Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • About
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Design
  • On William Gibson on design
  • Dezeen
  • 2014
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • On William Gibson on design

 

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.

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 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 Starcke interiors, 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”.

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. And 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. And, 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 industrialization 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.

Inevitably, in the latest book, The Peripheral, our unbridled materialism yields what we fear – climate-driven apocalypse. Returning to scifi, 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 – its 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 scifi 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
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Architecture Activist architects Al Jazeera 2014
  • Architecture Djenné’s mud mosque Icon 2010
  • Architecture Honeywell, I’m home! e-flux journal 2015
  • Architecture Maison Dom-ino Dezeen 2014
  • Architecture PREVI, Lima Domus 2011
  • Architecture Revolutionary housing in Argentina Domus 2011
  • Architecture Robin Hood Gardens SQM 2014
  • Architecture The Base, Chocó Nuevotopias 2013
  • Architecture The High Line Icon 2009
  • Architecture Walter Benjamin puts activists to shame? Here 2013
  • Cities Beirut Icon 2006
  • Cities DIY cities (the limitations) Uncube 2014
  • Cities Edge City (São Paulo) Strelka Press 2012
  • Cities How radical is Radical Urbanism? Catalogue 2015
  • Cities Istanbul Icon 2010
  • Cities Jenin Icon 2005
  • Cities Life on the edge Moscow Urban Forum 2013
  • Cities Seoul Condé Nast Traveller 2012
  • Cities Shenzhen Icon 2008
  • Cities Unreal estate (London) Domus 2012
  • Cities Urban commons The Guardian 2015
  • Design Adventure gear The Guardian 2010
  • Design Beneath the street, the wilderness: Occupy and Bear Grylls Here 2012
  • Design Craft fetishism The Guardian 2011
  • Design Craft fetishism: From objects to things Disegno 2012
  • Design Design and the Right Domus 2013
  • Design Design and violence Dezeen 2013
  • Design Dreaming of year zero Bio 50 2014
  • Design Fabbers, dabblers and microstars Icon 2009
  • Design London riots The Guardian 2011
  • Design Luxury watch culture The Guardian 2010
  • Design Milan’s PR economy The Guardian 2011
  • Design On William Gibson on design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Open design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Samsung vs Apple Domus 2013
  • Design The internet of broken things Dezeen 2014
  • Design The post-spectacular economy Van Abbemuseum 2011
  • Design Ultramundane Domus 2013
  • People Alejandro Aravena Icon 2009
  • People Do Ho Suh Icon 2008
  • People Enzo Mari Icon 2009
  • People Ettore Sottsass Icon 2007
  • People Francis Kere Icon 2010
  • People Richard Sapper Domus 2013
  • Reviews Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly Dezeen 2014
  • Reviews Hearts of the City by Herbert Muschamp Icon 2010
  • Reviews Latin America in Construction at MoMA Architectural Record 2015
  • Reviews Mad Max: Fury Road Dezeen 2015
  • Reviews Max Bill Icon 2010
  • Reviews Philips shaver Icon 2008
  • Reviews Postmodernism at the V&A The Guardian 2010
  • Reviews Rebel Cities by David Harvey Art Review 2012
  • Reviews The Craftsman by Richard Sennett Icon 2008
  • Reviews The Historical Museum, Sarajevo The Guardian 2011
  • Reviews Together by Richard Sennett Art Review 2012
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Design
  • On William Gibson on design
  • Dezeen
  • 2014
Back to Index

 

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.

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 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 Starcke interiors, 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”.

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. And 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. And, 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 industrialization 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.

Inevitably, in the latest book, The Peripheral, our unbridled materialism yields what we fear – climate-driven apocalypse. Returning to scifi, 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 – its 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 scifi 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.

 

 

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