https://www.dezeen.com/2014/12/18/william-gibson-subculture-commodification-london-justin-mcguirk-opinion/ * Magazine * Awards * Jobs * Events Guide * Showroom * School Shows * Courses Follow: * Architecture * Interiors * Design * Technology * Series * Features * Interviews * Opinion * News * Lookbooks * Talks * Videos * Podcasts * About * Comments * Newsletters * Preferences * Submit a story * Advertise * Privacy notice * Contact Dezeen Magazine Next story clear Follow: * Series * Interviews * Opinion * Talks * Videos * Newsletters * Architecture * Interiors * Design * Technology * Magazine * Awards * Jobs * Events Guide * Showroom * School Shows * Courses Search results: Read more: Refine your search: Cats [sci-fi-city-justin-mcguirk-opinion_dezeen_sq01] "Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk" Share: Justin McGuirk | 18 December 2014 2 comments Opinion: unbridled materialism, technology and design combine to challenge the meaning of personhood in William Gibson's latest sci-fi novel. The foundations for this future are already being laid in real life, says Justin McGuirk. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Among the flurry of articles greeting William Gibson's latest novel, The Peripheral, there should be at least one that addresses his interest in design. It's hard to think of a contemporary novelist with a keener eye for the world of things. Only Bruce Sterling is more invested in design as a topic, an engagement that goes far beyond the requirements of his fiction. For Gibson, especially in the novels of the last decade, design has been central to the fiction. Fashion, interiors and technological gadgets are not just superficially the fabric of the world in his recent books, they are often what motivate his characters. Only Gibson could get away with a plot that revolves around the hunt for an obscure brand of Japanese denim. I should stress that, unlike most Gibson readers, I am not a science fiction fan. Indeed I will risk alienating some of them by admitting that I found Gibson's most celebrated and phenomenally influential book, Neuromancer, impossible to finish. So it is no wonder that the series of novels that sucked me in was the so-called Blue Ant trilogy, which is set in the present day. The strange appeal of these books is that they function as both celebration and critique of a late-capitalist consumer society, in all its sophistication and infantilism. A world of fetishised objects populated by weird obsessives The trilogy opens with Pattern Recognition, in which the heroine, Cayce Pollard, is a brand consultant and "cool hunter". Pollard's defining characteristic is that she is allergic to logos - so much so that a trip to London department store Harvey Nichols is enough to make her sick. She has to cut the labels out of her clothes and file the trademark off her Casio G-Shock watch. Gibson is able to insinuate that adapting to our branded ecosystem has taken Pollard one evolutionary step ahead, and that this is what makes her such a sensitive trend spotter - as if consumerism can affect us at the genetic level. The meticulous clocking and cataloguing of desirable stuff that Pollard is so good at continues in the next two books, Spook Country and Zero History, but this time by another heroine, Hollis Henry. Henry - and, by definition, Gibson - is constantly noticing Philippe Starck interiors, different models of Adidas trainer, Volkswagen dashboards and Aeron chairs bought off failed startups, ever in search of their underlying semiotics. Like Pollard and Henry, Gibson himself aspires to be something of a connoisseur - to know "how to distinguish one thing from another." Like his character Milgrim, one wonders if he is not "more at home in the world of objects... than people." Zero History in particular charts a world of fetishised objects populated by weird obsessives. This is the one about the quest for the ultra-exclusive - indeed, positively secretive - Japanese denim brand. But it is also full of "gear-queers" - the kind of people who hanker after rare military equipment and know that the latest hue of US Army camouflage is called "foliage green". Design at its most materialistic, as a frontier to be explored by the corporate superstructure Of course, all of this rarefied consumer culture is really just atmosphere. These design objects are just MacGuffins, plot devices, signs pointing at the things that any thriller writer would really be concerned about: money, influence and power. And in the case of the Blue Ant trilogy, the puppet master is Hubertus Bigend, a man who knows that "far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves". Bigend, the marketing maestro, is only interested in Japanese denim because of what it might tell him about spectral forms of exclusivity - about "anti-buzz" being the new buzz. Design, here, is