William Gibson on the End of the Future, and a Visit with Thundercat

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

William Gibson has often been described as prescient in his ability to imagine the future. His special power, according to the staff writer Joshua Rothman, is actually his attunement to the present. In “Agency,” Gibson’s new novel, people in the future refer to our time as “the jackpot”—an alignment of climate effects and other events that produce a global catastrophe. The apocalyptic mind-set has already suffused our culture, Gibson believes. “How often do you hear the phrase ‘the twenty-second century’? [You] don’t hear it,” he points out. “Currently we don’t have a future in that sense.” Plus: Briana Younger interviews Thundercat, a bassist, producer, and songwriter who was a key collaborator of Kendrick Lamar on the album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and who makes quirky, slightly absurdist music of his own.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. There's an old reporter saying that prediction is the lowest form of journalism.
0:18.4	Now, I wouldn't swear by that, but there's certainly some truth in it, at least.
0:21.9	Fiction, however, is an entirely different story. When it comes to predicting what the future is
0:26.7	going to look like and be like and feel like, fiction might be the way to go. And nobody in our time
0:33.0	can beat the novelist William Gibson at prediction. Gibson's new novel is called Agency.
0:39.3	Here's Josh Rothman, an editor at The New Yorker.
0:42.3	When William Gibson came up with the term cyberspace in the late 70s,
0:47.3	there was no real internet to speak of.
0:50.3	He'd been walking around Vancouver, which is where he lived,
0:53.3	and he'd noticed kids playing video games in video arcades.
1:00.1	And he noticed that when you went to a video arcade and you watch the kids, they would duck and weave as though they were in the game.
1:11.5	And that alone was enough to get into his mind the idea that, yeah, we want to be in there.
1:17.4	We want to be in the computer world.
1:21.4	And in fact, that's true.
1:22.6	We do want to live in the computer world.
1:24.6	So much of what we've done with this technology over the last 30 years, 35
1:29.1	years has been about finding new ways to merge the digital space and the real space,
1:37.6	finding ways to take a selfie and get it into the digital world as quickly as possible.
1:44.5	He would be the first person to say he got a lot of technical details wrong about
1:47.9	cyberspace. He pictured it as a virtual world, like a VR, like Tron.
1:53.7	That's not what it turned out to be. It turned out to be the browser on your phone.
	...

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