Justin McGuirk of William Gibson and subculture

Discover: Invalid materialism, technology and design challenge the meaning of humanity in the most recent novel in William Gibson sci-fiels. The foundations for this future have been placed in real life, as Justin Mcguirk.

Among articles in articles greeting william Gibson’s newest novel, Peripheral, there must be at least one that deals with his or her interest in the plot. It’s hard to think about a contemporary novelist with an interesting eye for the world of things. Bruce Sterling only invested in design as a subject, an aggregate more than his fiction needs.

For Gibson, especially in novels in the last decade, the design is the center of fiction. Fashion, interiors and technological gadgets are not only the most fabric in the world in his recent books, they always move his characters. Only Gibson can escape a plot surrounding hunting for a vague brand of Japanese denim.

I need to stress that, unlike most Gibson readers, I’m not a firan fac in science. I actually listen to some of them by claiming I found the most celebrated bassion-influential book, neuromancer, it is impossible to finish. So no wonder the series of novels sucking me is called blue trilogy blue, set for the day. The wonderful appeal of these books is that they act as celebration and criticism of a latter-capital society’s society, with all its skills and infackiliism.

The trilogy has opened a pattern recognition, where the hero, cayce pollard, a brand consultant and “cool hunter”. The trigger character of the pollard is that he is allergic to logos – more likely to travel the department London Harvey Nichols is enough to make him sick. He had to cut labels from his clothes and filing the trademark in his casio G-Shock Watch. Gibson knows that adapting to our branded ecosystem taken by pollard is an evolutionary evolutionary step, as a sensitive one is a level of genetic level.

The polite-clocking and passionate of attractive things are very good at the pollard that keeps the next two books, in the country of country, but this time in a hero, Hollis Henry. Henry – and, by definition, Gibson – always known Philippe interyters, various models of Adidas Trainers, Volkswagen and Aeron seats are seated at the Failed Startups. Like pollard and Henry, Gibson itself intends to be something in a connoisseur – to know “how to identify something from another.” Like his Milagrim character, one thinks if he isn’t “more than the house of the world’s house … than people.”

The historical zero of particular charts in a world of things that have been dismissed to be inhabited by strange obsessions. This is about Ultra-Exclusive Search – In fact, positive secret – Japanese brand. But it is also full of “Gear goods” – The kind of people alone after the rare military equipment and know that the US camouflage is called “Foliage Green” called “Foliage Green” .

Of course, all this type of consumer culture is just the case. These design designs are only macguffins, designs of designs, signs that teach things a writer in Thriller: money, influence and power. And in case of blue trilogy, puppy mob is Hubertus Bigend, a person who knows “more creativity, now, goes to sell products than products themselves”. Bigend, Marketing Maestro, are only interested in Japanese denim because of what can tell him about the odd forms of exclusively – about “anti-buzz” new buzz.

The design, here, not as design evangelists see it – as a social benefit – like Cayce Pollard is not a Noemi Klein Sense logo. Instead, we talk about the design of the most material, as a front to explore corporate supertructure, as the quality that makes Apple the most precious company in the world. In that world, Gibson plays fleneur in the latter days, without the arcades of Paris but the streets of Solang in London or Tokyo’s Shibuya, share the consumerism. Like the Balahenaire, it can be an occult border. What makes her part of a replica of the museum-grade of a bomber jacket is its attention, as it exists ahead of time. As a character that puts it, it is about “Choosing Industrialization of innovation. It’s about deep code.”

What is this deep code? In a sense, it is a bad quality design design, credibility if you want. But it also asked for a content requirement – the search for the identity of a more homogeneous world. The irony is that the subcultures that Gibson are in pains to teach almost endless. The cyberpunks neuromancer helped spawn? They are gone, replaced with a globalized hipster culture. Thanks for the pollards and bigendings in the world, any threat to be a subculture given before it can walk. If the individual is endless, the ultra-excellusivity of the bigend is a response, but also the opposite: normcore. As fend forecasters k-holes, the normcore logic is: Don’t be unique, dressing like your dad. I wonder what Gibson makes K-Hole’s ability to turn out fend fiecasts in the satirical design of the design.

Inevitably, in the newest book, peripheral, our immutable materialism gives what we fear – climate infection. Return to Sci-Fi, Gibson puts the book in two futures. The first, in the 2030s, perfectly can be obtained in the design and terms of production. It’s a world of drones and a Google Glass-Story Eyepiece called Viz. In this greater version of the present, all you can do is made with a corporate hegemon called HEFTY (Walmart of steroids) or – from guns – it is published in reality. The middle falling outside commercial.

The second future is set about 2100, if the Pacific Garbage Patch ends with a plastic landmass “traders” turned into a floating city. If not, the action is all in London – London’s frequent touchstone – again an enlarged version of current self: all but the rest of the kleptocracy. This is a city of oligarchs of super-downstairs. Selfridges is briefly a single residence and Oxford Street, long abandoned, has been turned into an artificial forest not unlike Joanna Lumley and Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge Proposal.

In this social cleansed London has apparently no proletariat without rising. It has been replaced by an automatic class of servants of people called peripherals. Characters can get rid of their senses with these three-dimensional avatars if they need to be in a place they don’t have. And for the nominal hero, Wilf Netotton, brought it to a crisis indeed. He longs for “glorious pre-posthuman”. Man’s design and technology come till they challenge our kind idea what we can mean.

And that is, of course, is the territory of Sci-Fi-Fifypal. The route to this future in virtual presence and physical avatars are now shortened, what are quick efforts to interact with screens. All that makes me think I need to go back to the first books I find not fat – the parts of hackers in cyberspace. Because what was the former World World of Computer Engineering became primarily, instrumenting most of our designed experience. While Gibson can do this, the design is about deep code.

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and London-based curator. He is the director of Strelka PressPublishing the arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He is a design columnist for lymphaticthe editor of Magazine icon and the design consultant of Black. Her book Radical Cities: In total Latin America in search of a new architecture Published by Vero in June 2014.