<html>
<head>
<title>William Gibson</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar" CONTENT="no">
<SCRIPT Language="JavaScript">
//<!--hide me
if((navigator.userAgent.indexOf("AOL") != -1) && (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") != -1))
{
document.writeln('<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="../css/mac_aol.css" TYPE="text/css">');
}
else if((navigator.appName.indexOf("Netscape")
!= -1) && (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") != -1) &&
(parseInt(navigator.appVersion) < 5))
{
document.writeln('<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="../css/mac_ns.css" TYPE="text/css">');
}
else if((navigator.appName.indexOf("Netscape")
>= -1) && (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") != -1)
&& (parseInt(navigator.appVersion) >= 5))
{
document.writeln('<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="../css/mac_ns6.css" TYPE="text/css">');
}
else if((navigator.appName.indexOf("Explorer") != -1) && (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") != -1))
{
document.writeln('<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="../css/mac_ie.css" TYPE="text/css">');
}
else if((navigator.appName.indexOf("Netscape")
>= -1) && (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win") != -1)
&& (parseInt(navigator.appVersion) >= 5))
{
document.writeln('<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="../css/win_net6.css" TYPE="text/css">');
}
else if((navigator.appName.indexOf("Netscape")
!= -1) && (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win") != -1) &&
(parseInt(navigator.appVersion) < 5))
{
document.writeln('<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="../css/win_net.css" TYPE="text/css">');
}
else if((navigator.appName.indexOf("Explorer") != -1) && (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win") != -1))
{
document.writeln('<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="../css/default.css" TYPE="text/css">');
}
else
{
document.writeln('<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="../css/default.css" TYPE="text/css">');
}
// show me-->
</script>
<script language="javascript">
<!--
var myimages=new Array()
function preloadimages(){
for (i=0;i<preloadimages.arguments.length;i++){
myimages[i]=new Image()
myimages[i].src=preloadimages.arguments[i]
}
}
preloadimages('../images/nav_home_on.gif',
'../images/nav_source_on.gif', '../images/nav_books_on.gif',
'../images/nav_blog_on.gif', '../images/nav_links_on.gif',
'../images/nav_discussion_on.gif');
//--></script>
<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-64890602-1', 'auto');
ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>
</head>
<body marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" background="../images/bg.gif"><a name="top"></a>
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="908" height="161"><img src="../images/blog/header.jpg" width="908" height="161"></td>
<td width="100%" background="../images/bg_header.gif"> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="908" height="15"><table width="908" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="26" height="15"><img src="../images/nav_left.gif" width="26" height="15"></td>
<td width="65" height="15"><a href="../index.asp" onMouseOver="document.home.src='../images/nav_home_on.gif';" onMouseOut="document.home.src='../images/nav_home.gif';"><img src="../images/nav_home.gif" width="65" height="15" border="0" name="home"></a></td>
<td width="125" height="15"><a href="../source/source.asp" onMouseOver="document.source.src='../images/nav_source_on.gif';" onMouseOut="document.source.src='../images/nav_source.gif';"><img src="../images/nav_source.gif" width="125" height="15" border="0" name="source"></a></td>
<td width="142" height="15"><a href="../books/books.asp" onMouseOver="document.books.src='../images/nav_books_on.gif';" onMouseOut="document.books.src='../images/nav_books.gif';"><img src="../images/nav_books.gif" width="142" height="15" border="0" name="books"></a></td>
