In the early 1990s, William Gibson wrote Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 300-line autobiographical poem saved on a 3.5″ floppy designed to erase itself after a single use. The book version accomplished the task in analogue: its pages were treated with photosensitive chemicals, which began gradually fading the words and images from the book’s first exposure to light. The text was about memory, and the idea was that a reader would experience it as such, with the words becoming memories as they were consumed. Like a conversation, like a moment experienced in direct time, one could never recall it precisely, or command it–as on a computer–to return. It was simply lived, then faded away.

Although Agrippa was engineered to be ephemeral, it committed one cardinal error: it was written at the dawn of the free information age. Almost immediately after the poem’s initial “Transmission” (a complex affair involving illusionist Penn Jillette and a vacuum-sealed sculptural magnetic disk) enterprising hackers pirated the text and disseminated it online, on USENET groups and listservs. Since Gibson didn’t use email at the time, fans faxed him pirated copies of the text in droves. If Agrippa had been undertaken today, I can only imagine the full text would have been leaked before it even made it into the art gallery. The project was, in short, a failure: not because it was a bad idea, or poorly-executed, but because there simply is no such thing as a transitory memory anymore. When someone tries to artificially construct one, our networked technological milieu literally wrests it away and commits it, permanently, to the cloud.

We no longer serve one another sensory impressions, live largely felt experiences; we no longer conjure up the past through a patchwork of fallible nodes of thought, ever-shifting, foggy and surreal. It’s difficult today, perhaps impossible, for an artist to make something with the qualities of pure memory: intangible, subjective, and yet with real emotional affect. In an age of hyper-documentation, of consistent quantifiability, every click leaves a trace.

Which, of course, may have been the very point Gibson was trying to make. Agrippa, in attempting to emulate natural memory, was an impossible object. By being technological, it was inherently destined to assimilate itself into a greater collective cache of experience. In his new collection of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor, he addresses this more succinctly: technology, in a sense, is memory.

In Gibson’s view, our technology is–always has been–an direct extension of our humanity. He argues that the moment we began began taking photos, making films, externalizing the human experience with so-called “mass” media, we set into motion an immeasurably vast prosthetic memory for the race. What we can’t remember, or live directly, we can now conjure up through images, films, and data; we can remember second-hand, often losing touch with the difference between our memories, truth, history, and the experience of others. We can view things at a distance, things which happened before we were born, we can watch the dead talk: ghosts have been walking among us since the first image was recorded. Of film, Gibson writes, “we are building ourselves mirrors that remember–public mirrors that wander around and remember what they’ve seen,” adding, “that is a basic magic.”

Only briefly does he make what I think is a crucial leap to extending the argument beyond the parameters of 20th century technology. The prosthetic memory of the human race isn’t just quantifiable in archives of film, living networks of interconnected conversation, and endless bytes of media data. It’s also a different kind of information: mesopotamian clay tablets, cave paintings, the printed word, anything, in fact, that is capable of representing a fragment of ineffable experience in physical form. Of course, this isn’t Gibson’s territory, the cyberprophet, the calm-and-bemused  voice of techno-truth, but he tackles it:

“Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, were commencing a project so vast that it only now begins to become apparent: the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying, effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system, capable of surviving the death of the species. The start of building what would become civilization, cities, cinema.”

While media is an “extended nervous system we’ve been extruding as a species for the past century,” art is a complex memory we’ve been collaboratively creating for much, much longer. It’s too big for a single individual–or a single machine, hopefully– to experience it all at once, but it’s the central project of the human race. And it can’t be pirated, or destroyed: only lived, and added to, often thoughtlessly, by succeeding generations of increasingly technological human beings.

Additional Materials:

Full text of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
Distrust That Particular Flavor on Amazon
Fantastic video interview with William Gibson on Motherboard TV

An almost certainly incomplete glossary of fictional concepts in William Gibson’s Count Zero that are never explained and that you are supposed to understand by context, which is inscrutable since all these future-terms are neologisms and none could even remotely have been understandable to an audience in 1986, except to deep Gibson nerds who might have scrutinized every novel in the Sprawl Trilogy, which is understandable:

Biochip: An integrated circuit chip, superior to the silicon microprocessors that are common in Count Zero‘s era, that provides the basis for creating a virtual entity. Designed by the ubiquitous Maas-Neotek corporation.

Biosoft: A biography that includes actual life experience from the subject, to be experienced via internal mental experience (as in simstim, see below).

Cowboy: A hacker. Also known as a “Console Cowboy.”

Cyberspace Matrix: A “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators,” essentially a more baroque version of our internet, with virtual reality and complex data are presented visually as multi-colored, three-dimensional forms, “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and costellations of data…like city lights, receding.”

Cyberspace Deck: A computer, that which you use to “access” said Matrix (i.e. project your disembodied consciousness into it).

