The Looting of Science Fiction

Since the resurgence of virtual-reality technology in the 2010s, much has been made of how tech companies evoked science-fiction novels to assert their products’ potential: Neuromancer, Ready Player One, Snow Crash, and more. But what most of these futuristic stories included—and what most of these present-day evocations omitted—were pointed criticisms of the very mechanisms that these companies were developing. Promise without premise, if you will. For Aeon, Ali Rıza Taşkale critiques a greatest-misses litany of these bastardizations, from VR to martial surveillance to space colonies. It won’t make you feel any better about the names driving the stock market, but it might make you feel better about the sci-fi that supposedly inspires them.

[William] Gibson himself registered the irony. In an interview with Wired magazine in 2012, he acknowledged that the cyberspace of Neuromancer – all corporate interests and information thieves – bore little resemblance to the early internet he failed to anticipate: the 1990s-2000s moment when a teenager in a bedroom could genuinely outcompete corporations, when the network felt briefly open and democratic. Gibson missed that phase entirely. But he was accidentally right about where things ended up. The corporate platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – that now dominate digital life are far closer to his original vision than to the participatory web that briefly flourished between them. Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.