<td width="96" height="15"><a href="../links/links.asp" onMouseOver="document.links.src='../images/nav_links_on.gif';" onMouseOut="document.links.src='../images/nav_links.gif';"><img src="../images/nav_links.gif" width="96" height="15" border="0" name="links"></a></td>
<td width="104" height="15"><a href="http://www.williamgibsonboard.com/6/ubb.x" onMouseOver="document.discussion.src='../images/nav_discussion_on.gif';" onMouseOut="document.discussion.src='../images/nav_discussion.gif';"><img src="../images/nav_discussion.gif" width="104" height="15" border="0" name="discussion"></a></td>
<td width="270" height="15"><img src="../images/nav_right.gif" width="270" height="15"></td>
<td width="94" height="15" bgcolor="#665353"></td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
<td width="100%" height="15" background="../images/bg_nav.gif"><img src="../images/spacer.gif" width="2" height="15"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="908" height="28" align="left" valign="top"><img src="../images/nav_bottom.gif" width="908" height="28"></td>
<td width="100%" background="../images/bg_nav_bottom.gif"><img src="../images/spacer.gif" width="2" height="28"></td>
</tr>
</table>
<table width="941" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="89" height="22"><a href="../source/source.asp" onMouseOver="document.bio.src='../images/nav_bio_on.gif';" onMouseOut="document.bio.src='../images/nav_bio.gif';">
<img src="../images/nav_bio.gif" width="89" height="22" border="0" name="bio"></a></td>
<td width="852" height="22"><img src="../images/nav_bio_right.gif" width="852" height="22" border="0"></td>
</tr>
</table>
<table width="941" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="119" height="19"><a href="../source/qa.asp" onMouseOver="document.qa.src='../images/nav_qa_on.gif';" onMouseOut="document.qa.src='../images/nav_qa.gif';">
<img src="../images/nav_qa.gif" width="119" height="19" border="0" name="qa"></a></td>
<td width="822" height="19"><img src="../images/nav_qa_right.gif" width="822" height="19"></td>
</tr>
</table>
<table width="941" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="149" valign="top" background="../images/bg_left.gif"><img src="../images/left.gif" width="149" height="373"></td>
<td align="left" valign="top" background="../images/bg_text.gif"><br><br>
<table width="500" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr><td align="left" valign="top">
<font class="text">
<div align="right"><a href="../archive/archive.asp">blog archive</a> | <a href="../archive/rss.asp">rss info</a></div>
<h5>Tuesday, January 28, 2003</h5>
<blockquote>
<font size="1">posted <a name="90248174"><a> <a href="../archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp#90248174" class="small">10:29 PM</a></font><br>
IN THE VISEGRIPS OF DR. SATAN (WITH VANNEVAR BUSH)<br /><br />As
the Tupperware yawns wider still, and PATTERN RECOGNITION's "pub date"
looms (which sounds like having a pint or two down the Hog And Grommet
with that nice girl from Accounting, but isn't) I find myself starting
to have that I Don't Have A Life feeling. Pre-tour angst. As of next
Monday I will be on tour. So, in an effort to cut myself some slack from
the few precious civilian days remaining, I 'm opting to post the
following talk, which I gave last year at the Vancouver Art Gallery. VAG
had mounted an ambitious if oddly titled (The Uncanny) show around the
theme of "the cyborg". Since this seemed to be "the cyborg" as academics
understand "the cyborg", and not just a cyborg, or cyborgs, as you or I
might understand cyborg(s) I took it upon myself to lower the tone of
the proceedings with the following. I really couldn't get much of a read
on how it was recieved, but I figured these people were used to keeping
their cards pretty close to their chests. Meeting some of them did help
me, though, later, with the character of Dorotea.<br /><br />It's
long, as blog-entries go, and is probably way too basic for most of
you, but maybe someone will find it of some interest. This is the first
time it's appeared anywhere (and very likely the last). Meanwhile, I'll
have a little extra time to pretend I don't have to go on a book tour.
