This blogpost is about how William Gibson physically describes the Matrix in Burning Chrome. The Burning Chrome master blogpost is here.

Electronic Consensus-HalluCINATION

Early on in Burning Chrome Gibson describes the Matrix as an electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the exchange of massive quantities of data. The phrase electronic consensus-hallucination has become famous as a good description of the modern internet. But as I show over here, Gibson wasn’t trying to predict the future, but he was responding to the contemporary world he was living in and wanted to show a future where everything is deregulated and how technology isn’t a solution to those problems but rather how technology distances people from each other.

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Beyond that basic idea, I think it is worth thinking through how exactly Gibson depicts the Matrix and how that depiction deviates from what has filtered down into pop culture.

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Nonspace

Gibson describes the matrix as a “3d chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent.” This seems to be where the word “matrix” comes from: The black squares and white squares of a chessboard combine to form a matrix. But Gibson is also very clear that the matrix isn’t a physical space like the Matrix in the Matrix movie. Gibson’s Matrix is a “colorless nonspace.” There’s no chance of thinking that the Matrix is the real world. The hackers are represented by a “little yellow pyramid.” It’s always a computer simulation.

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Chrome’s IcE Castle

Chrome, what they are trying to burn down, is represented as an ice castle. Personally, it reminds me of the lake of ice where Satan is trapped in the Divine Comedy. Just like the idea that this is just a representation and not the real thing reminds me of Paradise Lost where Milton says he’s merely translating the story of the fall so humans can understand it, but the events portrayed aren’t the events that really happened.

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Anyways, as the hackers breach the first gate of the ice castle they see walls as “leagues of corridor, mazes of shadow.” I’m not really sure what is a “league of corridor” exactly. I interpret that as really just a series of shadowy corridors. I think this is another instance of Gibson getting way too cute and I guess his cuteness goes over my head here.

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The ice walls “flick away like supersonic butterflies made of shade.” Another puzzling description that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Because the Matrix is a “nonspace,” can’t one travel at will? Does it make sense to talk in distances? If no, and I think the answer is no, then what’s the virtue of a “supersonic” butterfly? Doesn’t this just mean that the walls flick away with great speed? Would these hackers really use a term like “supersonic butterflies made of shade”? Come on, now.

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Once the outside walls have “flicked away” we get to the data towers that are the object of our journey. These data towers are described as “vertical freight trains.” Another strange simile. One defining quality of freight trains is that they make a LOT of noise. But there’s no indication that sound even exists in the Matrix. The Matrix seems to be just a visual representation. In fact, at the end when they burn Chrome, the narrator states that he thought he heard Chrome scream, but he couldn’t have. By
“vertical freight trains” does Gibson just mean that they are really tall? And not that they make the sounds freight trains make? It’s unclear to me the exact image the reader is supposed to reproduce in their mind.

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Also, in this world do freight trains still exist? I get a chuckle out of the image of Molly Millions with her glass eyes and razor finger tips being some 19th century train conductor.

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Next we get to the impossibly bright colors as contrasted to the dark shadows. It seems to me this would be hard to watch. If they are impossibly bright are the hackers closing their eyes? How are they seeing this? Maybe this is a nitpick, but this is something you pick up on if you read the story 10 times. I do like Gibson’s use of the phrase “nursery blues.” It shows how the Matrix is sterile parody of real life: the Matrix itself is “colorless” AKA lifeless, but the objects in the Matrix are full of color. Describing the color as “nursery blue” shows that the only life in the Matrix are the colors – there’s no real life, no nursery, only the color of “nursery blue.”

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And then once the Russian program is inserted and Chrome is burned down, the Matrix “folds itself around me like an origami trick.” This reminds me of the origami tricks in Blade Runner. Not sure why origami is a thing in the cyberpunk genre. Here in Burning Chrome, I think it means that the Matrix is so artificial, nothing more than a child’s toy.

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This is very different from the Matrix in the Hollywood movie. There, the Matrix is as real as real life. But in Burning Chrome, the opposite is happening. The Matrix is artifice, an illusion, created for commercial reasons that serve to distance people from each other. It isn’t a liveable alternative reality like in the Hollywood movie. Hollywood misses the point entirely and that is why Gibson never liked the movie.

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I wrote my own cyberpunk story. It’s called THE LAST BLONDE. You can find it at www.blackflagliterature.com

This blogpost is about Chuck Palahniuk’s untitled “Woke Western” work in progress.

Woke Western

On his substack Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, openly contemplated writing a Woke Western. This is of coarse a very stupid idea, but it is worth examining because it reveals a lot about modern cultural production in America in the year of our Lord 2026.

