Take a Road Trip with Cyberspace Visionary William Gibson, Watch No Maps for These Territories (2000)

 
“‘I probably worry less about the real future than the average person,’ says William Gibson, the man who coined the term ‘cyberspace’ and wrote books like Neuromancer, Idoru, and Pattern Recognition. These have become classics of a science-fiction subgenre branded as ‘cyberpunk,’ a label that seems to pain Gibson himself. ‘A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list,’ he says to David Wallace-Wells in a 2011 Paris Review interview. Yet the popularity of the concept of cyberspace — and, to a great extent, its having become a reality — still astonishes him. ... A dozen years earlier, in Mark Neale’s biographical documentary No Maps for These Territories, the author tells of how he first conceived it as ‘an effective buzzword,’ ‘evocative and essentially meaningless,’ and observes that, today, the prefix ‘cyber-’ has very nearly gone the way of ‘electro-’: just as we’ve long since taken electrification for granted, so we now take connected computerization for granted. ...”

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