not as design's evangelists see it - as a social good - just as Cayce Pollard is not No Logo in the Naomi Klein sense. Instead, we're talking about design at its most materialistic, as a frontier to be explored by the corporate superstructure, as the quality that makes Apple the most valuable company in the world. In that world, Gibson plays the latter-day flaneur, parsing not the Parisian arcades but the streets of London's Soho or Tokyo's Shibuya, imbuing consumerism with meaning. As with Baudelaire, this can border on the occult. What interests him about a museum-grade replica of a bomber jacket is its atemporality, as if it exists beyond space-time. As one character puts it, it's about "opting out of the industrialisation of novelty. It's about deeper code." What is this deeper code? In one sense, it is simply an innate design quality, authenticity if you like. But it also appeals to an inner need - the search for identity in an increasingly homogenous world. The irony is that the subcultures that Gibson is at pains to pinpoint scarcely exist anymore. The cyberpunks that Neuromancer helped spawn? They're gone, replaced by a globalised hipster culture. Thanks to the Pollards and Bigends of this world, anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk. When individuality has gone generic, Bigend's ultra-exclusivity is one response, but so is the opposite: normcore. As cooked up by trend forecasters K-Hole, normcore's logic is: don't be unique, dress like your dad. I wonder what Gibson makes of K-Hole's ability to turn trend forecasts into satirical design criticism. The route to this future of virtual presence and physical avatars is being mapped now Inevitably, in the latest book, The Peripheral, our unbridled materialism yields what we fear - climate-driven apocalypse. Returning to sci-fi, Gibson sets the book in two futures. The first, in the 2030s, is utterly plausible in design and manufacturing terms. It's a world of drones and a Google Glass-style eyepiece called Viz. In this exaggerated version of the present, everything you can own is either produced by a corporate hegemon called Hefty (Walmart on steroids) or - from guns to phones - it's fabbed (3D printed) by yours truly. The middle has dropped out of commerce. The second future is set around 2100, when the Pacific Garbage Patch has congealed into a plastic landmass that "patchers" have fashioned into a floating city. Otherwise, the action is all in London - Gibson's constant touchstone - which again is an exaggerated version of its current self: all but empty except for the remaining kleptocracy. It is a city of oligarchs in super-basements. Selfridges is briefly a single residence and Oxford Street, long abandoned, has been turned into an artificial forest not unlike Joanna Lumley and Thomas Heatherwick's Garden Bridge proposal. In this socially-cleansed London there is apparently no proletariat left to revolt. This has been replaced by an automated servant class of humanoids called peripherals. Characters can slip their consciousnesses into these three-dimensional avatars when they need to be somewhere they are not. And for the nominal hero, Wilf Netherton, this brings on a crisis of authenticity. He longs for the "gloriously pre-posthuman". Mankind's design and technology have come so far that they are challenging our very idea of what it means to be us. And that, of course, is archetypal sci-fi territory. The route to this future of virtual presence and physical avatars is being mapped now, with what will soon seem like our rudimentary efforts at interaction design via screens. All of which makes me think that I should go back to the early books that I found indigestible - the ones about hackers in cyberspace. Because what was then the nerdy world of computer engineering has become primary, instrumental to so much of our designed experience. As Gibson might put it, design is about deeper code. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. His book Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture was published by Verso in June 2014. Read more: * Justin McGuirk * Design * Opinion Subscribe to our newsletters Your email address [ ] [Next] New! Dezeen Agenda US Sent on alternate Fridays, this US edition of Dezeen Agenda is a fortnightly newsletter rounding up everything you need to know from America, featuring news, projects and interviews with industry figures. Plus occasional updates and invitations to Dezeen events. [ ] New! Dezeen Showroom New Releases A quarterly newsletter rounding up a selection of recently launched products by designers and studios, published on Dezeen Showroom. [ ] Dezeen Debate Our most popular newsletter, formerly known as Dezeen Weekly, is sent every Tuesday and features a selection of the best reader comments and most talked-about stories. Plus occasional updates on