Neuromancer (idea)

A while ago, a Texas oilman who wanted to live to be 200 funded the cloning experiments that resulted in the first successful cloning of a human embryo. Granted, it was only five cells, but this scientific discovery will be used in the near future for medical purposes. We have taken one step closer to the future William Gibson imagined in Neuromancer. Not only does it point toward the possibilities of cloning human cells, but it also illustrates the fact that such scientific benefits are only there for the rich.

There does not need to be massive social upheaval, a nuclear disaster, or any such dramatic change in society to form the urban landscapes in Neuromancer. Instead, Gibson looked his surroundings in the early 80s and speculated as to how they would evolve.

Much science fiction looks to the future as a time where equality has been achieved, or at least there is more equality than the 20th century. The welfare state has evolved enough, and there are enough social programs that things have worked out for the better. Star Trek is an obvious example: technology can help us end world hunger, and eliminate money and racism and women’s oppression. But even in others, when there is cloning, or space and time travel, it is assumed that everyone will start being cloned and going to the moon, like somehow the government will set it up. The Gibson future, however, surmises that the nature of capitalism will only allow the wealthy to have access to this technology, and that the gap between the rich and the poor has stayed the same, if not widened.

Plastic surgery started gaining popularity in the late 70’s and early 80’s, which also had a profound influence on Gibson’s future. Rich people, particularly the Hollywood/Beverly Hills crowd and mostly women were getting nose jobs, facelifts, and breast implants. People had always been concerned with looking younger, but this was taken to new dimensions in the 80’s, and cosmetic surgery continues to outdo itself. I saw a guy on Jenny Jones a few years ago who had steel spikes implanted in his skull. It looked like a metal mohawk, and he could unscrew them to remove them when he went to sleep.

Also in the early 80’s, the “economic miracle” had taken shape in Japan. No longer was the United States the sole leader in important technological industry. Japanese car companies, for example, made a huge impact on the world economy. People concerned about the Japanese takeover of the American economy ranted about how people needed to buy Dodges and Chevies, not Hondas and Toyotas. Japan became a leader in electronics with companies like Sony and Hitachi.

Zaibatsus were also a Japanese concept. They were multinational corporations that often “owned” their employees in the sense that they usually stayed there for life. Zaibatsus had been around long before Neuromancer was ever written, but of course, with Japan’s development, they were accumulating more wealth and influence in the world economy.

The combination of all these factors shaped the future of Neuromancer. It is a world with immense technological capabilities. People can essentially live forever through cryogenic freezing and DNA reprogramming. They can look however they want to look, and even have superhuman powers. There is artificial intelligence, space travel, cloning, climate control, holographic technology, cyberspace… the list goes on and on. But these things are only available for those who have money, or to those who are willing to lead a life of crime.

It is also a world essentially run by the Mafia and zaibatsus. The Cold War had eventually turned into a real war. Germany (Bonn, specifically) had been hit with nuclear bombs. Neither side seems to have come out successful - we learn that the Pentagon and the CIA have been dismantled (Balkanized). There are televised trials. It is the end of the American Empire, and it seems to have been replaced by Japan. There are several indications of Japan’s global influence. People use New Yen even in the Sprawl. The hottest computer parts are all Japanese brands – Hosaka, Sony, etc. Case goes to Chiba City because it has the most advanced medical technology. Japan is the first country to outlaw non-electronic money. The writing on the controls of Armitage/Corto’s ship is in Japanese, so neither Maelcum nor Case can read it. The only Mafia anyone talks about, even in the Sprawl, is the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. The Yakuza is peppered throughout the book, constantly being alluded to. They have an air of ubiquity and eternity. They float in the upper echelons. The Hideo-like clone-mercenary who kills Johnny (who is, incidentally, also Keanu Reeves… he stars as Johnny Mnemonic in that horrible movie) is from the Yakuza. The whole story Molly tells about it has a ring of fate to it. You know it’s only a matter of time before they send an assassin she can’t beat. You hear things about them, like how if you make a mistake, they chop off one of your fingers. Cathie is amazed that Case, who she thinks is part of the Yakuza, still has all his fingers.

There are other small indications of the Japanese influence on global culture. When case looks up the Panther Moderns on the Hosaka, he gets this image of a boy wearing a mimetic polycarbon suit, and eyes with epicanthic folds “obviously the result of surgery.” Epicanthic folds are a characteristic of Asian eyes, where there is a fold of skin over the inner corner of the eye. When Neuromancer was written, people in Asia had started having surgery to remove their epicanthic folds so they could look more “white” or “American.” In Neuromancer, the tables have turned, and now people are getting them surgically created to look more Japanese.

Of course, the zaibatsus have the most impact. Early in the book, Case is shocked to see a Mistubishi-Genentech (notice that Mitsubishi has bought out a large American company) sarariman (“salary-man,” a word that was invented in Japan before Neuromancer) wandering around Night City. He can tell because of the tattoo on the back of his hand. The companies go to the extent of having surgery done on them to monitor mutagen levels in their bloodstream. (Though I’m not sure why.) Also, when Case sees a bunch of “techs from the arcologies” (more sararimen) at the fight where Linda is killed, he realizes that some recreational committee for their company must have approved it. He then muses over what life would be like as a sarariman. “Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.”

While zaibatsus in the 20th century didn’t legally own their employees, it seems they have taken several leaps closer in that direction. That is a frightening picture. Working people, in Case’s time, are like slaves. They are owned by one company for their entire life, branded like cattle, only participating in activities deemed worthy by committees. There don’t seem to be many other choices. Saraiman or criminal, unless you’re born into a privileged position, because we don’t really get a sense of fluid social mobility.

