So Neil Cicierega has put out Mouthsounds, and I’m at a total loss to describe it, but I really feel the need to talk about it. Neil has been a source of grade A internet weirdness for a long time, but I feel like this really puts him up into a new level. This feels, more than anything I’ve seen in a long time, to be a product of the internet. It reminds me of William Gibson talking about one of his novels “Pattern Recognition”:
“Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I’m going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I’m going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. ‘Cause I’m going to have to go beyond that. And I think over the course of these last two books–I don’t think I’m done yet–I’ve been getting a yardstick together. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the ’80s and ’90s–as strange as it may seem to say this–we had such luxury of stability. Things weren’t changing quite so quickly in the ’80s and ’90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.
dgstieber 