Dezeen's services and breaking news. [ ] Dezeen Agenda Sent every Thursday and containing a selection of the most important news highlights. Plus occasional updates on Dezeen's services and invitations to Dezeen events. [ ] Dezeen Daily A daily newsletter containing the latest stories from Dezeen. [ ] Dezeen In Depth Sent on the last Friday of every month, Dezeen in Depth features original feature articles, interviews and opinion pieces that delve deeper into the major stories shaping architecture and design. [ ] Dezeen Jobs Daily updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. [ ] Dezeen Jobs Weekly Weekly updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. [ ] Dezeen Awards News about our Dezeen Awards programme, including entry deadlines and announcements. Plus occasional updates. [ ] Dezeen Events Guide News from Dezeen Events Guide, a listings guide covering the leading design-related events taking place around the world. Plus occasional updates and invitations to Dezeen events. [ ] Dezeen Awards China News about our Dezeen Awards China programme, including entry deadlines and announcements. Plus occasional updates. [ ] We will only use your email address to send you the newsletters you have requested. We will never give your details to anyone else without your consent. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email, or by emailing us at [email protected]. For more details, please see our privacy notice. [Yes please!] [No thank you] Thank you! You will shortly receive a welcome email so please check your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link at the bottom of every newsletter. Share and comment Share: 2 comments More * Architecture * Interiors * Design * Technology More opinion * "Working yourself to the point of exhaustion is no longer a badge of honour" "Working yourself to the point of exhaustion is no longer a ... * "As architectural drama The Brutalist does not wholly convince" "As architectural drama The Brutalist does not wholly convince" * "LA boasts the world's most important legacy of 20th-century architecture" "LA boasts the world's most important legacy of 20th-century ... * "Companies could set a radical example by stating that they've exceeded their quotas of natural resources" "Companies could set a radical example by stating that ... * "We have only two options before us: reimagine, or perish" "We have only two options before us: reimagine, or perish" * "Mocha Mousse may be a classic exemplar of enshittification" "Mocha Mousse may be a classic exemplar of enshittification" * "Many of our everyday spaces are doing us harm" "Many of our everyday spaces are doing us harm" * "I wander into office lobbies wherever I go and it delivers no end of disappointment" "I wander into office lobbies wherever I go and it delivers ... * * * * * * * * Comments Visit our comments page | Read our comments policy Top design stories Most popular Most recent 1. 1Hyundai unveils electric rickshaws "tailored to India's unique environment" 2. 2Justin McGuirk on William Gibson and subculture 3. 3IKEA revives popular '70s shelf in Nytillverkad vintage collection 4. 4Swedish design is "bold, explorative, conscious and f***ing amazing" 5. 5Rethink Softly seating creates comfort without foam[sq-e3w-con] [sci-fi-cit][ikea-nytil][surface-cl][b-rethink-] 1. 1Chanel builds sculptural runway in newly restored Grand Palais 2. 2Ten exhibitions for design lovers during Mexico City art week 3. 3Liv tables by Interesting Times Gang x Ingridsdotter 4. 4Swedish design is "bold, explorative, conscious and f***ing amazing" 5. 5Mathieu Lehanneur's Olympic cauldron balloon to return annually in Paris until 2028[chanel-spr][mexico-art][iv-tables-] [surface-cl][olympic-ca] SO? marries timber and stone for house overlooking Turkish mountains Two Face House by SO? Studio Tarea creates "90s fever dream" inside pink Richmond eatery Pink Room by Studio Tarea Chopova Lowena kits out handbag with dedicated mayonnaise holder and spoon [hellmanns-chopova-lowena-bag_dezeen_2364_] Chowdhury Walk social housing designed not to be "a monolithic block" Aerial view of Chowdhury Walk Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe to our newsletters Your email address [ ] [Next] Loading New! Dezeen Agenda US Sent on alternate Fridays, this US edition of Dezeen Agenda is a fortnightly newsletter rounding up everything you need to know from America, featuring news, projects and interviews with industry figures. Plus occasional updates and invitations to Dezeen events. [ ] New! Dezeen Showroom New Releases A quarterly newsletter rounding up a selection of recently launched products by designers and studios, published on Dezeen Showroom. [ ] Dezeen Debate Our most popular newsletter, formerly known as Dezeen Weekly, is sent every Tuesday and features a selection of the best reader