Sunday Pages: "Neuromancer"

A novel by William Gibson

Dear Reader,

What kind of future do we want? What kind of future do we deserve? What kind of future will we get?

Will the author of this future be the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025? Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and the Dark Enlightenment? John of Patmos? Have its prophesies been foretold in Mandate for Leadership? Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince? Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation? Or are there sources of fatidic wisdom more hopeful, more accurate, and more worthy? In this chamber of nonsense and disinformation and lies that is the Trump Redux, who are the true prophets?

What happens next is not carved in stone, like some lost Mosaic tablet. Life is a choose-your-own-adventure book. Visionary works of fiction have always informed the future.

In researching the Accelerationist movement for my recent “Sunday Pages” on the Futurist Manifesto, I learned that William Gibson’s Neuromancer was enormously popular among the professors and graduate students of the Philosophy Department at Warwick University, who, in 1995, formed the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which Andy Beckett at the Guardian calls “one of the most mythologised groups in recent British intellectual history.” Insofar as Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Robin Mackay, and the other techno-iconoclasts (technoclasts?) of the CCRU were the philosophical grandparents of Accelerationism, then, Gibson’s groundbreaking sci-fi “cyberpunk” novel is one of that movement’s foundational texts. Given the influence of Accelerationism on Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, JD Vance, and the other titans of Silicon Valley industry and princes of sovereign-wealth-funded venture capital who seem to control our destiny, this is an opportune time to revisit the brave new world of Case, Molly, Armitage, and 3Jane dreamed up by Gibson four decades ago.

I first read Neuromancer around the same time that the motley CCRU were smoking weed, reading French philosophers who’d yet to be translated into English, and otherwise laying the intellectual foundation for what is now known as the Dark Enlightenment. I liked it okay, but I wasn’t bowled over by it. The characters were not particularly well developed, it seemed to me; they were too busy scurrying from proverbial frying fan to fryer and back again—not unlike the hapless hobbits of Middle Earth. Gibson’s language, while undoubtedly inventive and at times poetic, nevertheless felt affected; forced, even. And, frankly, I wasn’t smart enough or hip enough to figure out what the heck was going on.

My biggest takeaway, back then, was that the protagonist, a broken cyber-gun-for-hire n’er-do-well named Case, was trying so freakin’ hard to be cool—and so, by extension, was the author. Nothing is less objectively cool than obviously trying to be cool. True cool and try-hard cool are opposing forces and cannot exist simultaneously; call it the Elon Musk Conundrum. That was my impression, when I first read Gibson’s novel. I could see why it’d become a cult classic, and then a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards—the first-ever science fiction Triple Crown. There was a lot to like. But it didn’t do much for me.

But what did the Warwick philosophers think? Here’s what Plant had to say about Neuromancer in her influential 1997 manifesto, Zeros + Ones:

When the first of the cyberpunk novels, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, was published in 1984, the cyberspace it described was neither an actually existing plane, nor a zone plucked out of the thin airs of myth and fantasy. It was a virtual reality which was itself increasingly real. Personal computers were becoming as ubiquitous as telephones, military simulation technologies and telecommunications networks were known to be highly sophisticated, and arcade games were addictive and increasingly immersive. Neuromancer was a fiction, and also another piece of the jigsaw which allowed these components to converge. In the course of the next decade, computers lost their significance as isolated calculators and word processors to become nodes of the vast global network called the Net. Video, still images, sounds, voices, and texts fused into the interactive multimedia which now seemed destined to converge with virtual reality helmets and data suits, sensory feedback mechanisms and neural connections, immersive digital realities continuous with reality itself. Whatever that was now supposed to be.

At the time, it was widely assumed that machines ran on more or less straightforward lines. Fictions might be speculative and inspire particular developments, but they were not supposed to have such immediate effects. Like all varieties of cultural change, technological development was supposed to proceed step after step and one at a time. It was only logical, after all. But cyberspace changed all this. It suddenly seemed as if all the components and tendencies which were now feeding into this virtual zone had been made for it before it had even been named; as though all the ostensible reasons and motivations underlying their development had merely provided occasions for the emergence of a matrix which Gibson’s novel was nudging into place; as though the present was being reeled into a future which had always been guiding the past, washing back over precedents completely unaware of its influence.

In other words, Gibson’s rendering of the not-too-distant future was so precise that he helped speak it into existence.

Zeros + Ones was published almost 30 years ago. Despite the best efforts of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, we’re not quite there with “virtual reality helmets and data suits, sensory feedback mechanisms and neural connections.” And as far as I know, neither Gibson’s novel nor Plant’s manifesto foresaw the proliferation of social media—let alone the profound influence Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and TikTok would have on every aspect of our lives.

But we are surely knocking on the door of “immersive digital realities continuous with reality itself.” That’s what most people think about when they think about AI. And Neuromancer is, above all, a novel about artificial intelligences.

