{"id":487,"date":"2015-01-19T13:30:55","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T13:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slightlymuddy.com\/kuriosum\/?p=487"},"modified":"2015-01-20T12:11:27","modified_gmt":"2015-01-20T12:11:27","slug":"the-future-is-already-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/slightlymuddy.com\/kuriosum\/?p=487","title":{"rendered":"The Future is Already Here…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…it’s just been misremembered<\/h2>\n

\"575477_10201226624607158_660752653_n\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The internet is filling up with crap<\/strong>. My personal pet hate is misquotations, or the meme-ing of quotations without citation. Is this because I am a pedantic academic twat, or is it that by this process, crap gets spread around and actually finding genuine information gets more difficult? (Answers on a post card).<\/p>\n

This particular rant was provoked by a quotation that you will find all over the net:<\/p>\n

The future is already here. It’s just that it is unevenly distributed”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This remark is attributed to William Gibson. But if you search for its source it turns out that there isn’t one, Gibson may have said it in various interviews, but I can find no reliable source for it. The trouble is that I think this statement is quite true (for reasons I plan to go into in a later post), but how can one cite it, or discover the context in which it originated, without a proper source. Does it even matter whether William Gibson actually said this, if we believe it to be true?<\/p>\n

To give an idea of the difficulties inherent in sourcing quotations. Take a related remark attributed to Gibson’s colleague Bruce Sterling. Indeed I wonder if the Gibson quote is not a kind of garbled version of Sterling’s original.<\/p>\n

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away.
\nWhat I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years
\naway. And what I thought was ten years away — it was
\nalready here. I just wasn’t aware of it yet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now this quote has more of a provenance. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation<\/a>, it originates from “Speeches by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling National Academy of Sciences Convocation on Technology and Education Washington D. C., May 10, 1993”. Is this the case? A search of the NSF website turns up no reference to this “Convocation” and none to either Bruce Sterling or William Gibson. Then again, this was<\/em> 1993 when the web, as far as most people were concerned, was a mere gleam in the eyes of Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen, so maybe it just didn’t get archived electronically. On the other hand the EFF text is quite comprehensive, suggesting a genuine source.<\/p>\n

\"trash\"<\/a>Further searching revealed another link in an interview of Gibson by one Giuseppe Salza<\/a>, at Cannes in 1994 (Gibson was there to promote the film of Johnny Mnemonic<\/strong>, apparently). This interview is, as you can see, to be found at Project Gutenburg <\/strong> and although it is cited as “This interview will be included in the book “Net-Surfers” (tentative tile) by Giuseppe Salza, to be published by “Theoria Edizioni” in Italy in Spring 1995″, no such publication appears to exist. Although<\/em> archaeologists might be interested in the fact that Signore Salza has published a (1994) book entitled “Spazzatura. La prima guida mondiale al trash” , which Amazon <\/a>unfortunatelly lists as currently unavailable. In the interview, Gibson does appear to say “Bruce Sterling and I went to the National Academy in Washington to address the Al Gore people”. So there you are…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Johnny Mnemonic…<\/h2>\n

…is a story in which a man has a chip in his head to store data for criminals. That’s quite appropriate.<\/p>\n

At my Dad’s recent funeral the Vicar said “memory makes us human”, I was tempted to write it down in case I forgot. But I’m not sure he was entirely right – lots of creatures remember things, but that doesn’t make them human and, moreover, if our humanity depends upon memory, its a bit unreliable. Trying to assemble a Eulogy for my Dad involved several different drafts of his life, and I’m not sure we got it completely right.<\/p>\n

Clearly memory hasn’t worked too well with the Gibson quote, and that’s where citation, and provenance comes in. Things, including all sorts of artefacts, written words, photographs etc., exist such that we can anchor memory in something firmer that the vagaries of our synapses. This is what we know as archaeologists – archaeology is not the “handmaiden to history” because history, as memory, is inherently unreliable.<\/p>\n

So, am I a pedantic twat? I would argue that now, more than ever, we should aim to check and recheck our facts. In a world where the dissemination of “information” is so facile, it’s far too easy to propagate crap.<\/p>\n

Later…<\/strong> tracked down my copy of Burning Chrome<\/strong> and, no, it wasn’t the source of the Gibson quote. I had misremembered, confusing it with another quote about the street finding its own uses for things, which is<\/em> in the title story.<\/p>\n

Addendum<\/h2>\n

My colleague Sarah May reports:<\/p>\n

I tweeted your blog post and asked William Gibson for comment (he tweets as @GreatDismal ) and he says that he did speak at the convention you mention. WRT the specific quote he says “I think it first arose spontaneously in conversation. I then repeatedly used it in interviews. As tends naturally to happen.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So there we are…unless, of course, he has misremembered…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…it’s just been misremembered The internet is filling up with crap. My personal pet hate is misquotations, or the meme-ing of quotations without citation. Is this because I am a pedantic academic twat, or is it that by this process, crap gets spread around and actually finding genuine information gets …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":494,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,57,88,64],"tags":[90,91,47,89],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academicy-stuff","category-material-culture","category-memory","category-science-fiction-2","tag-bruce-sterling","tag-memory","tag-the-future","tag-william-gibson","has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/slightlymuddy.com\/kuriosum\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/trash.jpg?fit=202%2C346","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7sHEp-7R","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":318,"url":"http:\/\/slightlymuddy.com\/kuriosum\/?p=318","url_meta":{"origin":487,"position":0},"title":"\ufeffJohn Brunner","author":"slightly","date":"November 1, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"I just finished reading Stand on Zanzibar (1968) by John Brunner. 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