Nearer towards the end of the book, Case thinks about the mutability of the Tessier-Ashpools in relation to the immortality of zaibatsus. “The zaibatsus, the multinationals that had shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. …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.” So the zaibatsus, in Gibson’s future, have developed so far that they have control of the global economy and thus shape history. They also are indestructible, like the Party in 1984. An eternal oligarchy.

Bill Gates is almost a character from Neuromancer. He has more money than most people can fathom, and it comes largely from the tech industry. (As an aside, during the post-September 11 search for Osama bin Laden, the media was ridiculing people in Afghanistan when the American government was offering them $35 million or some such extravagant amount for the bounty of Bin Laden, because they couldn’t understand how much money that was, or what you could buy with it. And they say the gap isn’t widening.) He’s certainly a product of the Information Age. Everyone knows who he is, and what he looks like. It is unclear to me what his house is like, because probably a lot of what I’ve been told is rumors, but he nevertheless has a gigantic Straylight-ish house equipped with incredible technology. On New Year’s 1999-2000 he had a firework show on his lake that was more impressive and drew more people than the one produced by the city of Seattle.

We don’t get many glimpses of the lifestyle of the poor in Neuromancer, but there are enough for us to know that the living conditions for poor people haven’t improved much since the 20th century. We know there is still prostitution and drug addiction, and that if you want to live a lifestyle of luxury you have to commit crimes – in order to become a razorgirl assassin, Molly first had to make money as a “meat puppet.” In order for Case to play around in the matrix, he has to do hacking jobs for people, cutting through ice, et cetera. We hear about the hotel Case stays in with his girlfriend Marlene when he is younger, which is positively infested with cockroaches. The cityscape most people have to inhabit is a nightmarish “neon forest” with a “television sky” that glares brighter than the neon forest itself. People have to wear air filtration masks because of the pollution, so we know that industry has further damaged the environment. In Chiba City, most people eat krill-based food. This sounds even more unpleasant when it is compared with Freeside. Freeside is pristine, Eden-esque, and completely manufactured to look natural. We get several descriptions of things people now take for granted that are very expensive, bourgeois luxuries in the future when Case first arrives in Freeside. Outdoor activities like hang-gliding, for instance. Hand-woven fabrics, wood, wicker baskets. Not only are natural resources much scarcer than synthetic resources in the future, but these things are very labor-intensive and must be made by human hands instead of machines. There are descriptions of too-cleverly-sloped meadows and unnatural-looking trees. Case is disgusted by the smell of fresh-cut grass. To him, all of this is foreign. The emphasis is on the fact that it is all manufactured. “Nature” as we know it now can not be re-created by humans because that is the definition of nature - not man-made. Earlier in the book, Molly takes Case out for an extremely expensive breakfast where they eat real bacon and eggs.

The only other encounter we have with nature is the beach near Morocco in Neuromancer/Marie-France’s virtual reality. Here, in a scene we might find calm and beautiful, Case is terrified. “He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all. Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered.” He even starts crying and is so frightened that he pees his pants. He notices that the tide “had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any Tokyo gardener produced.” Again, he compares the subtleties of nature to things that are manufactured. But again, this nature is not real, either – it is a re-creation. The loss of nature and things natural is obviously something that troubles Gibson. The fact that people in his future are frightened by the isolation and calm of nature is meant to be frightening to us.

Common people don’t have any access to nature, constructed or not. In Molly’s/Case’s travels through the Villa Straylight, we also get the sense that very few people have access to or are interested in history or the past. Case sees libraries coded by the Dewey Decimal system that he finds completely mystifying. There are all sorts of things they run into that are familiar to us that seem irrational and crazy to Case. In METRO HOLOGRAFIX, all of the junk is just that – junk that nobody is interested in anymore. The rest of history is bought up by the rich and hidden away.

A lot of the stuff in the Straylight sounds like they just bought entire museums and stashed them up there – when Molly is walking through and Case is trying to observe everything, we get, “He had to satisfy himself with her disinterested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery, antique weapons, a thing so studded with rusted nails that it was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry.” Later on, according to Paul Brians’ “Study Guide for William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984),” Molly glances at a glass sculpture by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp titled “La mariée mise à nu par ses célebritaires, même.” That means “The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even.” The sculpture is apparently famous because it was cracked during transport, but it is familiar to most people with the cracks. This must have significance to Gibson’s view of history – over time, memories and meanings of objects are lost. Therefore, when Case sees the library, it mystifies him, while to us it makes perfect sense.

Gibson goes so far as to tell us that “Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power.” In other words, those with control over the money have control over everything. That is more the case in Gibson’s future than it is now. You can buy absolutely everything. Even privacy in the Finn’s “white room” is something you have to buy. Everyone refers to things by their corporate name: the Hosaka, his Hitachi, the Yeheyuans, the Mercedes, the Braun coffeemaker, et cetera. All of the technology I alluded to earlier is available to those with money. Immortality, even, can be purchased. The problem, however, is that only a handful of people have enough money to buy all of these things. Everyone else lives a relatively mundane existence, surrounded by urban decay. Under modern capitalism, no matter how much technology is developed, the social inequalities will remain. Unless these benefits can be available for everyone, how much have we really progressed? That is one of the questions posed in Neuromancer, and is certainly one of the main reasons this isn’t just a fantasy novel, but a dystopic vision of the progression of capitalism.