Applied Semiotics

Reviewed in this entry:

"Count Zero" (William Gibson)

They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Dehli, slotted to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street named Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystalized hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.

"The eyes were green." The next time I teach a section of creative writing, I'm going to hand out (or blog for review) a collection of openings for a novels and short stories. If you don't have a strong opener, it doesn't matter how good the rest of the story is. There were a lot of people at Iowa that never seemed to get this. Near the top of my list will be the opening page of Count Zero. Along with Libra and Gravity's Rainbow, the 350-some word opener of Zero is just about one of the flat-fuck best opening moves you will ever come across, dear reader. Turner's whole world, the world that the reader is invited to join, it's all there on that single page. Like all good openings it's both a beautiful hologram of the work as a whole and the bright promise of things to come. Gibson uses a poetic economy of language, conflating neologisms and a precise, lapidary selection of high-context technical jargon with the perfectly mundane. The result is both vivid and opaque at the same time. Slamhound. Recrystalized hexogene. Brown legs. A stucco fronted pink hotel. Turner's world it real from page one. Lead with a good punch.

I just re-read the book this week, and experienced the rare pleasure of reading something I really loved in high-school, really loved in college and discovering that not only did I still love the book but that it had improved with age. It had "gotten better." Since then, I have become a much more sophisticated reader and writer (one would hope), my own faculties to appreciate Zero have deepened significantly in the twenty years since I first read it in high school. But there has be something there to appreciate, and Gibson delivers it page after page. I was struck with how many things he seemed to get right (sprawl, corporate power) and how many things he got wrong (nobody has a cellphone). Yet even in 1986, Gibson and the rest of the mirrorshades crowd would have told you they weren't in the prediction game. They were in the science-fiction-as-microwave-ethnography game, using an imaginary future to explore the forces shaping the present.

The overwhelming impression I am left with, however, is just how damn well it is written. Nobody can touch Gibson at the sentence level. He is as good as any writer working today. He has a writer's command of character and plot. He's a master. Sure, Sterling's steam grommet factory tour of plastic-spewing tailored bacteria, pogo stick drug smuggling robots, and lethal slingshot fights deep within the guts of an asteroid are the planetary gold standard for inventiveness. Rucker's chops as as an actual, working mathematician and scientist are unimpeachable. But Gibson writes.

A lot of hype and derision have been heaped on the cyberpunks. Some of it is deserved - they were arrogant in their self-stated mission to destroy science fiction's softy social-speculation ghetto. Gibson's stylistic accomplishments are one of the most potent satchel charges ever superglued to the gates of the Science Fiction Internment Camp. Of course, it's not arrogance if you manage to pull it off, and to some extent the cyberpunks did just that. Despite their punk anarchist tendencies, their efforts actually made SF acceptable as a "literary" genre. Along with the efforts of writers like James Ellroy, the "literary" label these days is more a question of chops than genre. Much of SF's ghettoization these days is its own fault. Gibson's prose style and total command of the novel form blew open the internment camp gates long ago.

Count Zero is important to me. It was always my favorite of the Sprawl series. Turner, the arguable protagonist of the book, grew up in what sounds like rural Georgia, and yet as an adult he was able to navigate the complicated, urban world of the future. I knew Gibson had grown up in Wytheville, Virginia, just down I-81 from Blacksburg. I felt there was something of Gibson in Turner, and maybe something of Turner in me. Turner was capable and cool in every situtation. He could deal with corporate types, but never gave up the country boy survival skills so many urbanites never seem to develop. To this day, when I pack my bag for a business trip, when I head out to do fieldwork or research, Turner's corporate mercenary is the mental model I turn to. Turner is a suit I can put on when things need to get done, another country boy that learned how to hack the city. In those pre-Web days, I clung to that one scrap of biography: a guy from a little town like Wytheville had grown up, moved to The City, and written one of my favorite books. Maybe I could do it too.

