# William Gibson William Gibson (b. 1948) is an American-Canadian writer who founded the **cyberpunk** subgenre and supplied much of the vocabulary and visual grammar the digital world still uses to describe itself. His debt to the tech elite is paradoxical: cyberpunk was a *critique* of corporate-dominated, hyper-capitalist dystopia, yet its aesthetics were enthusiastically adopted by the very industry it warned about. ## Coining cyberspace Gibson coined the word **cyberspace** in the short story "Burning Chrome" (*Omni*, 1982) and popularized it in his debut novel [[Neuromancer]] (1984), which swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards. *Neuromancer* imagined a "consensual hallucination" of networked data — the matrix — navigated by freelance hackers in a world owned by zaibatsu megacorporations and rogue artificial intelligences. The book set the template for how a generation pictured "the net," from the imagery of *The Matrix* films to the marketing of actual technology companies. Gibson's famous aphorism — "The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed" — is quoted endlessly in tech circles, usually stripped of his characteristic irony about *who* gets the future first. ## Influence on the tech elite Gibson, with [[Neal Stephenson]], gave Silicon Valley its cyberpunk dialect: cyberspace, the matrix, the hacker-protagonist, the corporate-feudal future. The industry kept the noir cool and the vocabulary while largely discarding the anti-corporate politics — a pattern detailed in [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]]. His AIs and his networked worlds also prefigure the [[AGI]] anxieties now central to the field. ## See also - [[Neuromancer]] — the novel that named cyberspace - [[Neal Stephenson]] — the other foundational cyberpunk - [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]] — the hub