The Gibson Expense Account Fantasy

I read William Gibson's new novel, Spook Country, in the week of Aug. 22, 2007. I know the exact date because that was when I saw this interview with Gibson in The Onion A/V Club.

Once I realized Gibson had a new book out, I immediately bought it and read it. I didn't even finish reading the interview.

Why is William Gibson so important? The way I always introduce a conversation about Gibson is to explain that he invented the term "cyberspace," which those of you over 25 or so might remember as important in the early (pre-Google-ish) internet.

More importantly then the term, of course, is the concept. Early on, we thought of our online universe as what Gibson calls the "goggles and gloves school of virtual reality." (See Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers, Disclosure, blah blah blah).

The idea of such a space, and Gibson speaks to this quite well in his A/V interview, was fundamental to gelling the idea of the internet for the people who went ahead and invented it.

So Gibson created the then science fiction concept that led to the defining real-world innovation of our generation, and all this in just his first novel, Neuromancer. Since Neuromancer, Gibson has published eight novels and a collection of short stories, Burning Chrome

Except for Difference Engine, I've read them all, and a couple of patterns have jumped out at me. First, and I think this is extremely telling, Gibson's most recent novels, Spook Country and the excellent Pattern Recognition, are not science fiction. At least, they are set in the present time and use pretty much the technology of the day.

I like this a lot, because it is further evidence that you and I are living in the future. I've always had this idea that you can take common tropes from sci-fi and fantasy and translate them directly through analogy in to today's world.

For example, no one I know is actually a vampire, but we all know people who live off others' life energy in a different way - sap others' will, drain their money without giving any reward, stuff like that. Take a vampire, forget the blood and the sleeping in coffins, and you've got a certain type of lawyer or a Hollywood agent. Take it one step further, and you could translate Interview With a Vampire in to a pretty good Hollywood morality tale.

Gibson's science fiction no longer has to be science fiction. No one's making commercial flights in Low Earth Orbit, but with a fall in barriers to travel and cheap airfare abroad, we are pretty much travelling like we're in LEO space craft anyway.

No one's using goggles and gloves, but we're all using handheld global communications and informations devices, and even the occasional wireless modem. There aren't any actual aliens around, but with globalization and international markets, you can take walk to another neighborhood in New York and feel like you're on another planet. So we're living a version of Gibson's future already.

(By the way, if you need evidence that Gibson had this figured out way before I did, protagonist of Neuromancer: "Case." Protagonist of Pattern Recognition: "Cayce.")

The other thing that raised my interest by running across Gibson's various books is that, despite their obvious differences in subject and time period, Gibson's novels tend to share a lot of themes and a lot of plot devices.

I could talk about Gibson's grand themes, his take on technology, how art and communications are bringing people together or keeping them apart, how globalisation and consumerism are both creating needless goods and generating a global market or audience for the truly heartfelt art among us, and other large and grandiose ideas, but

1) you'd really do better to read Pattern Recognition, take a look the discussion on Gibson's blog, and form your own ideas,
2) I'm sure somebody else has done a much better job with this already, and
3) this blog isn't about addressing the thematic basis of our own world, it's about making tiny and carefully argued points about obscure media really well, and also sometimes posting pictures of legos.

I'll turn my effusive rant, then, to Gibson's favorite plot devices. First, Gibson loves the MacGuffin, and I love Gibson's MacGuffins right back. Neuromancer had Case chasing a word, Pattern Recognition had Cayce after an author, in Spook Country everyone's after a box, All Tomorrow's Parties they are chasing a world-shifting event. Gibson never leaves out a good MacGuffin.

Gibson's heros, however, tend to be ordinary in the global scheme of things, even down on their luck: drug addicts, the neurotic, a journalist, nothing-special hackers.

So you need a way for hero to chase MacGuffin. Enter the rich patron. In Neuromancer, this part is played by a criminally ambitious AI. In the recent books, the part is played by an overly ambitious Belgian advertising billionaire.

I love how you can see the traces of Gibson's imagined future of yesteryear translated in to his imagined present of today. For example, Wintergreen, the AI in Neuromancer, is built around the principal of not knowing the word that will unlock his abilities, so as better to keep him from comitting the dangerous Turring fete of making himself smarter (there is even a "Turring Police" that foil these AI's attempts to enrich themselves with deadly force).

Analogously, our Belgian advertising billionaire's character is first described as being centered on the idea that he can see nothing funny about his own name. That name: Hubertus Bigend.

(Incidentally, I am convinced that this latest Gibson cycle will eventually be referred to as the "Bigend Trilogy.")

So we have the rich and powerful patron to move the ordinary but somehow unique protagonist on a series of plot crucial and exciting tasks that Gibson obviously researched extensively and so is able to excitingly dismiss in throw away plot points like over-written message board posts about obscure footage, buying antique computing technology of the 1970s and spoofing black ICE with a data packet disguised as an ordinary accounting request.

Still, we need a means to an end, a way to get our hero from point A to point B, a way of giving these unique but ordinary people the power of the patron with out their necessarily understanding the intricacies of how it is used, and to overcome ordinary, plot-encumbring obstacles like airfare and walking-around money.

Which brings me to the final of the puzzle, the part of the post where I move from the obscure stuff you, the gentle reader, may not be able to make sense of even if you've read all this shit and on to the one, simple idea I probably could have laid out in the beginning if I wasn't so excited about writing everything inbetween then and now.

I speak of course of the semi-all-powerful, high-credit limit and no-questions asked expense account.

The escapist dream of living in a future where everything from Boston to Atlanta is all part of the same dirty and underlit urban sprawl has absolutely nothing on the fantasy of an unlimited, no-questions asked expense account.

God I love the idea of this expense account. Stay in a posh hotel, call the company travel agent to get booked on a first-class flight to Japan that very same day, and buy yourself that obscure Japanese-made WWII replicant American fighter jacket that comes up all the time, right now, today, no questions asked, and absolutely guilt-free.

In the real world, travelling on an expense account is never like this. The closest I've come personally is taking care of tasks as a PA on a commercial (budgets on commercials are really high - once I was sent out on an ordinary run and ended up taking four thousand dollars in cash across town for the production coordinator's petty cash).

Even then, I felt a little guilty about spending the production's money, and I'd never do it unnecessarily (although I've met many PAs who have no problem doing this). Receipts had to be accounted for. Efficiency is valued. You need to call your key for approval.

More often, of course, I was managing expenses on a shoot of my own, inevitably low-budget to begin with, and expenses that I have to manage are so frought with worry that there's really no point in comparing them to a fantasy expense account at all.

Friends of mine who travel on the expense account of a big company tell me it's fun at first and then almost immediately loses its appeal. I mean, you can only eat foie gras and steak so many meals of the day before you're sick of it and fat.

Worse, some people I know come to depend on their expense account, so that they get to a point where they couldn't feed themselves if they quit their jobs or stopped working through two or three meal times a day. Who wants to spend every waking moment trapped in opulence?

Gibson expense account are great not just because of the resources they deliver, but because they are truly justified and guilt-free. They are appointed for a specific purpose, something the expense account provider can provide that only the expense account recipient can do, and inevitably something important, even world-changing, and (in the best novels), something that is also of singular importance to the protagonist.

That's what makes the Gibson expense account such a fantasy: not the money, but the ability to navigate obstacles with a singularity of power and purpose that each of us can envy.