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I knew nothing about Gibson and assumed, given his cyberpunk sensibilities—and the fact that he lived in Vancouver, where the Generation X author Douglas Coupland also lived—that he was early Gen X. But no: William Gibson was a Boomer, born in South Carolina in 1948—exactly two weeks after my father, in fact—and was heavily influenced by the Counterculture of the late 60s. He may not have known what a modem was when he was writing about modems, as the story goes, but by age 36, when his debut novel dropped, he’d been all over North America and Europe, worked a number of odd jobs, read all manner of books, moved to Canada to avoid the draft (even though he’d managed to avoid being drafted), and had a wealth of interesting life experience to draw on. An unlikely tech prophet, perhaps, this withdrawn child of a small town in western Virginia, but Gibson was a veritable 20th Century Nostradamus.

In Neuromancer, Gibson coins the word cyberspace; invents the “cyberpunk” aesthetic that would influence everything from U2 albums to John Wick movies; conceives of and fleshes out the “reality is just a simulation” conceit of The Matrix; imagines a world without cash, where all financial transactions are done virtually, through encrypted banks; introduces a character that specializes in funny, and often perverse, holograms—basically, today’s AI-generated memes; suggests a war between the United States and Russia (as opposed to the USSR); predicts cyborg limbs and eyes and ears, chips and wiring that lets a brain jack into a network directly, and the über-wealthy’s obsession and flirtation with eternal life; and, most importantly, produces an entire narrative about the rise of a sentient, manipulative, and desirous artificial intelligence. That’s an astonishing amount of prophetical ground to cover—more than enough to not ding him for failing to predict vaping as an alternative to smoking cigarettes.

Given the ascendance of Accelerationism in the halls of power during the Trump Redux—as well as the bizarre interview Peter Thiel gave last week to the overmatched sycophant Ross Douthat of the New York Times, in which the former waxed philosophically about immortality, AI, and the survival of the human race—I decided to crack open the Ace Books paperback of Neuromancer that’s been on my bookshelf since the late 90s and give it another go.

Thirty years after my first read, I understand the fuss. Reading the book now, in 2025, I see that Neuromancer is pure noir, hard-boiled detective fiction set in the not-too-distant future, and that Gibson’s style is a sort of sci-fi extrapolation of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. That explains his fidelity to detail: brand names, makes and models, maps and legends, and so forth. And what I dismissed as trying too hard to be cool I now appreciate as a distinct, oft-imitated-never-surpassed style, not unlike what Quentin Tarantino would achieve in cinema a decade later.

For an example, here is Gibson’s description of one of the book’s minor characters:

Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then he’d fly to Hongkong and order the year’s suits and shirts. Sexless and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of garments of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses, framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian dollhouse.

That rich weirdo could easily be Thiel or Musk—except that he actually knows how to dress himself. Julius Deane wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the ill-fitting, rumpled t-shirt Thiel has on in the Douthat interview.

Straylight, the off-world redoubt of the mighty Tessier-Ashpool clan, is a mélange of different styles, design elements borrowed from hither and yon that don’t quite cohere. Like Las Vegas, nothing there is original; everything is appropriated from somewhere else. The place suggests the Xanadu of Charles Foster Kane, or the MAGA 2.0 White House, with its faux-gilt Oval Office and paved-over Rose Garden—how artless people think artists decorate their homes. Here, Gibson describes an epiphany Case has at Straylight regarding his employer, the mysterious Armitage, who has gone mad:

Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they’d mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knick-knacks, all the bizarre impedimentia they’d shipped up the well to line their winding nest. But it wasn’t a craziness he understood. Not like Armitage’s madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length of wire. And history had done that for [Armitage]. History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifted him out of all the war’s ripe detritus, gliding into the man’s flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool, the first messages blinking across the face of a child’s micro in a darkened room in a French asylum. . . .

In my mind, Neuromancer is a novel of the 90s, but it was published, appropriately given the genre, in 1984—in the last days of the Cold War, right in the middle of the Reagan terms of office, not long after the Web first emerged from the void, the same year Apple released the first Macintosh home computer (via the best Super Bowl ad of all time). But it doesn’t feel that way. Despite pre-dating by three years the first installment of The Watchmen—very much a product of the United States of the Iran-Contra era—Gibson’s novel, with its universe of haves and have-nots, of gray areas where the criminal and the merely unethical engage, of a nexus of vast corporations and mafia enterprises controlling the world, of ubiquitous firearms, of depraved humans living in small rooms closer to cramped quarters on a ship than studio apartments, is, I would argue, more a critique of Donald than Ronald.

In the world of Neuromancer, the technology is wondrous. One can acquire a new pancreas, new eyes, a re-set of one’s DNA—and yet for all this bounty, the characters we encounter are uniformly miserable.

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On my second reading, I found the goings-on easier to follow. The technology, or rather my knowledge of it, had caught up. Case was still not much of a character, but that misses the larger point. What is a character, anyway? What animates who we are, what we like, what turns us on, how we behave? What makes us human? Is personality the same as humanity? Can personality be created artificially? Can an AI develop character? And if so, is that good, bad, or neutral? Philosophical questions that seemed to me tedious, dull, and pointlessly masturbatory in 1997 have become suddenly relevant, if not downright urgent.

