From book tour promoting Gibson’s first book of non-fiction, Distrust That Particular Flavor
Tag Archives: Interview
William Gibson Interview
Excerpts from interview with William Gibson in the Paris Review
INTERVIEWER: Do you take notes?
GIBSON: I take the position that if I can forget it, it couldn’t have been very good.
“Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”
“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.”
“My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.”
“We know that something happened then. We know that broadcast television did something—did everything—to us, and that now we aren’t the same, though broadcast television, in that sense, is already almost over. I can remember seeing the emergence of broadcast television, but I can’t tell what it did to us because I became that which watched broadcast television.
“In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Let’s go rob a Chinese corporation—cool!”
“If you’re visiting the future, you really want to have a few of the “shit, could they do that?” moments.”
“In Neuromancer, the war starts, they lose a few cities, then it stops when multinational corporations essentially take the United States apart so that can never happen again. There’s deliberately no textual evidence that the United States exists as a political entity in Neuromancer. On the evidence of the text America seems to be a sort of federation of city-states connected to a military-industrial complex that may not have any government controlling it.”
“The Bridge is a fable about counterculture, the kind of counterculture that may no longer be possible. There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.”
“Social change is driven primarily by emergent technologies, and probably always has been. No one legislates technologies into emergence—it actually seems to be quite a random thing.”
“It looks to me as though that prosthetic-memory project is going to be what we are about, as a species, because our prosthetic memory now actually stands a pretty good chance of surviving humanity. We could conceivably go extinct and our creations would live on. One day, in the sort of science-fiction novel I’m unlikely ever to write, intelligent aliens might encounter something descended from our creations. That something would introduce itself by saying, Hey, we wish our human ancestors could have been around to meet you guys because they were totally fascinated by this moment, but at least we’ve got this PowerPoint we’d like to show you about them. They don’t look anything like us, but that is where we came from, and they were actually made out of meat, as weird as that seems.”
Life in the Meta City
I found the following in a brief Q&A with William Gibson (Scientific American):
“The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it possible for people who don’t live in cities to master areas of expertise that previously required residence in a city, but I think it’s still a faith in concentrated choice that drives migration to cities.”
I paid $6 for the PDF of Gibson’s article (September issue). A few nuggets:
“Cities afforded more choices than small towns, and constantly, by increasing the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts. Cities were vast, multilayered engines of choice, peopled primarily with strangers.”
“Cities, to survive, must be capable of extended fugues of retrofitting.”
“Relative ruin, relative desertion, is a common stage of complex and necessary urban growth. Successful (which is to say, ongoing) cities are built up in a lacquering of countless layers: of lives, of choices encountered and made.”
If I wore a younger man’s clothes, I think a city would be the place for me.
James Arness
When I heard that James Arness had died my first thought was, “How could he still be alive?!” It’s just that Gunsmoke was so long ago.
So I dug out this photo taken when Craig Watson and I “interviewed” the popular TV actor when he appeared at the Sikeston Bootheel Rodeo. KBOA news guys John Reeder did the recording and Craig (on the right) and I asked some questions. Marshall Dillon signed my Fanner 50 holster.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I read The Handmaid’s Tale 25 years ago and it scared the crap out of me. It’s the story of “a future America under the violently oppressive rule of a far-right Christian sect. Women are back in the home and divided into domestic and reproductive functions, branded by coloured robes.”
If Tea Partiers read books this one would make them say “Hell yeah!” The rest of us cross our fingers and say, “It can’t happen here.” But it can, of course. We’re closer today than when the book was published.
Interview with William Gibson
My favorite author, far and away. Just finished his new novel, Zero History. Here are a few bits that caught my attention in the interview:
- I find Twitter to be the most powerful aggregator of sheer novelty that humanity has yet possessed.
- “I think the concept of “mainstream” is probably becoming archaic in some sense.”
- “The mainstream is more digestible by osmosis”
- “I wonder if we’ll ever have consensus (again)?”
- “Generally, we don’t know what we were doing with something until we quit doing it.”
- “When I see Glenn Beck –to the very small extent I do, if I can help it– it’s like Devo’s vision made flesh”
- “I now write with the assumption that someone will google every unfamiliar word and term as they go through the book.”
- “The footnote now lives in cyberspace, a click away”
Mel Karmazin interview: “Fucking with the magic”
Mel Karmazin is the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio. Before that he was head of CBS Radio. For most of his career he has been known as a “Wall Street darling” for his ability to drive up the price of his various companies’ stock. Don Imus frequently referred to him as the Zen Master. Let’s just say he knows a lot about radio and advertising. I was struck by his description of advertising and frank assessment that Google was “fucking with the magic.”
