Human Capital
Reading “golden age” science fiction one detects a project to replace capitalism with something better, from psycho-history to null-A. At some point this utopian project collapsed and now the only alternative to money is extermination at the hands of bugs and borgs.
The Soviet Union looms as the Big Other in Neuromancer (and later in Virtual Light) perhaps because Gibson can’t imagine anything other than capitalism succeeding. Capitalism has succeeded almost totally in Neuromancer, crushing democracy and instating a kind of neo-serfdom. Medieval serfdom was based on land ownership, while cyber serfdom is based on information ownership. In this age, you probably don’t even know who your king is, and Molly engages Case in her investigation to find out.
Sean Witzke prompted me to finally watch (the excellent) No Maps For These Territories, where Gibson says:
It’s a world where there aren’t families. It’s the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family.
If you went to uni you might recognise the kind of family Case is looking for, a kind of finding of where everyone’s been brought to the same level as you. Some summers it seems like those families are so real they’ll last forever, but then circumstances change, conveniences and alliances change, and the group falls apart. Case loses Linda and Julie, gains Molly and Armitage. Everyone can see it’s never going to work, but Case is living on periphery, it must be very different if you’re working for Sense/Net or the Turing Police. There, family must seem stronger, but it’s just the zaibatsu expanding to make all your time into company time.
And it’s interesting that this is a kind of fantasy that many young people have, and many companies exploit even today. The middle class is absent from this “young man’s book” because manichean youth can’t see how tradition can last. But this tearing down is often accompanied by utopian longing in its building of ad hoc families, and it’s sad that in this novel cyberpunk declared the end of history eight years early.
By Thorne Lawler, 2 weeks, 6 days after the fact
A number of my new colleagues have been propositioned by Google in recent years. Some of their colleagues actually accepted such jobs.
The outcome is always the same, to bend a classic horror trope: the techie vanishes into Google, and is never heard from again.
Stories abound of the perks of a job with Google: free employee food-courts, masseurs, laundry service, and impossibly baroque workstations costing as much as a new car.
As Dr Jon once pointed out to me, one misses the point when one calls these ‘perks’. These things are only there to ensure that employees never need to leave the office.
Yes, Google is a way of live, a state of mind, your new home, your family. It’s true. Think carefully about that.