Neuromancing the Code: When IT Changed

Posted on | December 27, 2010 | No Comments

During the 1980s, a different short of conversation about computers and data networking emerged. I was an undergraduate at the time doing an internship about Asian computerization at the East-West Center and I remember the personal computer with its IBM clones and the Apple Macintosh held most of the public’s tech attention with their associated meanings of personal empowerment and creativity. Also telecommunications seemed to be the linguistic domain of engineers and Washington DC lawyers. Artificial intelligence (AI) was beginning to be popularized through movies like The Terminator (1984) but the Internet was still an obscure research network. By the decade’s later years, the notion of “cyberspace” began circulating. Its meaning varied but it was spurred on by the continuing developments in digital network technologies as well as the megacomputing abilities of the new electronic microprocessors. Cyberspace was mostly connected with the “virtual reality” technologies that combined high resolution goggles with various gloves, pressure suits, and other physical equipment to simulate the visual world and the haptic experiences associated with interacting with it.

These simulated environments gained subcultural attention, particularly through the works of one author. William Gibson created and and coined the term in his novels to describe the electronic “consensual hallucination” which the characters in his award-winning novel Neuromancer (1984) used in his fictional narrative which posited a near-future scenario in which the new electronic spaces become dominant. In it, “console cowboys” connect to the network by “jacking in,” linking into the electronic telecommunications “matrix” via electronic velcro-held “trodes” attached to their heads. Somewhat like a flight simulator, the cowboy experiences a vast simulated space scattered with geometric shapes representing institutional databanks such as the “green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America.”[2] Their objective is to participate in the “biz,” the combination of network and street economies of Gibson’s future scenario.

Known posthumously as the “cyberspace trilogy,” Neuromancer and two consecutive novels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), captured the imagination of many of the young and technology-minded. Their popularity has rocketed the author to an extraordinary cult status as evidenced in a cameo performance in the Oliver Stone mini-series Wild Palms (1993), a story roughly about the near-future use of virtual reality in the broadcast industry for political purposes. William Gibson was introduced, by none other than Sex in the City‘s Kim Cattrall, as the man who coined the term cyberspace, to which he replied, “And they won’t let me forget it.” [3]

As he alludes in one of his short stories published in Cyberspace. First Steps by Michael (Ed). Benedikt (1993) :

Assembled word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. Neologic spasm: the primal act of pop poetics. Preceding any concept whatever. Slick and hollow–awaiting received meaning.
All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete in the interstices. [4]

In retrospect, Gibson’s articulation of the cultural and political dimensions of electronic networks seemed to have entered a discursive void where the only language able to talk about computers and telecommunications was dominated by engineers and technocrats. Cyberspace became a term a new way of conceiving the telecommunications network, one with cultural, literary, and political dimensions. It rocketed to the status of a currency. As the commercial, entertainment, financial, logistics, and productive realms of diverse countries and regions began to being woven together through the the world’s new telecommunications grid, the term cyberspace circulated, as I argued in my PhD dissertation, as a symbolic third, moving and finding its way into discussions about IT and telecommunications.

Cyberspace was a term that was elevated to a unique socio-economic position, although its value deflated significantly after the web and Internet became popularly used. Along with the term “information highway”, it helped change the perception of a technological infrastructure that had been the domain of staid telecommunications (AT&T) companies and Washington lawyers. But cyberspace went further, into the interstices of academic talk and publishing. But that is a topic for another day.

Notes

[1] Quote from Cyberscribe (1991) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Production. By Producer/Director Frances-Mary Morrison, Editor Jacques Milette.
[2] Part of a quote from William Gibson’s (1984) Neuromancer. (New York: Ace Books) p. 52.
“Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission
Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high
and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his
reach.”

[3] Wild Palms is a Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. production which was aired in the US as a 6 hour mini-series the week of May 16-22, 1993. It was adapted from a long-running adult comic strip in the magazine Details.

[4] As part of William Gibson’s short story “Academy Leader,” in Benedikt, M. (1991) Cyberspace: First Steps. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) pp. 27-29.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.

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