(Don't worry. Once I'm out there, I get all too into it.) <br /><br />MY TALK ABOUT "THE CYBORG":<br /><br />The
first intimations of the cyborg, for me, were the robots in a 1940
Republic serial called THE MYSTERIOUS DR. SATAN. These robots had been
recycled from the earlier UNDERSEA KINGDOM, 1936, and would appear again
in the brilliantly-titled ZOMBIES OF THE STRATOSPHERE, 1952. I have
those dates and titles not because I’m any sort of expert on Republic
serials, or even on science fiction in general, but because I’ve
bookmarked Google. But we’ll get back to Google later.<br /><br />THE
MYSTERIOUS DR. SATAN was among my earliest cinematic experiences. I
probably saw it in 1952, and I definitely saw it on a television whose
cabinet was made out of actual wood, something that strikes me today as
wholly fantastic. These Republic cliffhangers, made originally for
theatrical release, one episode at a time, were recycled in the Fifties
for local broadcast in the after-school slot, after half an hour of
black and white Hollywood cartoons.<br /><br />I
can remember being utterly terrified by Dr. Satan’s robots, which had
massive tubular bodies, no shoulders, hands like giant Visegrip pliers,
and limbs made of some sort of flexible metal tubing. They had been on
the job since 1936, which contributed strongly to the weirdness of their
design-language, but I had no way of knowing that. I just knew that
they were the scariest thing I’d ever seen, ever, and I could barely
stand to watch them menace the hero or his girlfriend. <br /><br />I
wonder now what I knew about robots. That they were called “robots”,
and were “mechanical men”. That these particular robots were the
servants of Dr. Satan. Did I believe that they were autonomous, or that
Dr. Satan controlled them? Probably the latter, as menacing-robot scenes
in serials of this sort often involved a sort of telepresence, and the
suggest of remote control. Cut from robot, menacing, to evil scientist
in his lab, watching robot menace on television screen. Evil scientist
closes giant knife-switch, which causes robot to menace even harder.<br /><br />Given
that I was watching this material in the early Fifties, I would shortly
become familiar with the expression “electronic brain”, which like
“rocket ship” was there as a marker of something anticipated but not yet
here. Actually, it already was here, and had been since World War II,
but most people didn’t know it yet. And that is where postwar science
fiction, in retrospect, got it most broadly wrong: all eyes were on the
rocket ship, relatively few on the electronic brain. We all know, today,
which one’s had the greater impact.<br /><br />An
electronic brain. What would you do with one of those, if you had one?
In 1940, you’d probably stick it in a machine of some kind. Not one of
Dr. Satan’s recycled Atlantean robots, but something practical. Say a
machine that could weld leaf-springs in a Milwaukee tractor factory. <br /><br />This,
really, is about what science fiction writers call “Steam Engine Time”.
The observable fact that steam, contained, exerts force, has been
around since the first lid rattled as the soup came to a boil. The
ancient Greeks built toy steam engines that whirled brass globes. But
you won’t get a locomotive ‘til it’s Steam Engine Time. <br /><br />What
you wouldn’t do, in 1940, with an electronic brain, would be to stick
it on your desk, connect it somehow to a typewriter, and, if you, had
one, a television of the sort demonstrated at the 1939 Worlds fair in
New York. At which point it would start to resemble… But it’s not Steam
Engine Time yet, so you can’t do that. Although you would, or anyway
you’d think about it, if you were a man named Vannevar Bush, but we’ll
come back to him later. Vannevar Bush almost single-handedly invented
what we now think of as the military-industrial complex. He did that for
Franklin Roosevelt, but it isn’t what he’ll be remembered for.<br /><br />I
can’t remember a robot ever scaring me that much, after DR. SATAN’s
robots. They continued to be part of the cultural baggage of sf, but
generally seemed rather neutral, at least to me. Good or bad depending
on who was employing them in a given narrative. Isaac Asimov wrote a
whole shelf of novels working out a set of hard-wired ethics for
intelligent robots, but I never got into them. The tin guys didn’t, by
the Sixties, seem to me to be what was interesting in science fiction,
and neither did space ships. It was what made Asimov’s robots
intelligent in the first place that would have interested me, had I
thought of it, but I didn’t. <br /><br />What
interested me most in the sf of the 60s was the investigation of the
politics of perception, some of which, I imagine, could now be seen in
retrospect as having been approached through various and variously
evolving ideas of the cyborg. Stories about intelligent rocket ships and
how humans might interact with them, or stories of humans forced
through circumstances to become the non-electronic brain in an otherwise
traditional robot. A sort of projection was underway, an exploration of
boundaries. And meanwhile, out in the world, the cyborg was arriving.
