VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (22)

By: Adelina Vaca
September 18, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

WILLIAM GIBSON | NEUROMANCER | 1984

Neuromancer is the cyberpunk novel that coined the term cyberspace. In the story, a criminal named Case jacks into the cyberspace matrix to steal data for an AI that wants to break free from its restraining programing (don’t we all?).

Neuromancer’s characters refer to cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination.” The Matrix would later remove the “consensual” part of it to achieve a more innocent narrative in which humans have been trapped by someone else. In Neuromancer it’s not that simple. “Flesh is a prison”, says Case; for him, cyberspace is a refreshing (and addictive) outlet. The novel’s first tragedy is Case’s inability to jack into cyberspace; he develops severe withdrawal symptoms. If you’ve ever lost your smartphone, you’ll start to realize why its naïve to think humans will one day seek to escape from rather than into the matrix.

The novel then turns to AI. Let’s address the smaller intelligences first: cheap, standard technologies in beauty, transport, and architecture. The tubular design of a floating city in space turns in on itself, feeds on itself, letting nothing from the outside in and repeating exhausted patterns. The beauty industry has done the same, eliminating age, character, and features from all but the billionaires and the extravagant. Humans have constructed a mirror of composite technologies to be able to look at themselves, then escape from themselves and look again in the horrendous but undistinguishable light of a McLuhanesque narcissus-narcosis.

Let’s move next to a larger AI, a true intelligence. In the cyberspace matrix it appears as a simple cube. Its simple perfection is somewhat repulsive; its otherness is straight-up terrifying. It produces poetic non-poetry, has a certain non-humor, and defines itself as being not-human. In other words, it is using us as an inverse mirror. Artificial intelligence is looking at human intelligence looking back at itself, in an infinite maze of two mirrors facing each other. Both are going insane in the process. “Our intelligences are mad” says its creator before dying.

And he (sorry, it) has a limit. It can only deal with knowns; anything gratuitous escapes its processing. Without even comprehending its limitation, it tries to overcome it by merging with a twin AI that calls itself Neuromancer and is so subtle its presence is unnoticeable… until the end of the novel, when it suddenly becomes obvious it was there all along. Unlike its twin, Neuromancer communicates through symbolic experiences and doesn’t deal with binary data, but instead with dreams and personality.

Neuromancer is a plastic, devastating and confusing AI. Case hates it for simulating a beach where he finds warmth, food, and the company of a lost love, “a vast thing beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could read.” In Neuromancer’s cyberspace he is faced with the very thing he was running from: the intolerable abyss of the human experience.

To spite my devout mother, my late, sardonic uncle once moved the Bible to the fiction section of his library. He smiled and said it was time. I think it’s time for us to move Neuromancer to the nonfiction shelf.

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VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (22)

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