Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson Read Free Book Online

example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change. It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying business model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex interaction among several. You can see the difference if you compare the music industry's initial outcry against "home taping" with the situation today.
    Whatever changes will come for film will be as unpredictable and as ongoing, but issues of intellectual property and piracy may ultimately be the least of them. The music industry's product is, for want of a better way to put it, a relatively simple, relatively traditional product. Audio recordings just aren't that technology-heavy. Though there's one aspect of the digital's impact on music that's absolutely central to film: sampling. Sampling music is possible because the end consumer of the product is now in possession of technologies equal or even superior to the technologies involved in producing that product. Human capital (that is, talent) aside, all the end-consumer-slash-creator lacks today, in comparison to a music-marketing conglomerate, is the funds required to promote product. The business of popularmusic, today, is now, in some peculiarly new way, entirely about promotion.
    Film, I imagine, is in for a different sort of ride up the timeline, primarily owing to the technology-intensive nature of today's product.
Terminator III Unplugged
is a contradiction in terms. Hollywood is massively and multiply plugged, and is itself a driver of new technologies. The monopoly on the means of production (at least in terms of creation) can be preserved, in this environment, as the industry itself operates on something very near the cutting edge of emergent technology. For a while, at least.
    In terms of the future, however, the history of recorded music suggests that any film made today is being launched up the timeline toward end-user technologies ultimately more intelligent, more capable, than the technologies employed in the creation of that film.
    Which is to say that, no matter who you are, nor how pure your artistic intentions, nor what your budget was, your product, somewhere up the line, will eventually find itself at the mercy of people whose ordinary civilian computational capacity outstrips anything anyone has access to today.
    Remember the debate around the ethics of colorizing films shot in black and white? Colorization, up the line, is a preference setting. Probably the default setting, as shipped from the factory.
    I imagine that one of the things our great-grandchildren will find quaintest about us is how we had all these different, function-specific devices. Their fridges will remind them of appointments andthe trunks of their cars will, if need be, keep the groceries from thawing. The environment itself will be smart, rather than various function-specific nodes scattered through it. Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline. Genuinely evolved interfaces are transparent, so transparent as to be invisible.
    This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct and separate media, that's where I imagine we're headed. Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in
The Great Escape
, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he's always been able to. He doesn't think about these things. He probably doesn't fully understand that that hasn't always been possible. He doesn't know that you weren't always able to explore the sets virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn't