Neuromancer by William Gibson with John Hill and Jesan Sorrells

And as a matter of fact, I never read this book before.

We agreed to cover it on the podcast today.

I'd heard of, of course, the author of this book.

His name floats around many circles that I am involved in.

And of course, if you're going to read any kind of science fiction in this genre, you're eventually going to run up against this person.

I had a little bit of a different experience than John with this book, though.

After I finished it, which was probably about a month and a half ago now, maybe about a couple months ago now, because I'm reading like 8,000 different things from a bunch of different projects that I'm involved in.

I got into my car and I drove to my local grocery store.

And I was pulling into the parking lot.

And this anecdote is sort of... where I'm gonna go with this book today, at least in my understanding of it.

When I was parking, I looked across the lot and I observed some of the pedestrians in the crosswalk.

And I saw a small child, probably no more than maybe three or four, walking behind his parents who were pushing a cart, looking very dejected and very upset that they had to go to the grocery store.

And this little man, was holding, clutching underneath his arm quite tightly, a tablet.

I could not see the brand of the tablet, but it didn't really matter.

Kid couldn't have been more than three or four years old.

And in looking around, of course, getting out of the car, looking around, I put my own, you know, communication addiction device in my own back pocket as I got out of the car and looked around and saw that everybody else was in varying stages of having their own communication addiction device either attached to their head or in their hand or, you know, as they were walking through the store, attached to their head, actually using it for a phone.

Now, the movie The Matrix came out in 1999 when I had just graduated from high school, right? And when it did, the internet that our author envisioned in 1984 that sort of set the table for how John opened us up today, that internet hadn't yet come to fruition, not in any kind of real meaningful way, not the way we think of the internet.

But it was on its way.

And The Matrix, at least the original movie, was a warning shot across the postmodern bow of the ship of culture and society of the late 90s.

Some of us, of course, heard the shot.

That has been our author today.

Others were confused by the sound of the shot, and many of us ignored it altogether and were completely and utterly surprised when we wound up in the space that we're in right now.

Timothy Berners-Lee turned on the commercial internet in 1989.

It was a seminal year that included the crushing of rebellion at Tiananmen Square and the falling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism and the beginnings of the post-Cold War peace dividend that the boomers had been promised by the generations that fought the Cold War and World War II and Korea and Vietnam before them.

37 years later, however, after all of that has happened, After social media and 240 characters and cryptocurrency and self-driving cars, instant shipping, and here we are right on the cusp of AI, we all live, even that kid in the grocery store lives now, in the fully realized backwash of the author of our book today's nightmare.