I spent the night in a port city in Greece as I am making my way back to Western Europe. I’ll be crossing by airplane via polar routes on my way to Colorado next week for an academic conference at my home town university.
I feel like I’ve made it when I am invited to speak on topics like Renegade Futurism. I’m now old enough to have lived a couple rounds in the “dissident technology” discourse so I hope to have something of value to say to new generations.
“You can’t get the little pricks generation gap you.” Molly Millions Neuromancer
On the long drive back from Istanbul I am listening to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to set myself in the right mood after the mix of antiquity and modernity I encountered this week.
One doesn’t cross thousands of kilometers and centuries of empires without requiring a bit of an aesthetic change.

The weather is more sunny Mediterranean Easter weekend than the non-climate skies of a future Japan’s Chiba and Night City, but with really any port city at night I can’t help but think of the famous first line of cyperpunk’s foremost novel.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer
And so I tuned in to a story of oligarchy, artificial intelligence, dissident coders and cyborgs with mirror shades. In that near future the protagonists make a stopover in Istanbul too and it involves medically advanced nervous system treatments too. Gibson’s cyborg chop shops are almost as advanced as what I saw this week.

Gibson’s 1984 novel is as relevant in 2025 as it ever was. Our timeline has become his later work in uncanny ways but his cyperpunk aesthetic has become as timeless as the domes of Constantinople.

Whatever transition we are about to make as humans as our own Wintermute intelligences arrive will be rocky. I don’t know who will be the dissidents and how centralizing power may prove to be.
One can just start to see corporate post-nation states emerge. Maybe they will look like Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Maybe it will look like Elon Musk’s family office Excession. Of course, that’s an entirely different science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.
