446: Allergic to Brands

The Incomparable Mothership

Jason Snell

Tv & Film, Arts, Leisure

4.7 • 704 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2019

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clip the labels off your clothes and put on a World War II replica bomber jacket—it’s time to revisit one of our favorite novels of this century, 2003’s “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson. It was Gibson’s first book to be set in the present day, and yet 16 years later it still feels like a work of science fiction, with a very modern story about brands and viral marketing and our desperate search to find meaning in a world that may have none. If all you’ve read of Gibson is “Neuromancer”, it’s past time that you visited the post-9/11 world of cool-finder Cayce Pollard, the mysterious internet video clips known as The Footage, the global marketing firm Blue Ant, and a series of increasingly lonely international hotel rooms.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The incomparable number 446 February 2019.
0:11.0	Welcome back everybody to The Incomparable.
0:13.4	I'm your host, Jason Snellan.
0:14.5	In this episode, we're going to be talking.
0:15.9	It's a book club episode.
0:17.1	The book club is here to talk about 2002's pattern recognition, a classic, sort of
0:24.7	science fiction, sort of not, novel by William Gibson, the great writer, great novelist,
0:31.1	great science fiction writer. And I always tell people who know about William Gibson from
0:36.3	Nuromancer, his 1984, multi-award-winning,
0:40.8	best-selling novel, that maybe my favorite William Gibson novel is actually a pattern recognition
0:45.8	from 2002. And a bunch of people agreed with me, and that pleased me. So now we're doing a podcast
0:51.1	with them about this book, which hopefully you have read or will read after you listen.
0:57.6	Let me introduce my panelists who are all cool finders in their own way.
1:02.2	Anthony Johnston is here. Hello.
1:04.3	Hello, Jason. I'm looking forward to discussing lots of long chain monomers.
1:09.3	Excellent, excellent. Lisa Schmeiser is here.
1:12.1	I hope she doesn't make any jack moves.
1:15.1	I have a jill face.
1:18.3	Monty Ashley took a duck in the face at 250 knots.
1:21.6	No, he didn't, but he's here.
1:22.7	Hello.
1:23.6	It takes forever to grind the Levi's logo off one of those buttons.
	...

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