from tyeebooks.ca

William Gibson Hates Futurists

The night they started to broadcast television in New York, New York ceased to be what it had been before. Because everyone stayed home to watch television.

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Virtual reality was one of our most recent experiences of a future that didn’t happen. The one before that would have been interactive television, on which millions of dollars were spent. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted it at all. But the Internet wasn’t here yet, and people were saying, it would great if people could go back and forth with media, but it turns out the medium they wanted to do it with is one that presents the world, rather than a bunch of entertainment — the Internet.

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..the Internet, for the first 25 years of its existence, has been almost exclusively text based. And so [people] are writing with frequency unseen since the Victorian heyday of the British Empire, when there were three mail deliveries a day, and people wrote and communicated constantly. We went back to it. It wasn’t new.

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“The present zeitgeist, now, is only one news cycle long. Something could happen tomorrow that would throw everything into a cocked hat.”

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