OK, after this I promise to lay off the Discover magazine articles for awhile. But this Q and A with sci-fi author William Gibson is so fascinating I couldn't resist. According to the article's introduction, Gibson knows little about computers or technology of any kind, which is odd, but after reading the rest of it I could see how it makes perfect sense. Sometimes it takes an outsider to take a fresh look at things and see how they fit into the big picture.

Some excerpts:
Gibson: ....[T]here were guys who already had their own kind of Radio Shack computers that they'd built, and I knew some of those guys, and I would talk to them and say, “Yeah, they’re going to hook them all up, and then, and then. . . .” And they would always say: “But there’s not enough bandwidth!” I never knew what bandwidth was, and I probably don’t really know today, but I just knew that they were wrong—that it wasn’t going to matter about the bandwidth. It was amazing to me: These guys were so smart, so technical. They were doing this stuff, but they couldn’t see its potential.

------

To me, the Internet is as basic a thing for humanity to be doing as, say, cities have been. It’s that primal, that important, maybe more so.

------

That’s a very interesting thought experiment, by the way. I recommend that to anyone: Sit down and choose a year—it doesn’t have to be 1967, of course, but it only really works if you choose a year in your own life—and compare it to your sense of where the present is and look at the difference. What most people experience when they do that is vertigo. It scares them. They say, “Oh, it’s really changed a lot,” and suddenly feel like they ain’t seen nothing yet.

------

By turning itself inside out, the digital has become the constant; it’s becoming where we all are, all the time. And really the exotic and kind of weirdly unexplored area is the part of our lives that isn’t online, that for some reason can’t be online.