Gibson has said that he was imagining a TV from when he was growing up. Quote:
"I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful, […] the texture and color of a signal free channel on a wooden cabinet motorola with fabric covered speakers.
So like this:
Take me down to Roku City, where the remote is good, and the advertising pretty!! Awwww will you please take me hommmeeee!
The scariest part about this is realizing there was less time between 1985 to 2005 then there is from 2005 to now (2026).
Neuromancer reference, btw
Should have just been the Roku City haha
Fantastic 😂
Neuromancer if anyone is curious. One of the best opening lines in literature.
Yall had color static? I only remember seeing black and white static.
Gibson talks about this in his prologue, and other anachronisms in Neuromancer (specifically his lack of imagination regarding phones)—he was envisioning the dull grey of a dead tv signal of his childhood, not the crazy black and white static of the late 20th and early 21st century; but the sentiment tracks even though he probably wasn’t event thinking that about any of the implications, given his displeasure of even being lumped in with cyberpunk as a genre (which I think is really confoundedly stupid on his part).
We had a really old tv in my basement when I was young. If you messed with the hue knob while on a non existent channel you could get a lot more colorful static
Well that is wildly upsetting.
there are two too many towers in the post 1985 skylines.
