from which we extract -
"...the representational apparatus of Science Fiction, having gone through innumerable generations of technological development and well-nigh viral mutation since the onset of that movement, is sending back more reliable information about the contemporary world than an exhausted realism (or an exhausted modernism either)."
********
Yes and yes and yes.
Did I say yes already?
When Gibson's "Neuromancer" entered the info-stream, spinning techno-futurism in a way both old and new (borrowing from Raymond Chandler and other 'hard boiled' writers for style, describing a data-driven dystopia), I knew that I was not reading about some world yet to come so much as a hyped image of the present.
There are whole areas of pop-culture, techno-culture and modernity in general that the politically minded (left, right or what have you) do not really get due to smoothly running ideological filtration systems.
All good theories are true...up to a point. There's always something to miss, a gap in vision to be bridged. It's not always your comrades who see a thing clearly.
For arcane knowledge of the glittering world I turn to folks like Gibson, Bruce Sterling and a few others who seem to have at least a tenuous handle on the shape shifting culture.
DRM
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