William Gibson: The US has emotionally regressed in response to 9/11

Not sure how I got to this one. Maybe through Boing Boing. William Gibson author of Neuromancer and anointed (supposedly reluctantly) creator of the cyberspace myth comments on futurists, terrorism and other things at Tyee Brooks, a Vancouver website. The interview is interesting at least. Here are some snippets, some out of context but they still work.

On America's response to 9-11:

"I think that if I were Osama Bin Laden, I can't really imagine what more I could ask for. The strafing of Mecca, possibly. But we've done everything we could wrong..."

"But emotionally, I think it caused an understandable infantilization of society."

"Invade countries. Use air power. Well, it turns out, those are the two things not to do. The old paradigm is the wrong paradigm."

What I found most interesting was Gibson's take on reality, authenticity, and virtual reality.

"I think a lack of concern about virtual and real maybe telling us as much about what we used to call real as it is about what we now call virtual. I think that everything we've been doing since we sat around camp fires telling stories and started making cave paintings, everything we've been doing as a species seems to me to be part of this [desire and ability] to create prosthetic aspects of the self that are capable of surviving the death of the individual or indeed the death of an entire society."

I take away from this that things like building an online presence are in a way a response to mortality. Building virtual worlds that are more lasting than the real one. Interesting thought.