Thread by @DanielHadas2

As a teenager, my early intensive exposure to the internet wasn't to the real thing (thankfully, I'm too old for that).

It was to William Gibson's 𝘕𝘦𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘳.

The real internet has been a disappointment ever since.

Gibson's internet is a mystical phenomenon, an unfathomable, incorporeal communion with the infinite, a home of godlike AIs, beyond time and space. It is terrifying and wonderful.

(Gibson knew next to nothing about tech, and it shows).

𝘕𝘦𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘳 is a fine piece of pulp poetry, a comic book in words only. But the writer who truly saw what the internet would be isn't Gibson. It's Philip K. Dick.

Iirc, PKD didn't actually imagine any item that much like the internet. He too wasn't much interested in actual tech developments. But he understood the esssential: that tech wouldn't make our lives more glamorous and tragic; that it would make them 𝘵𝘢𝘸𝘥𝘳𝘺.

In many ways, PKD was a bad writer. He spread himself very thin. He wasn't well-read, and his prose doesn't rise above sub-Chandler functionality. His plots tend to peter out, and in his later, crazier years, he indulged in the addict's dull meanderings.

His male leads are all the same strung-out, defeated would-be Bogart. His women are what one would expect from a man who was married five times: either unpleasant neurotics, or elusive sylphs.

He recycled the same plot twist - reality is a user-created illusion - again and again, but so sloppily it's often hard to make much sense of it.

(Of what I've read, I think it's best in 𝘈 𝘔𝘢𝘻𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘪𝘨𝘩 𝘊𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘦 baffles me).

But PKD's pulp slum dweller habits are inseparable from the prophetic power of his vision.

His future, like his present, was one of cheap motels, bad drugs, scared kids, exhausted and bored couples struggling to make rent. His future was our present.

PKD saw that tech could worm its way into every corner of our lives, that we could be permanently hooked to the machine. But that the post-human project would fail, would be human, all too human.

He also saw that only hearing the voice of God over the machines' whirr would help

PKD's future is neither monstrous nightmare nor glistening city on the hill. It's crummy and listless. Its fundamental terror isn't that the machines will eat us, but that they will be loud enough to silence God, but too dumb and glitchy to distract us from the need to hear Him.

And that's the intenet: neither angel of digital light, nor monster-god from Cthulhu, but just us humans, in all our tawdriness and far too little of our glory, screaming and whispering at each other in the wall-less echo chamber.

Neither feast nor fast, but junk food on demand.

Covid addendum -

I hope and pray there will be no Bio-power, Social Credit Score dystopia. But if there is, it will be PKD's, not William Gibson's or Zamyatin's.

No perfectly managed, robot-piloted world of soul-captured slaves. Just bored officials, glitching machines, small cruelties, tired and dazed citizens trying to feed off bug-laced bread and tiktok circuses.

And always and everywhere, the need to hear the voice of God above the whirr, to see His face behind the pixels.

(@philipkdickfans / #PhilipDick / #PhilipKDick)