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First, he notes that there have been attempts to write a Post-Modern Western, like King’s Dark Tower series for example. He doesn’t actually give a reason for dismissing those books other than that they are in the Fantasy as well as Western genre and he apparently doesn’t like that. So, what’s his idea? What’s his twist?

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His twist is to add some humor. Specifically, he says he wants to do something like “Cormac McCarthy, but funny, really funny.” I think he might be selling McCarthy a little short here, because Suttree can be, at times, really funny. Nevertheless, Mr. Palahniuk is capable of some humor so I guess the suggestion isn’t completely outrageous.

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The interesting point to me isn’t the humor but the Wokeness. He says he wants the book to have “a woke-ish awareness of the damage being done to the Wild West”. One objection to this is that it has already been done. Blood Meridian absolutely has a “woke-ish awareness of the damage being done to the Wild West” sentiment.

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It starts with The Kid leaving home at an early age and turning his back on his father and where he came from. To be divorced from all tradition is a woke thing to do. The book ends with a man inserting posts in the ground, which signals the end of the Wild West because now with fences there’s no freedom to roam.

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This shows how the American experience in the frontier ended the Wild West, which is similar to Palahniuk’s “awareness of the damage being done to the Wild West.” So, there’s really no reason to write this book. Making it funny wouldn’t change anything. Mr. Palahniuk’s novel would be proving a point that’s already been proved. And the Novel is just one long argument isn’t it? The reader is a jury, after all.

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I’m sure Mr. Palahniuk feels quite smug and superior to a writer like Louis L’Amour. Mr. Palahniuk wants to take something someone else has built (the Western genre) and make a few snide woke comments to show how superior he is to those old Western writers. But L’Amour at least L’Amour was earnestly building something. What Mr. Palahniuk wants to do is a teenager’s fantasy: live in Dad’s house and eat Dad’s food but crack some wisecracks at Dad to feel morally superior. Absolutely childish.

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That aside, which character Mr. Palahniuk would select as the main character is revealing. He picks a veteran of the Confederate Army. This is a dead ringer clue that the whole project is about being smug and morally superior to his characters (and their modern-day analogues) then actually trying to depict what those characters who inhabited that world were really honestly going through.

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He says he wants the main character to be the veteran of the Confederate Army because he wants the man to be burdened by his “poor choices.” This just proves my point. Palahniuk wants to believe that he (and the standard issue liberal reader reading this book) would make better choices. That’s a fantasy. Mr. Palahniuk would have made the same “poor choices” that his Confederate Army character made.

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Thinking that you’d be the ONE GUY who didn’t give the Nazi salute is a comforting fantasy. But just that – a fantasy. You are actually not morally superior to people from the past. Just like people in the future aren’t morally superior to us, even though I’m sure there are things we did that will look just as bad as slavery and the rest.

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He ends with a quote from one of these old Westerns where the writer depicts an Asian shopkeeper as a guy who’s owned a shop for 20 years but can’t figure out the impenetrable ways of the White man. Mr. Palahniuk says, “Yeah, this genre is ripe for some reinvention.” He seems to think – and assume his reader will think – that such a description of the Asian shopkeeper is so obviously wrong that the only path forward is reinvention. He doesn’t even consider that the description is true, even necessary.

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The description to my ears seems true because obviously there is a large difference between the Asian guy and the White guy in the Wild West. The Asian is just there to run a business and make a profit off of the White guy. He sees the Wild West as just an economic zone. But the White guy is there for exploration and adventure. There really is no comparison. The two different men, with different outlooks on life are the result of two different civilizations. So, of course the Asian will find the White guy impenetrable.

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By scoffing at this distance between the White man and the Asian man, Palahniuk is saying, “We’re all one human race, so of course there’s nothing impenetrable here.” But that is not the attitude that the people who made the Wild West took. They were racist to the core. They had to be. If they hadn’t been the Wild West would have never existed. And Mr. Palahniuk wouldn’t get a chance to earn a healthy paycheck by doing nothing but taking a genre someone else invented and inserting some standard issue Wokism. I hope he writes the book. It will be very difficult to prove me wrong.

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Check out my story, THE LAST BLODNE, at www.blackflagliterature.com

This blogpost is about the House of Blue Lights in Burning Chrome. The Burning Chrome master blogpost is here.

House Of Blue Lights

The House of Blue Lights is a neuroelectronic sex shop, a sort of brothel of the mind. It’s revealed that Chrome, the person/thing they are trying to “burn” down, is the owner, as opposed to just a figure head for The Boys. It’s is somewhat notable that Gibson doesn’t use a MegaCorp for the figures that are supposedly pulling the strings. Instead it’s “The Boys.” More of a gang than a transnational corporation. Where’s the Yakuza?