One morning during my senior year in high school, a classmate walked over to my desk and picked up the science fiction book I was reading. "You know what, Grant? You're a smart guy, but you fill your brain up with shit. This is shit. Try reading some Camus." This dude had been kicked out of Choate and a number of other fancy east coast boarding schools. He had travelled all over Europe and Asia. I'll admit it, I was intellectually intimidated by him, and harbored a sneaking suspicion that what he read was better than what I read.

He was wrong. Yes, a lot of what I read was crap. But I also read Gibson. Gibson is one of the people that taught me good writing.

Hail to the Count.

In the "Technology" section of this Saturday's NYT, there's an article on the rise of "true" web applications, or perhaps more appropriately, web-active desktop application replacements (wadars?). What's a wadar? It's not a web application like Orbitz or EBay. Plunk someone from 1991 down in front of Orbitz and the response would be "What the fuck is this?" But a wadar... plunk that same chrononaut down in front of Writely and they would say, "This? This is a really nice version of Word." Only after you had explained the networked collaboration, the fact that your files were being stored on some server out there in the white hot data cores of the matrix would an expression of gnostic horror would take control of their face.

Google has had the pieces for a totally networked "Office," for a while - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and Writely. Writely hasn't been rolled out yet (the beta site has it rated at "62% beta," for what that's worth), but when it goes live there will be a suite of office software that is operating system independent and totally free - because the operating system is the web and revenue stream comes from context cued search. While this is tectonically, seismically, geologically important, it is not news. This was Larry Ellison of Oracle's pitch way back in the heady 90's. Thin clients. Massive networked data centers. Multiple modes of access and delivery. To which I say, "So what?" This kind of thing has been possible since the days of Nth tiered software architecture. Browser technology has finally caught up with the idea of ubiquitous data through ubiquitous computing. The important thing is that something much more significant has caught up - user expectations of experience.

"Web as Platform" has gone mainstream. When you ask a friend if you can check your email and they hand you their phone, WasP is mainstream. When turning in your essay to your composition professor means uploading it to Writely (apparently a killer app for the service), WasP is mainstream. All of this is significant because it means the needle has moved on user expectation of experience.

If the game experience is now the default frame of reference for an immersive, high-interactivity user experience, then the wadar experience is holding down the other end of the bench. Users are arriving at websites today expecting the sites to do something. Ask them questions to help configure a car. Search for product more powerfully. Aggregate and process content based on their preferences. They are expecting the site to work in certain ways: moving data and input asynchronously. Remembering what users want and do and reacting. Life is an active, metabolic state. Web sites do not "deliver" anything. Websites need to help users work, help them live. It is a concept which goes as far beyond providing static product information as a word processor supersedes a typewriter. Both work in words, but beyond the layout of the keyboard there is simply no comparison.

Sites that simply provide a "virtual brochure" experience are essentially Colonial Willamsburg for the late 1990's. Sites that provide rich media interfaces for galleries of photos and product information are more of the same, circa 2004. The future of user experience online looks like a chimeric hybrid between an Excel spreadsheet loaded with all the data you've ever touched and a robot knife fighting game, all delivered via Firefox... except that Firefox is now your operating system, except it isn't, because you're on your phone. Wait, you're on a Lenovo-clone made in Thailand with a Tupperware exterior, the whole thing ginned-out in a inkjet fabrication plant for $40, running on open source software that you are continually tuning to your personal tastes. It's all just a door to your data.

Where am I going with this? This is the state of the experience gap. Users expect a game with a cinematic-like high definition world, or they expect tools - newly powerful tools that are increasingly replacing the role of desktop applications. Both experiences carry with them an expectation of doing something. In World of Warcraft they are forming social networks and building personalities. They are creating a sense of community and accomplishment that may not exist in their analog lives. On Google Spreadsheets they are conducting business, crunching number in a free groupware environment. They are getting things done. That is their mindset when they open up their computer, users are not "online" so much as just living. They are not creative professionals and developers caught up in technologies and branding. They are doing.

With our brands and our microsites, what are we doing for them?