Here’s why you should stop using William Gibson‘s “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“
It’s wrong and I will get into it but let me give you some context first. I’m a huge William Gibson fan. Heck, we put his face on the top half of our website when we launched Third Wave, we used this quote in a ridiculous amount of presentations ourselves, I have read Neuromancer the first time around when I was 16. Yes, you Gibson groupies, you got nothing on me.
But nine years is a long time. One thing that we see in our work is that people are chasing someone else’s future. Sometimes they are chasing just a mirage. Sometimes this mirage is gigantic, but it’s still nothing more than one narrative. And in a few times a mirage can become so big, it becomes reality.
And there‘s a reason why this is happening. We‘ve been very much part of an industry that was reaching out into supposed the future, into developments that we thought are beneficial to us and thus must be beneficial to others and told other people about them. Thus encouraging a cycle where people who make decisions, but do not have time to understand how the world is changing around them relied on people to tell them what shiny new thing they need to engage with. For the most part, this is still how business is done in Germany and all over Europe.
Today it’s too easy to create alternative narratives that seem stronger than the reality of most people. It has always been William Gibson absolute strength to capture the Zeitgeist before it is fully unfolding. We can‘t really blame him for what he said. But we should pause from time to time and reflect on why this quote has been larger than life. When we do that, it shows us that in a scary, VUCA‘esque world it represents our desire to know that at least some out there know what the future will look like. I think, for the most part, it just tells us that somehow everything is still the same as it used to be.
Of course, this is not true.
The more we rely on this quote as a mantra, the more we relinquish our own agency. It puts us all into the position of living in a future that belongs to someone else and never our own.
I will not attempt to coin an alternative that is more accurate. It would be foolish, both because I‘m nowhere close to being William Gibson and because, if anything, it shows us that quotes and phrases can develop a life of their own and we should be wary of that.
