"It's what we do now instead of bohemias," Harwood says. "Instead of what?" "Bohemias. Alternative… — William Gibson
"It's what we do now instead of bohemias," Harwood says.
"Instead of what?"
"Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies…And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct."
"Extinct?"
"We started picking them before they could ripen…as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters."
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Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney than a vague source of irritation. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable to define, something very large was happening here.
San Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities.
That other country, waiting.
He is by trade a keeper of the door to that country.
Drawn, the black blade becomes a key. When he holds it, he holds the wind in his hand.
The door swings gently open.
But he does not draw it now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial…raises his hand to halt a passing cab. Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own.