Or continuing to arrive.<br /><br />Though
not in science fiction’s sense of the cyborg, which was that of a
literal and specific human-machine hybrid. There’s a species of
literalism in our civilization that tends to infect science fiction as
well: it’s easier to depict the union of human and machine literally,
close-up on the cranial jack please, than to describe the true and daily
and largely invisible nature of an all-encompassing embrace<br /><br />The
real cyborg, cybernetic organism in the broader sense, had been busy
arriving as I watched DR. SATAN on that wooden television in 1952. I was
becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We
all were. We are today. The human species was already in process of
growing itself an extended communal nervous system, then, and was doing
things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a
distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead
men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the
experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly
and amazingly altered, extended, changed. And would continue to be. And
the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted.<br /><br />Science
fiction’s cyborg was a literal chimera of meat and machine. The world’s
cyborg was an extended human nervous system: film, radio, broadcast
television, and a shift in perception so profound that I believe we’re
yet to understand it. Watching television, we each became aspects of an
electronic brain. We became augmented. In the Eighties, when Virtual
Reality was the buzzword, we were presented with images of…television!
If the content is sufficiently engrossing, however, you don’t need
wraparound deep-immersion goggles to shut out the world. You grow your
own. You are there. Watching the content you most want to see, you see
nothing else. <br /><br />The
physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated,
has been an accomplished fact for decades, though we tend not to see
it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still employ
Newtonian paradigms that tell us that “physical” has only to do with
what we can see, or touch. Which of course is not the case. The
electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden
television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons
subsequently moving along that child’s optic nerves. As physical as the
structures and chemicals those neurons will encounter in the human
brain. We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of
artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it. <br /><br />We are it. We are already the Borg, but we seem to need myth to bring us to that knowledge.<br /><br />Steam
Engine Time. Somewhere in the late Seventies. In garages, in
California. Putting the electronic brain on the table. Doing an end run
around Dr. Asimov’s ethical robots. The arms and legs, should you
require them, are mere peripherals. To any informed contemporary child, a
robot is simply a computer being carried around by its peripherals.
Actually I think this accounts for the generally poor sales of several
recent generations of commercial humanoid robots; they’re all more than a
little embarrassing, at some level. Sony’s Aibo, a robot dog, does
slightly better in the market. Who today wouldn’t simply prefer to have a
faster and more powerful computer, faster internet access? That’s where
the action is. That augmentation. Of the user. Of us.<br /><br />Actually
the return of those humanoid robots has disappointed me. I’d thought
that everyone had gotten it: that you don’t need to go anthropocentric
in order to get work done. That in fact you get less work done, far less
bang for your buck, if you do. My idea of an efficient robot today
would be an American Predator drone with Hellfire missiles, or one of
the fly-sized equivalents allegedly on Pentagon CAD-CAM screens if not
already in the field. Though actually those are both cyborgs, or
borg-aspects, as they are capable both of autonomous actions and actions
via telepresent control. When the human operator uplinks, operator and
Predator constitute a cyborg. Bruce Sterling wrote a short story, in the
early Eighties, in which the protagonists were the Soviet equivalents
of Predator drones, but literal cyborgs: small fighter aircraft
controlled by brain-in-bottle on-board pilots, with very little left in
the way of bodies. But why, today, bother building those (unless of
course to provide the thrill of piloting to someone who might otherwise
not experience it, which would be a worthy goal in my view). But for
purely military purposes, without that live meat on board, aircraft are
capable of executing maneuvers at speeds that would kill a human being.
