UG: In Spook Country, the net is introduced in a quite specific way; it is somehow turned inside out and projected into real space. You have invented a new art form for that purpose called locative art. For example, you describe a virtual monument on the site of River Phoenix’s death. Why did you choose to write on GPS?
WG: I wanted a way to visualise the extent to which something has changed since I started writing about information technology. When I coined the word cyberspace, cyberspace was there, and everything else was here. That has reversed itself over the course of my writing. I literally think that cyberspace is now here, and a complete lack of connectivity is now there. If we could see the wireless exchanges of digital information taking place around us, we would be living in a much busier visual landscape. Most of what we do as a society we now either primarily do digitally, in what we used to call cyberspace, or we simultaneously do digitally and in the physical world. If you are driving with a GPS system, you are simultaneously driving your car and manoeuvring your car through a digital construct. I believe that very few of us are aware of the extent to which that has already happened, and I suspect that I’m not aware of it to anywhere near the real extent to which it has happened. So in this book I was looking for a more or less imaginary emergent technology or art form that will allow me to simply bring that up. The conversation in the coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard is a little more grandstanding than I usually do. I don’t think I have had a scene in a novel before where three people sit down and basically talk about a William Gibson novel without ever really mentioning it.
I guess that is the point: "very few of us are aware of the extent to which" large sections of human activity and social life have transferred themselves to what Gibson would once have called cyberspace, and very few of us are aware of the negotiation of "digital constructs" that have merged seamlessly into our experience of the real.