comments and most talked-about stories. Plus occasional updates on Dezeen's services and breaking news. [ ] Dezeen Agenda Sent every Thursday and containing a selection of the most important news highlights. Plus occasional updates on Dezeen's services and invitations to Dezeen events. [ ] Dezeen Daily A daily newsletter containing the latest stories from Dezeen. [ ] Dezeen In Depth Sent on the last Friday of every month, Dezeen in Depth features original feature articles, interviews and opinion pieces that delve deeper into the major stories shaping architecture and design. [ ] Dezeen Jobs Daily updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. [ ] Dezeen Jobs Weekly Weekly updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. [ ] Dezeen Awards News about our Dezeen Awards programme, including entry deadlines and announcements. Plus occasional updates. [ ] Dezeen Events Guide News from Dezeen Events Guide, a listings guide covering the leading design-related events taking place around the world. Plus occasional updates and invitations to Dezeen events. [ ] Dezeen Awards China News about our Dezeen Awards China programme, including entry deadlines and announcements. Plus occasional updates. [ ] We will only use your email address to send you the newsletters you have requested. We will never give your details to anyone else without your consent. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email, or by emailing us at [email protected]. For more details, please see our privacy notice. [Yes please!] [No thank you] Thank you! You will shortly receive a welcome email so please check your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link at the bottom of every newsletter. Most contemporary architecture photography "looks the same" says Helene Binet Helene Binet portrait "The distinction between theme parks and urban venues is rapidly dissolving" Starry Night immersive exhibition Popular jobs Featured jobs 1. 1Mid-weight interior designer at Pineapple Interiors 2. 2Interior designer at Tihany Design 3. 3Mid-weight interior designer at Paolo Moschino 4. 4Interior design assistant at Rachel Willson Interiors 5. 5Studio director at ADP[Pineapple-][TD-Logo-24][Paolo-Mosc] [new_site_p][adp-logo-2] 1. 1Architectural director at Rural Design Architects 2. 2Design manager at Makower Architects 3. 3Interior designer at Gravity Design Associates 4. 4Senior interior architect/designer at Lambs and Lions 5. 5Mid-weight interior architect/designer at Gunter & Co [Rual-Desig][MAKOWER-ar][Gravity-De][lambs-and-][GUNTER-and] Eight sumptuous members' clubs united by luxury interiors Soho House Mumbai Sixteen Japanese architecture studios photographed by Marc Goodwin Photo of Ikimono office by Marc Goodwin Stockholm Design Week 2025 guide Illustration of two people walking in snow Dezeen Jobs [RHS--300x300] Highlights * Hand in Hand House in Karuizawa Japanese houses Nendo intertwined cottages Japanese houses Nendo intertwined cottages * Design week collabs by Hosoi Stockholm Design Week Stockholm Design Week highlights Stockholm Design Week Stockholm Design Week highlights * Jeddah Tower construction resumes News World's tallest skyscraper News World's tallest skyscraper * [hero-tweleve-chinese-architec] Architecture Upcoming Chinese projects Architecture Upcoming Chinese projects * Marina Tabassum set to design 2025 Serpentine Pavilion News Serpentine Pavilion 2025 News Serpentine Pavilion 2025 * Cross-laminated timber data centre Data centres Microsoft timber data centres Data centres Microsoft timber data centres * E3W electric rickshaw concept by Hyundai and TVS Motor Company Electric vehicles Hyundai electric rickshaws Electric vehicles Hyundai electric rickshaws * Newton Park Place by ROAR London house extensions Oak-framed extension London house extensions Oak-framed extension * Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture by Asif Khan News Kazakhstan cultural centre News Kazakhstan cultural centre * Menorca farmhouse conversion, Estancia San Jose, by Atelier du Pont and Aru Arquitectura Renovations Menorca farmhouse conversion Renovations Menorca farmhouse conversion * Bookcase in Belgravia home Lookbooks Stylish bookshelves Lookbooks Stylish bookshelves * Pala Zion News Utah desert homes News Utah desert homes * Snoop and Dr Dre Bottles Ini Archibong gin bottle Bottles Ini Archibong gin bottle * The Light House by SJK Architects Multi-generational homes Multi-generational home Multi-generational homes Multi-generational home * Still from The Brutalist Opinion The Brutalist review Opinion The Brutalist review Share: * Newsletters * Comments * Submit a story * Advertise * Privacy notice * Contact * Series * Interviews * Opinion * Talks * Videos * Architecture * Interiors * Design * Technology * Magazine * Awards * Jobs * Events Guide * Showroom * School Shows * Courses