Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is the seminal cyberpunk book: it’s the thing that the web is based on. It’s a pretty typical cyberpunk story, being the one of somebody wronged, who has to jack into the mainframe to clear his name. The main characters are pretty distasteful, but because they’re part of this society that is in and of itself a dystopian environment, they’re using these technologies to make these worlds better. But they create a real romance around what technology is, and what technology can be.
Your fourth book.
Neuromancer by William Gibson is the seminal cyberpunk book: it’s the thing that the web is based on. It’s a pretty typical cyberpunk story, being the one of somebody wronged, who has to jack into the mainframe to clear his name. The main characters are pretty distasteful, but because they’re part of this society that is in and of itself a dystopian environment, they’re using these technologies to make these worlds better. They create a real romance around what technology is and what technology can be, and I think that’s really stoked the fire of so many young technologists from the first generation to the most recent generation of technologists who were reinventing things and creating the web 2.0. They’re trying to do things in a very interesting way. It’s idealistic, but in a way that’s very knowing.
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Aleks Krotoski is a television presenter and journalist, who writes about technology and interactivity. She wrote a column on technology for The Guardian, and now presents their weekly technology podcast and blogs on guardian.co.uk. In February 2010, she presented The Virtual Revolution for BBC2, and she is also the New Media Sector Champion for the government’s business arm, UKTI. She completed her PhD thesis in social psychology in 2009, which examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web.
