Neither human, nor corporate

As I mentioned a week or so back, I started rereading William Gibson's Count Zero not long ago. It had peaked out at me from my shelf, and I kept thinking about a scene in which one character -- who specializes in helping people defect from one corporation to another -- is shepherding a defector across the wasteland of the America in which they live, and the shepherdee looks at him and says (I paraphrase) "Don't you find it scary, to live without a corporation?"

This is a sentiment which has resonated with me at times throughout my life, and in particular when working as an entrepreneur, lacking the safety net of benefits and social capital that comes from tenure with a large company.

But then I started reading it and found it taxing. Much of the language and many of the concepts with which Gibson works are so novel. He was a creative guy, after all. So I put the novel down.

But somewhere in there one of the protagonists of one of the three streams that come together at the novel's end reflects on Joseph Virek, the superrich guy who manifests himself through computer projections who is pulling the strings behind everything: "and it occurred to her that the extremely rich were no longer even vaguely human like the rest of us." (again, a paraphrase)

Then, a couple of weeks later, I read this Douglas Rushkoff article on "The Survival of the Richest" in which the author advises a few hedge fund guys on strategies for surviving the upcoming apocalypse. One thing mentioned is how Ray Kurzweil and others are seeking to upload their consciousness onto computers (and if you read Michio Kaku's The Future of the Mind, it is clear progress is being made in this direction).

Once more, I had a sense that Gibson had anticipated a lot of what has come -- as did other great sci-fi writers, mind you -- and I went back to the novel. And I finished it, and it was good. It stretches in places, asks the reader to make considerable leaps of faith, but then what doesn't. That is the nature of fiction.

I remember feeling that, of Gibson's trilogy, the Neuromancer had been the best, then Count Zero, but that Mona Lisa Overdrive, the last novel, had been a let-down. But perhaps it is time to revisit it.