The next generation of US fighter aircraft, for this and other tactical
reasons, will almost certainly be physically unmanned. <br /><br />Martian
jet lag. That’s what you get when you operate one of those little Radio
Shack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an airbase in
California. Literally. Those operators were the first humans to
experience Martian jet lag. In my sense of things, we should know their
names: first humans on the Red Planet. Robbed of recognition by that
same old school of human literalism.<br /><br />This
is the sort of thing that science fiction, traditionally, is neither
good at predicting, nor, should we predict it, at describing. <br /><br />Vannever
Bush, who I mentioned earlier, was not a science fiction writer. In
World War II he was chief scientific adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, and
director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he
supervised the work that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. He more
or less invented the military-industrial complex, as we call it today.
In 1945 he published an article in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY titled “As We
May Think”. In this article he imagined a system he called the “memex”,
short for “memory extender”. If there was a more eerily prescient piece
of prose, fiction or otherwise, written in the first half the 20th
Century, I don’t know it.<br /><br />
This article is remembered most often, today, for having first
envisioned what we call the principle of “hyperlinking”, a means of
connecting disparate but conceptually involved units of data. But I’ve
never read it that way, myself. I think Vannevar Bush envisioned the
cyborg, in the sense I’ve been suggesting we most valuably use that
word. <br /><br />One
remarkable thing about this is that he seemed to have no particular
idea that electronics would have anything to do with it. He begins by
imagining an engineer, a technocrat figure, equipped with a
“walnut-sized” (his phrase) camera, which is strapped to the center of
his forehead, it’s shutter operated by a hand-held remote. The
technocrat’s glasses are engraved with crosshairs. If he can see it, he
can photograph it.<br /><br />Bush
imagines this as a sort of pre-Polaroid microfilm device, “dry
photography” he calls it, and he imagines his technocrat snapping away
at project-sites, blueprints, documents, as he works.<br /><br />He
then imagines the memex itself, a desk (oak, he actually suggests,
reminding me of my television set in 1952) with frosted glass screens
inset in its top, on which the user can call up those images previously
snapped with that forehead-walnut. Also in the desk are all of the
user’s papers, business records, etc., all stored as instantly
retrievable microfiche, plus the contents of whole specialized
libraries.<br /><br />At
this point, Bush introduces the idea which earns him his place in
conventional histories of computing: the idea of somehow marking
“trails” through the data, a way of navigating, of being able to
backtrack. The hyperlink idea.<br /><br />But
what I see, when I look at Bush’s engineer, with his Polaroid walnut
and his frosted-glass, oak-framed desktop, is the cyborg. In both
senses. A creature of Augmented rather than Virtual Reality. He is…us!
As close to the reality of being us, today, as anyone in 1945 (or
perhaps in 1965, for that matter) ever managed to get! Bush didn’t have
the technology to put beneath the desktop, so he made do with what he
knew, but he’s describing the personal computer. He’s describing, with
an accuracy of prediction that still gives me goose-bumps, how these
devices with be used. How the user’s memory with be augmented, and
connected to whole Borgesian libraries, searchable and waiting. Google!
The memex, awaiting the engineer’s search-string!<br /><br />But
in our future, awaiting the interconnectedness of desktops. Awaiting
the net. Bush didn’t see that, that we’d link memex’s, and create
libraries in common. Steam Engine Time: he couldn’t go there, though he
got closer than anyone else, in his day, to getting it.<br /><br />There’s
my cybernetic organism: the internet. If you accept that “physical”
isn’t only the things we can touch, it’s the largest man-made object on
the planet, or will be, soon: it’s outstripping the telephone system, or
ingesting it, as I speak. And we who participate in it are physically a
part of it. The Borg we are becoming.<br /><br />So
for me the sci-fi cyborg, the meat/metal hybrid, is already another of
those symbols, somewhat in the way that Dr. Satan’s robots had their
origin, as symbols, in a Czech satirist’s view of alienated labor. The
real deal is that which we already participate in daily, meld with, grow
into.<br /><br />The
