Excerpt from Gibson's “Academy Leader”

<...> Once perfected, communication technologies are unlikely to die entirely; they are likely to shrink in order to occupy their own special niche in the global info-structure. Lamp radio was supposed to be used for transmitting optimum sowing dates to remote villages. The typewriter is one of the many modern dinosaurs of the city office, it still shines with inexhaustible samizdat potential in the backwaters of the century, the Victorian answer to the desktop publishing house. Banks in countless third world villages until then lined up daily totals on calculators winding meters of long strange paper serpentine with barely visible indigo-colored symbols until the Soviet Union sold off new technological toys to them, becoming a reliable supplier of vacuum tubes.

The eight-way audio cassette format survived in the truckers of South America as a carrier of country music and audio
pornography
The street is looking for its own use of things - an application that their manufacturers cannot even imagine. The voice recorder, originally intended for recording speech, becomes a revolutionary mediator of a magnetizdat, making the secret distribution of forbidden political speeches possible in Poland and China. Beeper and cell phones have become economic tools in the growing competitive market for illicit pharmaceutical products.

Other technological artifacts suddenly become a means of communication ... The aerosol engendered the urban graffiti movement. Soviet rockers printed home-made records from used X-rays. <...>