk, is what would have been considered Cyberpunk in the 1980’s. Just nowadays people would call it high-tech progress. The fiction focused more on the grit, the dystopia in the extreme, but the parallels exist. Just think that 80’s cyberpunk was about:
- Big multi-national corporates
- Global network (call it the ‘net, cyberspace, whatever)
- Focus on massive data repositories (Google as the index?)
- Implants (Pacemakers now the norm, joint replacements, stem cells)
- Hackers
I think that’s what the “Unevenly Distributed” is about. Many technologies, information and organisations exist, but it takes some critical mass for the common people to get a grip.