for a long time you made a point about restricting your direct experience with the Internet. Now you're developing your own Web site, William Gibson's Yard Show. Why and how has that changed?
Until sometime last year, you could've counted the minutes that I'd actually been on the Internet. The Sony people twisted my arm into doing a particularly goofy promotional event for the "Johnny Mnemonic" video game. And that's all I'd ever done, other than having Net-smart friends occasionally download and fax me stuff that they'd seen and thought I'd be interested in.
But then I met a guy in Vancouver who talked me into letting him build a Web site for me. And he hooked one of our computers up so that I could see it. Once I could see the Web site, I could also see the rest of the Net, so I started looking around and checking it out. That happened when I was not too far into "Idoru," when I had maybe the first 40 pages of the manuscript.
We haven't really done anything to promote the site. One of the things I find really delightful about it is that it's completely non-commoditarian. We're not trying to make any money, we're not trying to promote William Gibson particularly, or William Gibson products there. No T-shirts. It's free stuff -- anybody who wants free Gibson stuff enough to find that Web site can go there and download things and look at graphics that I like that they won't see anywhere else. Christopher Halcrow, the guy who does it -- who poses there, to the bafflement of many of my friends, as loverman@vkool.com -- is great. He's a hip young guy who's simultaneously an ace techie, an Internet provider, and an ace graphics guy.
I had never seen a Web site. I had no idea what it would look like. I was imagining something much more plain text, like what I'd seen of things like e-mail and newsgroups. And I was floored when I finally saw it. It was like a CD-ROM. Amazing.
What made you change your customary reluctance to get online?
For years, when I was saying I don't want to be on the Internet, I would say that if they could make the user interface more transparent, so that children can do it, I'd probably do it too. And I think that's exactly what happened with browsers. It took me a minute and a half to show my daughter how to use Netscape. And now it rivals her television watching time.
What do you want to do with your site?
We're not funded, so it proceeds very slowly. We've got five or six killer projects going, like a Shockwave version of "Agrippa," with the original photographs from my father's album. But each one is a work in progress. As Chris says, he's got to spend however many hours in the HTML sweatshop to produce this stuff. So, slick as it all is, it depends on Chris sitting in a basement somewhere knitting. It's like, you think computer animation is going to be this instant fast thing, and it turns out to be like knitting -- it's a bunch of guys manipulating little bits.
I think when this book tour is over I'll actually spend more time on it myself, trying to figure out things to do. I love the idea -- it feels to me like we've got a global ham television broadcast license, and we can only send postcards -- but that's still pretty cool. You can just put this stuff out there, and people all over the world can go and get it. And you can go and get theirs. I find it really quite sweet.
Plus I've seen some of the weirdest stuff I've ever seen in my life, just poking around out there. Everything under the sun.
There's no apparent limit on the Web's size or variety.
Pretty soon I think there'll be people who make a living pre-surfing it for you. There's a real need for that -- otherwise it becomes this monster time-sink. You can just sit there forever. Looking. Looking. And maybe not finding anything. Seeing a lot of goofy stuff.
The serendipity's wonderful too, though. The database people are always trying to solve the problem of how you find what you're looking for, when an awful lot of people don't know what they're looking for, or are more excited to just grope around.
The groping around is a big part of it -- the Web's capacity for pleasurably wasting time. That's something we don't have so much of any more. And for me this is a much more positive way of wasting time than watching broadcast television.
Because there's more variety in it?
Yeah. Broadcast television is innately hierarchical -- it's coming down to you from a boardroom somewhere. TV is almost never random enough for me. New York used to have all that insane public access TV -- some of the most demented, obscene, crazed stuff that I'd ever seen in my life. I used to watch it whenever I'd be in New York in a hotel room. But that's very rare. There's no such thing as a pirate Web site -- it's all pirate, in a sense.
One thing that I'm sort of hoping to see -- I'm sure we will, eventually -- is Web sites of the profoundly disturbed. It seems that building a Web site is something that can really lend itself to a certain schizophrenic modality. I can imagine someone spending 20 years constructing a Web site that represented their world view. Perhaps it would be a long time before anyone discovered it. But imagine stumbling into that, 20 years on. This has happened in literature, it's happened in the figurative arts, but I don't know if it's happened on the Web yet.
I've run across only a few sites that I thought were verging on that. The art of the insane, of people who are completely untuned but utterly obsessive. I think in a way I'm suggesting that with the "Yard Show" title.
That's drawn from a kind of roadside tradition in the south, of putting weird stuff in your front yard?
Yes. Folk art. A lot of it is what the French call "art brut" -- a technical term.
When I started writing, I was influenced in some ways by an American film theorist named Manny Farber, who wrote a book called "Negative Space." Farber made a distinction, which had a huge impact on me at the time, between what he called termite art and some other kind of art. The other kind of art was sort of the art of the academy, where you took a big slab and carved it out into something. With termite art, he said, you just start with a big slab and drill into it from every conceivable angle and the holes start connecting.
He made this wonderful argument that all the great stuff in American B movies that he liked was termite art. I think I had that running in the back of my head when I started writing fiction. And I was thinking the other day when I was looking at Web sites and following links around -- man, this is some kind of mega-termite art.
Or even termite space.
Yeah -- it's termite space.
When I talked to you two years ago, the Web was new, and you wondered whether it had an innate drive toward being democratic, or whether it would just be absorbed by existing power structures. How do you see it today?
I'm probably not the best person to ask. To answer a question like that, you need to follow the trades, in effect, and know what's going on. Once again, I'm inclined to think, this is just my hunch, looking at it from the great distance of my ignorance, that this accidental global post-national post-geographical thing that we've created -- which is growing constantly and exponentially in an unplanned way -- is very scary for nation-states in the traditional sense. Because where's the border? It's a violation of what they do.
I'm also inclined to think, in the very long view, that a lot of what nation-states do, and have done traditionally, is responsible for a lot of the problems in the world. So if we're going to get to something a little better, this is maybe the only thing in the world that's pointing in that direction. This is taking us somewhere.
The Chinese have already begun to fight back. And the encryption battle is just beginning.
Have you ever heard of stego encryption? It's this wonderful thing -- you can encrypt enormous amounts of information in a graphic file. So you send a GIF to somebody, and it's a picture of Marilyn Monroe. But if they've got the decryption key, it's how to build a stinger missile. And there's no way to catch it.
That's why governments are going to be behind the curve on this stuff. This has never happened in my life -- the government has always been ahead. Governments, in plural, have always been ahead. This may be a situation where, just by virtue of what's going on, they can't be. This is different.
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