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I found this at the Washington Post.com. It needs no commentary, but it begs a discussion:

The Post-9/11 Era Has Caught Up With William Gibson’s Vision

By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 6, 2007

Southwest Washington is an antique vision of the future. It’s mid-century’s idea of “progress,” a never-to-be-repeated experiment in bulldozing shabby if genuine neighborhoods and replacing them with chilly high-rise modernity. To this day it struggles to present much sense of life or soul.

It is weird finding William Gibson here, even given his acute sense of irony.

He gazes at his Mandarin Oriental hotel surroundings off Maryland Avenue. “It looks like one of those low-resolution, decaying-fractal hotels you’d find in Second Life,” Gibson muses as he walks around the broad, empty meeting-room corridors, thinking of that Internet virtual world where residents interact through animated selves. “You keep waiting for somebody to scoot out of one of those doors and shoot you like in a video game.”

Back when it was a more meaningful phrase, Gibson achieved renown for writing “science fiction.” He famously invented the word “cyberspace” in his 1984 novel “Neuromancer,” which has sold more than 6 1/2 million copies. This was before virtually anyone — including him — knew that something called the Internet was being born. He is also credited with inventing the idea of the “matrix,” as well as foreseeing some of the twistiest aspects of globalization.

He was in Washington recently, however, because he has morphed. Gibson is still producing literate and thought-provoking novels featuring the kind of gritty, anonymous warehouses where the future is sometimes fledged. But recently his novels have transcended categories.

And this:

Gibson says: “One of the biggest technologically driven changes in my writing is the awareness that every text today has a kind of spectral quasi-hypertext surrounding it.” It is “all of the Googled information that found its way into the book but which isn’t available to the reader as a literal hypertext unless you’re willing to be the animator of the hypertext process” and Google each term that’s distinctive and new.

“It’s curious. When I published ‘Pattern Recognition’ ” — his previous book, which was also set in the recent past and achieved mainstream success — “within a few months there was someone who started a Web site. People were compiling Googled references to every term and every place in the book. It has photographs of just about every locale in the book — a massive site that was compiled by volunteer effort. But it took a couple of years to come together. With ‘Spook Country,’ the same thing was up on the Web before the book was published.” Somebody got an advance reader copy, and instantly put up a site for his fictional Node magazine.

Even more important, “Google is the pi?ce de r?sistance of weird [stuff] finding,” he says. “One of the things I’ve been doing in the eBay era — I’ve become a really keen observer of the rationalization of the world’s attic. Every class of human artifact is being sorted and rationalized by this economically driven machine that constantly turns it over and brings it to a higher level of searchability. . . . The tentacles of that operation extend into every flea market and thrift shop and basement and attic in the world. . . .

“Every hair is being numbered — eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

“Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I’ve been able to see on eBay. The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made ‘eek eek’ noise until that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I saw his box, which I’d long forgotten. I didn’t have to buy Froggy, but I saved the jpegs. So I’ve got Froggy in my computer.

“This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn’t used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world’s premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does.”

Read the whole thing. How does that make you feel? I certainly used to think that “the future” would be something shiny and different, that is, when I was a kid thinking about the 21st Century and all.

I did not expect “the future” to look so much like yesterday. What did you think that today would look like, way back when?