How do you think computer media are affecting our unconscious minds? Do you think that affects people’s creativity for either good or bad?
It must be having amazing effects on younger people, and I’m sure that it’s having amazing effects on me, I’m just not sure what they are. Think of the people on, say, something like LiveJournal, who are totally exposing themselves to their friends, who are like 22 years old, and they don’t know any different, and where is that going to go? Where is that going to go when those people start writing more novels? It’s going to be different. I think that maybe with what I’ve done with writing these very speculative novels of the very recent past, I may be able to sit down and try to look at MySpace and all of that and see where it feels like that goes. Although I don’t know; it may be too generationally specific.
Do you see any positive trend in current society that gives you hope that if we can no longer live without the Matrix, we might live with it more as the character Neo does—we live with it but are not enslaved by it?
The Internet gives me hope that way every day. I think that’s the big one for me. I think if we didn’t have that, I can’t even imagine where we would be now. To me, the Internet is as basic a thing for humanity to be doing as, say, cities have been. It’s that primal, that important, maybe more so. I think it’s a fundamentally new way of doing a lot of things that we’ve always done, and it’s also such a fertile ground for so many things that we’ve never really done at all.
To me, the Internet is as basic a thing for humanity to be doing as cities have been. It’s that primal.
If you could build a little binary time-travel switch between 2007 and 1967, and you toggle back and forth, the biggest difference is the Internet. And it’s one of the things that you just couldn’t have imagined from 1967. That’s a very interesting thought experiment, by the way. I recommend that to anyone: Sit down and choose a year—it doesn’t have to be 1967, of course, but it only really works if you choose a year in your own life—and compare it to your sense of where the present is and look at the difference. What most people experience when they do that is vertigo. It scares them. They say, “Oh, it’s really changed a lot,” and suddenly feel like they ain’t seen nothing yet.
Early on, you were fascinated by how people related to their machines. How do you see the relationship between man and machine progressing?
There’s a blip of that in Spook Country, where they’re sitting around in the coffee shop in Los Angeles and one of the virtual reality art people says, “Cyberspace turned itself inside out.” By turning itself inside out, the digital has become the constant; it’s becoming where we all are, all the time. And really the exotic and kind of weirdly unexplored area is the part of our lives that isn’t online, that for some reason can’t be online.
So in that sort of scenario, people might be in some ways personalizing and fetishizing their hardware. Think about it: You’ve got all this junk lying around that’s got really neat pieces inside it that are capable of all sorts of things—you might as well try to get in there and see what it actually does. Otherwise, you’re just living in this kind of molded little corporate surface world, where they are giving you a pretty little box and you don’t know what’s inside. And the truth is, there’s power inside.
