Neuromancer 1-5: Achievable Dystopia?

What strikes me having read the first five chapters of Neuromancer is the extent to which William Gibson’s vision of the post-Internet age differs from the visions presented in Convergence Culture. Henry Jenkins and Pierre Levy imagine a society where Internet use enables greater social, economic, and political participation by a wider range of groups and individuals, leading to the empowerment of ordinary people to affect positive social change. Gibson, by contrast, imagines a future where the unregulated flow of data across multiple channels and through the hands of multiple agents does little to disrupt long-standing power hierarchies. In his world, ‘ordinary people’ -- typified by the steady stream of consumers trickling through the shopping areas of Chiba and the Sprawl -- are portrayed as not being particularly concerned for their society. Of course, the story is told from a criminal perspective, leaving certain aspects of Gibson’s future open only to conjecture. Chiba and the areas of the Sprawl frequented by Molly and Case might not be representative of the world of Neuromancer as a whole... Ninsei is after all described as an “outlaw zone,” a place where the governing authorities of Chiba have no real power to stop bad stuff from happening. But then again, the narrator’s suggestion that Ninsei’s lawlessness may be the product of government malfeasance is a serious imputation -- one that, when considered alongside the mysterious Screaming Fist incident and the horrifically violent police crackdown at Sense/Net HQ, makes Gibson’s future look pretty undesirable. This is not a society characterized by more democracy, more freedom, and more meaningful participation by a greater number of people on the basis of the logic of collective intelligence. It’s a global society dominated by totalitarian governments and cheap markets of the senses where law and order is only possible through strict prohibitions on user access to a wide array of potentially dangerous technologies. These technologies do seem to be empowering in that they enable ordinary people to enhance their experience of the world through digital and biological modifications of their bodies, enabling in turn a flowering of new cultural possibilities. But in the book, the question of whether such enhancements serve any purpose beyond sensual gratification is left largely unanswered -- except, perhaps, in the passages explaining Case’s fascination with the cheap chrome shuriken of Ninsei. The fact that Case can “[read his] destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome” suggests that what’s lost in a globally connected capitalistic information society is any sense of cultural uniqueness -- or, to put it more exactly, any sense of the dignity and importance of a person’s uniqueness, which to the Western mind entails certain political rights. A person in Gibson’s world is a databank ready for access, a true resource -- and therefore an object -- in every sense of the word. When anything is possible, everything is cheap.

So I dunno. Anyone take any positives from Gibson’s achievable dystopia? If so, I’d be interested to hear them.