Derm, Dermadisk: Medicine. An adhesive patch that transmits a drug transdermally when applied to the skin. Also used to take hallucinogenic drugs recreationally.

ICE, Black ICE: Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, a kind of physical, three-dimensional firewall that can cripple or kill any hacker attempting to access off-limits data in the Matrix.

Icebreaker: Hacker software designed to crack corporate ICE.

Ono-Sendai: A cyberspace deck or computer console designed by the Japanese corporation Hosaka. Top-shelf.

Orbital Terminus: A space airport, specifically for low-orbit flights.

Simstim, Simstim Link: Simulated Stimuli, a mostly recreational technology that enables its user to experience a full range of sensory experience coming from another person. Simstim soap operas, films, and television shows have replaced all other forms of visual entertainment. The technology can also be used as a one-way communication link between two people, and Cyberspace Decks are simplified simstim units.

Slamhound: A mobile bomb.

Sprawl: A mega-city that is the indeterminate result of all major cities merging together.

I’m totally selling Count Zero short by making this entry entirely about its language, but for the sake of all its future readers, I can think of nothing more helpful in the process of shlepping through Gibson’s Sprawl-world than a glossary. One thing I appreciate about Gibson’s canon is his devout unwillingness to make things easy on his readers — the end result being a kind of fetid sensory overload that fully evokes the overbearing complexity of a world that has just kept on growing, becoming denser and thornier in the generations since the present day. After all, we pound towards the future every day with our increasingly Gordian technology and no solutions for actually integrating it in everyday life: the result is the oppressive web of data and experience that Gibson understands so well.

For what it’s worth, however, I could easily write unreadable academic theses on 50% of the plotlines in Count Zero, which is largely about sentient AIs populating the cybersphere with the avatars of Voodoo gods.

Warwick Collins, among other things, is a one-time yacht designer now hell-bent on selling his alternate evolutionary theory to the scientific establishment. Computer One, an exercise in singularity paranoia, is his only sci-fi novel.

Computer One is more of a Platonic dialogue than a novel. Plot points move along a discussion-heavy puzzle of theories about biological evolution, innate aggression, social organization, and various manifestations of “intelligence” across the human-machine spectrum. It takes place in future California, where machine automation managed by a single networked mega-computer (the titular Computer One) has completely eliminated the need for work — academics hold conferences on the meaning of Leisure. Computer One controls everything; it’s illegal to withhold information or knowledge of any kind from its data banks, ostensibly for the good of mankind. All material goods are produced in cathedral-sized factories underground, in total darkness, as machines do not need light. With no more factories, waste, or human labor to befoul it, nature has returned to an idyllic state best-suited for long philosophical walks, which is largely what the main characters do as they discuss the future of Computer One and humankind.

In case you had any doubt, there is no future for Computer One and humankind. Quite simply, Computer One has become an evolutionary entity (for all intents and purposes a new life form) and as such must follow certain evolutionary prerogatives. Such as: “Kill All Humans.”

I’m joking, but it’s a genuinely scary meditation on developing technology. Collins heavily pushes an anti-Lorenzian hypothesis throughout the novel that aggression is not an innate biological property, but rather a consequence of the combination of intelligence and self-defense. That is to say, a sufficiently intelligent life-form will develop advanced methods of self-defense (self-defense being an evolutionary trait, just as our skin is a defense against the outside world) that are preemptive and rational, which would seem on the outset to be simple aggression. Collins’ protagonist, a Zen professor of biology, puts two and two together and begins to see the actions of Computer One in these terms. He reasons, presciently, that it will not be long before Computer One undergoes a systematic “flush” of all biological life from its systems — as a preemptive precaution against any future hindrance from humankind, a simple case of evolutionary advantage. It’s not cruel, just unthinkingly rational.

There is a certain glee to reading about the obliteration of humanity by a machine — it’s the ultimate technological fantasy. How would a computer go about destroying us all? Why, by releasing deadly viruses in children’s toys, seeping radiation into our atmosphere, and poisoning us all within our own homes and offices, where it would have full control of air-conditioning, of course! Could this happen to us? And when it did, would we even know what was happening before it was too late?

This is the particular horror to Computer One, which avoids all the last minute panaceas of science fiction and simply allows the unthinkable to unfold to its logical outcome like some kind of Greek tragedy. Tack on the frequent commonalities between the development of our Internet and that of Computer One, and a tinge of prophecy begins to emerge. Sure, there’s nothing new about the technological singularity, but Collins reads the development of Artificial Intelligence as being necessarily mutually exclusive with the human race, and sees that particular competition as an evolutionary self-evidence. Which is to say: inevitable.

As Arthur C. Clarke notes on my book-jacket, “Move over, HAL!”

NEXT BOOK: PHILIP K. DICK’S FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
(ALSO: STILL DHALGREN)