"maddox.interview" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Gibson - Agrippa)

TM: Oh--I heard about that, yeah.

DW: For me, one of the most interesting things in this magazine is when they
start talking about what happens when you download people into machines. What
constitutes personality when the borderline between people and machines starts
to blur? The Flatline seems to be a personality, but is a ROM construct, and
the Finn, who gets himself made into some kind of construct...

WG: (Laughing) That's one of my favorite parts in that book... he's got the
high rollers drawing in cocaine.

TM: Do you mean, what is it that's in there?

DW: Yeah. At the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive you've got Angie, Finn, Colin, and
Bobby--two dead people and two personality constructs, one modeled after a
"real" man and one a complete fabrication--in the Aleph, heading off into
alien cyberspace, and they seem to have their own volition. It's not just a
machine kind of thing... they're not programmed to act in certain ways. So
that's what I want to look at: where does the self go? How much self do any of
these characters have?

WG: Yeah, well, that's just a question, you know? I suppose the book poses
that question, but it doesn't answer it. I can't answer it. As for that
downloading stuff, I think those guys who seriously consider that stuff are
crazier than a sackful of rats. I think that's monstrous! It just seems so
obvious to me, but people like those guys at Autodesk who're building
cyberspace--I can't believe it: they've almost got it--they just don't
understand. My hunch is that what I was doing was trying to come up with some
kind of metaphor that would express my deepest ambivalence about media in the
twentieth century. And it was my satisfaction that I sort of managed to do it,
and then these boff-its come in and say "God damn, that's a good idea! Let's
plug it all in!" But, you know, it just leaves me thinking, "What??" You know,
that is actually stranger than having people do theses about your work, is to
have people build this demented shit that you dreamed up, when you were trying
to make some sort of point about industrial society. It's just a strange
thing.

DW: Actually, there is an article in here on NASA's virtual reality project,
and Whole Earth calls it cyberspace.

WG: (looking at the photo of a sensor-lined glove that controls the movement
of the wearer in "cyberspace") Hey, Tom: you know, if you turned this thing
inside out, you could get the computer to jerk you off?

TM: (laughing) That's beautiful, Bill. Put it in your book and someone'll
build it.

WG: (laughing) Instead of jacking in, you'd be jacking off.