“I loved the model that I had then. At that point I had… I was the CEO of CBS and I had a model where you buy a commercial… if you’re an advertiser you buy a commercial in the Super Bowl and, at that time, you paid two-and-a-half million dollars for a spot and had no idea if it worked. I mean, you had no idea if it sold product… did any good… I loved that model! That was a great model! And why …if I can get away with that model… if I’m in the business where I can sell advertising that way, why wouldn’t I want to do it?
No return on investment. And you know how everybody looks for return on investment? We had a a business model that didn’t worry about return on investment and then here comes Google. They screwed it up. They went to all these advertisers and said, we’ll let you know exactly what it is.”
Oooh. Reminds me of the old saw, “I know that only half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half.” The full interview is worth a watch and confirmed my feeling that a real sea change (in advertising) is taking place.
Who owns the interview?
I find this a very interesting question, asked and answered by Paul Bradshaw on E-Media Tidbits:
“Some time ago I was interviewed via e-mail for an article and, as I often do, after providing answers to the nine questions, I asked the following: “Mind if I republish these answers in full on my blog after the piece goes live?”
It turned out that the journalist actually did mind. In fact, in the correspondence that followed, the journalist explicitly refused me permission to publish my own answers before changing her mind and saying I could — but without the accompanying questions she had supplied. So who owns the interview?”
The thinking behind the question and Mr. Bradshaw’s post are worth a read for any reporter. And raise another question (in my mind):
Do I need your permission to publish an email you send me? Sure, it might be tacky… but once it hits my in-box, isn’t it mine, to do with as I please? Is there a legal answer to this question?
At a more pragmatic level, shouldn’t I just assume that anything I write and “release into the wild,” can and will wind up online? Are there enough lawyers to stop that?
Note to self: In the unlikely event someone asks to interview me, inform them that I reserve the option of publishing the full interview. If they don’t like that, don’t do the interview.
Seth talks “Tribes” at radio seminar
J. T. Gerlt (Program Director at KTKS, Lake of the Ozarks) recently attended the annual Country Radio Seminar in Nashville, where Seth Godin was one of the keynote speakers. From Country Aircheck:
“Best-selling author, entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “agent of change” Seth Godin delivered one of the best received keynotes in seminar history. Beginning with the premise that “ideas that spread, win,” Godin detailed the changing realities for mass media. “It isn’t ‘mass’ anymore,” he warned. And he laid out a new approach. “Music isn’t in trouble,” he said. “The music business is. The good news is, there’s a huge number of opportunities.” Those can only be met, however, by those willing to commit to innovation. “Timid trapeze artists are dead trapeze artists,” he joked.
The business model, Godin explained, is shifting to the point where the radio business will look a lot more like the magazine business. Fragmentation of mass media, in Godin’s view, means building strong and self-perpetuating communities he calls tribes. “More isn’t the point,” he said. “Tighter is the point.” The “television industrial complex” is being replaced by the “fashion/permission complex.” He suggested that stations will know they’re reaching their tribe with the crucial “anticipated, personal and relevant” messages when they get complaints from listeners when it isn’t sent out. Getting there means a break from the pattern of demanding success before making a full commitment.”
“Demanding success before making a full commitment.” We’re not going to try something new (risky) unless we’re sure we can make a lot of money doing it. Man, that sounds familiar.
“You can’t create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences”
The following excerpts are from an interview Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) did with Tom Asacker, a marketing and branding adviser and author (A Little Less Conversation: Connecting with Customers in a Noisy World).
One of the larger challenges facing radio?
“It seems that we’ve got a catch-22 on our hands, right? We need to get out on the street and keep selling in order to keep revenue coming in, so nobody wants to slow down in order to change the way they’re doing things, to really rethink it, because that might take away from sales time. I mean we’re putting out fires, and nobody wants to step back and say, “Wait a minute. Is there a better way of doing this?”
“It’s a difficult thing with an industry that’s been around this long, with people that are well entrenched in relationships up and down the chain. It’s tough to get people to change — to just say, “Put on the brakes, and let’s rethink radio.” But I think that that’s what needs to be done: Let’s rethink radio. Just like Steve Jobs said, “Let me rethink the MP3 player.” He didn’t say, “Well, we can do the MP3 player and slap this thing on it”; he said, “Stop, and let’s rethink the MP3 player.”
That’s a tough thing to do. It takes guts.”
Yes, it does. And he offers this rather brilliant (IMO) insight on creating audiences:
“You can’t create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences. You can only create larger audiences by trying to get deeper with smaller audiences.
Think about how to get deeper and make more relevant, valuable connections with individuals in a culture or a subculture.
Don’t think about audience size. Think about the depth of the relationship and how important it is and how valuable it is. The more you do that, the bigger the audience gets.”
That’s probably true of friends as well. Best way to have a lot is to be a good one. You can listen to the entire interview at Hear 2.0.