William Gibson Interview Wired. Part 3

The first part is about why science fiction writers almost always misinterpret the future.
The second part is about Twitter, vintage watches and Internet addiction.

If punk appeared today, and not in 1977, how would it penetrate the mass consciousness?
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“He would have been posted on YouTube right away. - assumes William Gibson. - Among trillions of other things that are loaded there daily. And then how could you find him? ”

In the third and final part of the interview, the eminent science fiction writer talks about punk rock, Internet memes, the first steps of recording and the sensational clip of the South Korean rapper Psy " Gangnam Style ". The movie, which collected 170 million views at the time of recording the interview, hooked him.

“... something generated by a subculture that we would never know about in our life, goes to YouTube, suddenly gets millions and millions of views, and people around the world say to each other:“ Wow! Did you see it? ”Said Gibson.

It is unlikely, he believes, that this video will become something more than an occasional burst on the radar of pop culture, which will be quickly forgotten, supplanted by another viral meme. “But,” he says with a smile, “you know, I want to watch his next video. Be sure to see the people on Twitter will not let me miss it. "

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Wired: In the essay from the book " Punk: An Aesthetic " you wrote that punk was the last pre-digital counterculture. Interesting idea. Can you explain in more detail?

Gibson: It was pre-digital in the sense that in 1977 there were no punk websites [laughs]. There was no web itself in which these sites could be. There was nothing like that in 1977. The music was on records and tapes. There was no mp3. There was no such distribution opportunities. The verbal component of the counterculture was spread in the form of samizdat magazines that were molded manually and replicated on copiers. And then they were sent by mail or sold in small shops with plates and reels. It was a pre-digital era. There was no Internet in which to publish all this. The expansion of culture took place rather quickly, but much more slowly than now.

I think - and this is hardly just nostalgia - that thanks to this, the punk culture was initially thicker, more concentrated. She could not travel from London to Toronto at the speed of light. Someone had to come to Toronto or somewhere else with a backpack full of discs, tapes and magazines, and show it all, physically show other people. What happened. Compared to how news is spreading now, this is the stone age. The real stone age! This was something special, although for those who look from the future, it is not at all clear what it is. In 1977, everything was felt differently than, say, in 2007.

Wired: And what if punk rock didn’t arise then, but now? What would be the differences?

Gibson: He would have been posted on YouTube right away. Among the trillions of other things that are loaded there daily. And then how could one find him? How could he become a Thing, how would a subculture be formed? I think today this is not at all the way it used to be. Bohemia, the countercultural get-together, always somehow separated itself from the rest of society. She was an independent state in the cultural landscape of Western industrial civilization. She was a mysterious country, in which most of the way is custom. To get into it, you had to pay a serious price. And it was cool and exciting. How is this happening now? Where and how to get tickets to this country? I am sure that it still exists, although I already have no first-hand information. But for sure today a lot different.

My first encounter with punk rock happened when I came to Toronto and went to a couple of parties, which, as it turned out, were the first punk concerts. There were bands from afar, even from Los Angeles, and they played music that I had never heard before. I heard a lot of them and went home to Vancouver thinking: “What was it like?”

And then one of my friends, who studied at the Art School in London, returned from there with a backpack, which contained a bunch of punk magazines and a complete collection of Sex Pistols recordings. When he shook it all out of his backpack, the very name of the Sex Pistols was completely unknown to me, like no one else in Vancouver. And by the end of the evening we talked about them only [laughs]. This is not at all the same thing as waking up one morning and looking at the main Boing Boing page.

Wired: Perhaps if you had a punk today, it would have become a meme, and a viral video from the Sex Pistols would collect millions of views on YouTube.

Gibson: Have you seen the Korean clip "Gangnam Style"? Just something like that — something generated by a subculture that we would never know about in our life, goes to YouTube, suddenly gets millions and millions of views, and people around the world say to each other: “Wow! Have you seen it? ”Very similar to how it all began then. Although it is unlikely it will have the exact same continuation. You never know what to expect. But you know, I want to watch their next video [laughs]. Be sure to see the people on Twitter will not let me miss it.



Wired: You had interesting ideas about the origin of the sound recording, how strange it was, perhaps, to suddenly hear the recorded sound. How surreal it was to hear music from an inanimate object.

Gibson: When people first heard it, they were shocked, judging by the reviews that came down to us. And today it is much harder to imagine a world in which there is no sound recording than many worlds made up by science fiction with their incredible technology.

The recording industry played a huge role for us in the old days, and we took it for granted, but now it is no longer there, it has become completely different than before. Now you cannot become a millionaire simply by selling records. You have to trade in paraphernalia and souvenirs or constantly give concerts.

When I studied vintage mechanical watches, I learned one thing. The epoch of this watch lasted from about 1914 to 1970. Yes, they continue to produce them now, but this makes no sense anymore, because a digital watch for a couple of dollars is much more accurate than any mechanical watch, except the best ones, which stand like a machine. They, too, were all taken for granted, it was a ubiquitous device that counted the exact time for the whole world, and it was absolutely necessary. And now the mechanical clock is no longer there, they have been supplanted by more efficient and cheaper counterparts.

Likewise, the era of sound recording - in the form in which it existed during the time of the Beatles - came to an end when audio tapes appeared. To make a copy of the plate, we needed a complex and expensive equipment. And the tapes destroyed the monopoly and everything went downhill ... I don't know yet how it will end with paper books, but definitely great changes are waiting for us.