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Note: This Webpage uses a version of Nicholas Friesner's stretch-text. I have modified the css to match the default page style, so as to better integrate the text into the essay. I also combined the question tag with a hyperlink, which should allow somebody unfamiliar with the mechanics of stretch-text to still identify and access the hidden content.
While William Gibson's cyborgs are often sub-dermally enhanced or modified in fashionable ways, as with Molly in Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, Neal Stephenson's satiric dystopia Snowcrash provides a more stereotypical, obvious cyborg. These "Gargoyles", as Stephenson dubs them, are ugly, visible, hung on all sides with computer gear: the quintessential geek.
Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; there getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculater pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time. [Snowcrash 123-124, emphasis added]
In this permanent state of connectivity, the Gargoyle Lagos contrasts sharply with his closest analogue within Gibson. Angie Mitchell, from Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, can also access cyberspace without a traditional computer. It's built into her brain: she dreams the Matrix. It is not common knowledge, however, and she can only closely interact with those who know her secret. Though Angie and Lagos both sacrifice a normal life for the sake of constant connectivity, the two different worlds slip them into the top and bottom rungs of society. Angie Mitchell is a Sense/Net star, a pop idol in her world, dedicated to recording multi-sensory entertainment media to elevate the viewer from their quotidian existence. Lagos is an outsider, orbiting the fringes of the crowd (quite literally, in the scene referenced) to gather information for processing. While both Angie's job and her eventual departure from the real world (born again into a data-construct within cyberspace) relate to an escape from the Sprawl, Lagos' main activity is the detailed analysis and observation of environment, meticulously cataloguing the eccentricities of life Angie leaves behind.
It is Stephenson's environment that creates the need for an information-processing cyborg. Angie's dreams gave her a perspective on an environment apart from (though linked to) reality; Lagos' constant analysis and reference is a perpetual race to stay on top of things. In the end, it is an ambiguous question who is the more truly cyborgic, Lagos and his assisted race to catch up with the times (he started as a librarian, not exactly pole position in terms of societal knowledge) or the hundreds of people who integrate technology into every facet of their lives without thinking. The world is a mess.References and Related Materials
- K. Adam White - Junk City
- George Landow - Four Kinds of Cyborg
- Steve Cook - Gibson's Sprawl
- Angie as Cyborg Inhabitant of Cyberspace
- Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
- Gibson, William. Count Zero. New York: Ace Books, 1986.
- Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1989.
Last modified 19 April 2005