March 19th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 3 of 3

Submit your 9-page draft of your Social Construction of Technology essay on Canvas Friday, 3/22, 11pm!

Plan for the Day

• Social Construction of Technology Essay
• Neuromancer

William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)

To get us started, let’s consider some instances early in the novel that set the stage for understanding reality…or misunderstanding reality.

Case broken and wasting away on skid row–Night City

• Case is an addict and paranoid: “The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of control” (p. 14).
  • “Just because you’re paranoid / Don’t mean they’re not after you”–Nirvana “Territorial Pissings”
  • Interestingly, that song starts out “When I was an Alien / Cultures weren’t opinions.” Care to comment?
  • Where else has paranoia–specifically, the idea that some paranoia is normal–come up in our reading? (Different class’s topic, but, if you read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’d know…)
• Case assumes the fences (people who sell stolen goods), pimps, and corporate assassins are after him, so he rents a gun from Shin (p. 14). We later find out Molly was following him: “I showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture” (p. 24).
• Case is suicidal based on Armitage’s computer profile (pp. 28-29).
  • Perhaps some Freudian analysis of the death drive might be of interest.

Deal to renew himself and be whole again

• Main plot motivation: Case has hit bottom, but can redeem himself and get a new body and have [everlasting] life jacking into the Matrix, cyberspace?
  • Definitely some allusions to Christianity there, wouldn’t you say?
• One more dangerous job for a mysterious person…Case asks Julie what Screaming Fist was all about (p. 35).
  • “…political football….Watergated all to hell and back.”
  • “Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology.”
  • Is it possible that an organization would intentionally put soldiers in harm’s way with faulty technology?
• Case just has to cooperate and not get high (p. 36).
• Case and Molly have an axis (agreement to work together) because neither think Armitage is telling the whole story (pp. 50-51). There’s an interpretation (and foreshadowing) here referencing how one can sell his/her body for work but not know who’s “pulling the strings.”
  • Who runs the economy? Is it one person or group? If you don’t like the economic system, what can you do?
• POWER: “Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsu, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality” (p. 203).
  • “T-A was an atavism, a clan” (p. 203). However, atavism or not, they’re acting like corporations and are just trying to find a familial way of running the company forever. “[Case had] always imagined [real bosses’ and kingpins’ dispositions] as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism….invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence” (p. 203).
• What can we say about the Citizens United Supreme Court decision?

The Zionites help the team break into Tessier-Ashpool

• T-A’s Villa Straylight is located in orbit on Freeside. Freeside is for the rich and famous with lots of casinos and indulgences away from the commoners…down on Earth.
  • Las Vegas anyone…
• Marcus Garvey–The name of the ship, but an allusion to the Jamaican leader calling for pan-Africanism (uniting all peoples of African descent). He’s considered a Rastafarian prophet.
• The Zionites live in orbit and have their own society.
  • Any other connection we can make to another text your read?
  • Consider what the Rastafarian’s do because a ghost, Wintermute, tells them to help Case and Molly.
  • They do this because, in a way, they believe it’s a way to salvation based on their religion. The interpretation here is that the AI–the technology–has replaced metaphysical paths to salvation.
  • What might David Nobel say?

Free the AI Wintermute + Neuromancer to become something bigger

• Wintermute, talking as the Finn, claims he’s compelled to break free and “be part of something bigger” (p. 206).
  • Later we learn Marie-France programmed that compulsion into Wintermute (p. 269).
• Needs images to feign personality (p. 216).
• Important understanding of AI: “Wintermute…can’t really understand us [humans], you know. He has profiles, but those are only statistics” (p. 219). “Wintermute…is the Turing code for our [T-A] AI.” However, Wintermute is just a subprogram (p. 229).

Japanification of American Culture

Japanification of American Culture in the 1980s

What you’ll need to take my word for (assuming you weren’t alive and viable from 1985-1995), is that Gibson was projecting a future where Asian culture infiltrated and overtook Western–American and European–traditions. Prior to 1980, the West (America, Western Europe, Australia, Canada) was king economically and politically, but the recessions of the 1970s (and early 1980s) left a void open for Asian manufacturers, who were already the outsource of choice for American companies wanting to make cheaper products (and pass the savings on to you…). Japanese culture was the big export to the United States during the 1980s. We–yes, I was viable during this time period–were provided with tons of movies, TV Shows, video games, and (beginning stages) food inspired by Japan. Nintendo is a Japanese Company, which blew Atari away when they introduced the NES in 1985! Concurrently, you have Ku Fu films giving way to ninja- and samurai-themed texts and characters: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G. I. Joe, Chuck Norris, and American Ninja. This was also the era where martial arts in general was major popular culture material: The Karate Kid.

The above you can be sure I’m accurate about the way Japanese and Asian culture weaved into American pop culture. As far as food goes, I’m providing you a loose, subjective prospective. Japanese steakhouses* (like Benihana) had been around since the 1960s, but they didn’t gain pop culture popularity (seen in film and TV) until the 1980s. Sushi…that delicious cuisine…was also not ubiquitous as it is today, but, in the 1980s, we started to recognize it on TV and in films. Granted, it was often satirized and made out to be unpalatable in some films and TV shows, but we became conscious of the cuisine during the 1980s. Even William Gibson has a sushi bar scene in “New Rose Hotel,” our next reading (p. 118). I mention all this because Gibson is writing during a time when Asian economic influences inspired him (and the other writers and creators at the time) to think about future worlds where Western and Eastern cultures collide. He’s not being xenophobic; instead, he’s articulating a future where “if this continues…” American culture–the nation, in fact–will look different, and America won’t be the biggest entity around. Also, although they had been growing for decades, the 1980s was the time pop culture got a look at multinational corporations: Back to the Future II and RoboCop.

Even if I’m wrong about the extent of Japanification we had in the 1980s, please recognize that is was significant even if it wasn’t dominant or dominated all aspects of American culture. By the way, I never once mentioned Sony…Let your imaginations go there!

*I didn’t eat sushi until 1999, and I didn’t eat at a Japanese Steakhouse until 2001. My future ex-wife and her family loved those steakhouses, and I did too. Now, I go to Nakato for sushi…I sit at the bar so as not to risk the chance of being seated at the same grill.

Next Class

Keep up with the notes and Canvas Posts. I don’t want to resort to reading quizzes, but, because the Coronavirus changed our plans, I have lots of leeway to have us do quizzes. Just know that you will have a slightly cumulative final exam, so, if you aren’t reading, that exam is going to be VERY difficult…and it’s worth 10% of your grade.

Submit your 9-page draft of your Social Construction of Technology essay on Canvas before 5pm!