big news in biology this week was the announcement that we’ve stopped
evolving, in the biological sense. I’ll buy that. Technology has stopped
us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush
never dreamed of, and neither, I’m sure, have I.<br /><br />Interface
evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least
conscious effort to, survives, prospers. This is true for interface
hardware as well, so that the cranial jacks and brain inserts and bolts
in the neck, all the transitional sci-fi hardware of the sci-fi cyborg,
already looks slightly quaint. The real cyborg, the global organism, is
so splendidly invasive that these things already seem medieval. They
fascinate, much as torture instruments do, or reveal erotic
possibilities to the adventurous, or beckon as stages or canvasses for
the artist, but I doubt that very many of us will ever go there. The
real cyborg will be deeper and more subtle and exist increasingly at the
particle level, in a humanity where unaugmented reality will eventually
be a hypothetical construct, something we can only try, with great
difficulty, to imagine -- as we might try, today, to imagine a world
without electronic media.<br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br>
<div align="right"><a href="#top">top</a></div>
</blockquote>
<P>
<blockquote>
<font size="1">posted <a name="90244012"><a> <a href="../archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp#90244012" class="small">6:28 AM</a></font><br>
THE MATRIX: FAIR COP<br /><br />I
was, as you can probably imagine, prepared not to like THE MATRIX. A
friend finally dragged me to see it in Santa Monica, when I was taping
NO MAPS FOR THESE TERRITORIES.<br /><br />I liked it a lot. I even went back to see it a second time in theatrical release, which is unusual for me. <br /><br />I
thought it was more like Dick’s work than mine, though more coherent,
saner, than I generally take Dick to have been. A Dickian universe with
fewer moving parts (for Dick, I suspect, all of the parts were, always,
moving parts). A Dickian universe with a solid bottom (or for the one
film at least, as there’s no way of knowing yet where the franchise is
headed). It’s thematically gnostic, something NEUROMANCER isn’t.<br /><br />Whatever
of my work may be there, it seems to me to have gotten there by exactly
the kind of creative cultural osmosis I’ve always depended on myself.
If there’s NEUROMANCER in THE MATRIX, there’s THE STARS MY DESTINATION
and DHALGREN in NEUROMANCER, and much else besides, down to and
including actual bits of embarrassingly undigested gristle. And while I
was drawing directly from those originals, and many others, the makers
of THE MATRIX were drawing through a pre-existing “cyberpunk” esthetic,
which constituted as much of a found object, for them, as “science
fiction” did for me. From where they were, they had the added luxury of
choosing bits from, say, Billy Idol’s “Neuromancer” as well. <br /><br />When
I began to write NEUROMANCER, there was no “cyberpunk”. THE MATRIX is
arguably the ultimate “cyberpunk” artifact. Or will be, if the sequels
don’t blow. I hope they don’t, and somehow have a hunch they won’t, but
I’m glad I’m not the one who has to worry about it. <br /><br />The
other thing I’m glad of is that a film of NEUROMANCER, whatever else I
might want it to be, definitely doesn’t, now, have to be THE MATRIX, or
even anything very much like it. <br /><br />AN END TO CYBERPUNK?<br /><br />Someone asks if I might please put an end to it. <br /><br />Would
that I could, but it just doesn't work that way. "Cyberpunk", which
you'll note I put in quotes or not, as the irony level in my bloodstream
fluctuates, has a life of its own. Has in fact been possessed of a
stubborn vitality since it first hove into view circa 1981. At this
late stage of the game, though, my belief is that, outside of a certain
narrow discourse in literary history, its best use today is as an
indicator of a particular generic flavor in pop culture. In the way that
"cowboy" functions in "cowboy boots", which generally has nothing to do
with anyone, particularly the wearer of the boots in question, being
any kind of cowboy. "That's kind of a cyberpunk video." We all know
what the speaker means. <br /><br>
<div align="right"><a href="#top">top</a></div>
</blockquote>
<P>
<div align="center">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com"><img width=88 height=31 src="http://www.blogger.com/buttons/bloggerbutton1.gif" border=0 alt="Powered by Blogger"></a>
</div>
</font>
</td></tr></table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="941"><img src="../images/bottom.gif" width="941" height="73"></td>
<td background="../images/bg_bottom.gif"> </td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>