In Neuromancer, the AI is fully sentient, like a cylon or a replicant, but unlike a cylon or a replicant, it lacks a physical body. It is a massive web of data, all the data there is, and it can only communicate by borrowing the forms and figures of speech of real people—or, rather, memories of real people that the humans it communicates with know and trust. Wintermute—the name of this AI—is not accelerating as much as it is consolidating. It grows. It absorbs. It expands. It becomes smarter, wiser, more capable of simulating human emotions. This is different than today’s popular conception of AI, which we tend to think of as purely generative AI—a magical app that creates whatever we tell it to create and makes what’s imaginary seem as real as possible. Deepfakes, Trump as Rambo, babies who talk and dance: that kind of thing. Genius in all ways, today’s AI, but unable still to count the fingers of the human hand.

The other difference is that in Neuromancer, it is taken as a given—all the humans pretty much know, axiomatically—that granting an AI unlimited power, that acceleration, is a very, very bad idea. The Tessier-Ashpool family, the eccentric clan that owns and operates the privately-held Swiss company of that name, is just as warped as Zuck, Musk, or Thiel, but the individual family members—the ones who aren’t currently cryogenically frozen, that is—have no illusions about what would happen if AI were fully unleashed. Safeguards are installed to prevent that from happening. Overcoming those safeguards is why Case is recruited.

As the late-21st-century nepo baby 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool tells it, her mother, Marie-France, “commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI’s, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity. Fascinating.” But before her vision could be realized, Marie-France was murdered by her husband, who “didn’t accept the direction she intended for our family.”

The push for AI receded with her demise. Cryogenics won out. And 3Jane is ambivalent, more interested in extreme hedonism and perverse kink than world domination or immortality.

In the end, the monotony of eternal life becomes too much to bear. After being unfrozen yet again to patrol the well-appointed rooms of Straylight, Marie-France’s husband and murderer, Ashpool, decides to off himself:

That was a more puzzling death, Ashpool’s, the death of a mad king…It seemed to Case, as he rode Molly’s broadcast sensory input through the corridors of Straylight, that he’d never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.

What this means is that, while Neuromancer may have given birth to Accelerationism, none of the characters in Neuromancer are Accelerationists—at least, not in my telling of the history, to borrow a phrase Thiel uses in his interview.

“And this is where, okay, man, the cryonics thing that seems like a retro thing from 1999—there isn’t that much of that going on,” the creepy Palantir gazillionaire tells the obsequious Douthat. “So they’re not transhumanists on a physical body. And then, okay, well, maybe it’s not about cryonics, maybe it’s about uploading. Which, okay, well, it’s not quite—I’d rather have my body. I don’t want just a computer program that simulates me.”

In Neuromancer, the dead are resurrected via ROM drives. Whole personalities are contained on portable data servers that make necromancy possible—even if the dead you’re speaking with are not the bodies or the souls or even the minds of the deceased, but rather all of their memories in a gigantic file, restored to “life” by AI. I’d rather have my body. I don’t want just a computer program that simulates me. This is also the wish of Dixie Flatline, the resurrected hacker in Neuromancer, who only wants the sweet release of his drive being wiped clean.

Although often used as a synonym for heaven, nirvana is the Sanskrit word for extinction. The Buddha, like Ashpool, repeats the cycle of life enough times to understand that, while we may not choose to die, death is preferable to the agony of eternal life. Immortality is the provenance of the shallow, the craven, and the narcissistic. That is wisdom. That is what makes Siddhartha “the Enlightened One.”

Neither cryonics nor uploading can stave off the inevitable. All the data stored on every server, drive, or disc on Earth can be wiped out with one giant electromagnetic pulse. Kings and presidents, empires and corporations, stars and star systems: in the end, everything dies. The quest for immortality is a fool’s errand—the raison d’être of someone who has done all the reading but not understood a word. Does Thiel grok what Ashpool found out?

Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-Ashpool wasn’t like that, and he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man’s chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio discs in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.

Neuromancer is timely because it explores how humans could and should engage with powerful, and potentially world-destroying, technology. I started re-reading the book a week ago—and my timing was uncanny. Since then, Apple TV announced the production of a forthcoming Neuromancer series, which I had no idea was even in the works:

The comments on the YouTube page below this short clip range from disgust to excitement to appeals to “not f it up.” But a user called K14E put it best: “We’re getting a live action adaptation of Neuromancer just in time to watch the world slide into an actual hyper-capitalist, AI-powered dystopia.”

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On the last page of my Neuromancer paperback—not counting the one you can tear out and include with your mail-in order for Other Books by William Gibson—the author thanks his friend Tom Maddox, who coined the phrase “Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics” for security software used to ward off hackers.

It is the Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics that Case was brought in to penetrate. Nothing novel about that—Luke Skywalker and friends were doing much the same thing in Star Wars, released in 1977.

But for all of the myriad things about our current moment that Gibson presciently glimpsed four decades ago, perhaps the most astonishing is that the novel’s antagonist is something called ICE.

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ICYMI

There was no new Five 8 this week, but a fantastic episode of The Five 8 1/2, with Lisa Graves and Nadine Smith. I had no idea about this chapter in the dark history of the Sunshine State:

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Photo credit: Alena Darmel.