We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea of being attuned to various forms of communication in a complex world.
William Gibson's quote emphasizes the importance of being attentive and responsive to the multitude of signals and messages that surround us in an increasingly complex and noisy world. The metaphor of listening amidst the 'babel of tongues' suggests that, despite the chaos, there are significant and powerful voices that can resonate and create impactful experiences, akin to the way music moves us.
In practice
This quote could be used in a technology conference to highlight how important communication is in tech development.
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.
As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
Why commit technological suicide by restricting the flow of talent into the United States?
Our values are that we do think that people have a right to privacy. And that our customers are not our products.
In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.
We cannot idealize technology. Technology is only and always the reflection of our own imagination, and its uses must be conditioned by our own values. Technology can help cure diseases, but we can prevent a lot of diseases by old-fashioned changes in behavior.
We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.
Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.
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