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So, the House of Blue Lights is some sort of futuristic den of prostitution but Gibson never quite clears up how the mechanics works. A shift for one of the girls working three is described as “three hours in an approximation of REM sleep” and how “the customers never complained that she was faking it, because the orgasms were real.”

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I take issue with this vague talking around the issue instead of stating what’s really going on. There’s no real point to hide the ball unless the writer himself doesn’t have a clear vision of the mechanics of the setup.

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Here’s what I picture: a guy (maybe more than one) sitting in a chair separated from the sex worker by some glass window. Both the girl and the customer are hooked up to some electronic apparatus via wires so that they feel the orgasm – the orgasms are real – but there is no physical touching.

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The commercialization of sex without anything physically happening is very cyberpunk. But I could be wrong. Maybe my image is wrong. Gibson really should have been more specific and precise. I despise vague writing, because the point of reading a novel is to see a very particular artistic vision in an artistic medium that can be more detailed and specific than any other medium.

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To say that “Well Zeke, Gibson doesn’t explain everything and spoon feed the reader,” is a horrible cop out. Not explaining everything is a virtue when the writer wants to minimize the distance between the reader and the story. “Info dumping” can often read like the novel is behind a thick piece of museum glass. But that isn’t what’s going on in Burning Chrome.

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First, please keep in mind that Burning Chrome is very accessible. It is recommended to people who find Neuromancer a little too hard to follow, as a lot of the same ideas and characters populate both stories. So there’s no reason to hide the ball.

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Second, Gibson spends a considerable amount of time explaining everything else about the House of Blue Lights. It’s “hushed corridors” and “tacky decorative waterfall” are mentioned as how the bouncer doesn’t like the look of Automatic Jack but lets him in anyways because everyone’s just a wallet. So given these details there really is no justification for the “hide the ball” antics about how everything really works.

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I do like the name though. “House of Blue Lights” recalls the “Red Light” district of a seedy city, except the blue implies that something futuristic – like an electronic version of Amsterdam’s sex stalls. The reader can get that from just the name itself.

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Despite my complaints, Burning Chrome remains a defining work of art. And it is when Automatic Jack discusses his personal trip to the House of Blue Lights that we get the famous line about “the street finds its own use for things.” Absolutely worth reading and thinking over each detail.

THE LAST BLONDE

I wrote a cyberpunk story that applies the familiar ethos of the genre to a fresh setting. Instead of in a seedy city in the North East of the US, it takes place in the Mid-West in a rural town that died a long time ago. It’s called THE LAST BLONDE. You can find it at www.blackflagliterature.com

This blogpost is about the Gentleman Loser, the bar in William Gibson’s Burning Chrome. The Burning Chrome master blogpost is here.

The Gentleman Loser

The Gentleman Loser is a bar. It’s a cyberpunk story so the story pretty much has to start in a bar. This bar is a chic bar full of computer cowboys and other hustlers. Gibson uses the term “rustlers.” It sounds so close to “hustler” so that’s the meaning one naturally think of.

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But, if you look up “rustler” in the dictionary it tells you it refers to Wild West types who would steal cattle. That’s about right because the story is about burning/hacking Chrome and stealing her money. It’s a really good use of language by Gibson.

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Gibson also says that it is full of “cybernetic second-story men.” I have no idea what the means. What is a second-story man? Is it a middle manager type? Someone who has climbed above the first story but is nowhere near the top? That’s the only thing I can think of. I think this is another example of Gibson being too cute.

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Anyways, the Gentleman Loser is a “chic” bar. I think that’s pretty bad writing. How is it chic? What does it mean to be chic in in this cyberpunk world? Gibson doesn’t say. Saying something is “chic” without showing how it’s chic – especially in a science fiction world where what the in-world characters consider to be chic would not necessarily be the same thing as the reader would consider chic – is pretty bad writing. Gibson is telling instead of showing. It’s a lazy short hand that probably should have been deleted.

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The bar is full of “young-old” people. I assume that means young looking console cowboys who are old for their profession. Like how Case is 28 years old in Neuromancer and that is considered over the hill for a console cowboy. It’s an interesting phrase – not quite too cute but getting there – that seems to undercut the “chic” description. If the bar is so chic why is it only populated by these young-old hacker types? Why not an actual young person who isn’t a hacker or looking to date one? It seems this bar is a hipper version of a dive bar – but that’s not chic, is it?

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It’s mentioned that Jack, Bobby, and Rikki go to the Gentleman Loser to talk about Jack’s old war wound (that’s how he got the cybernetic/myoelectric arm) and they sit in a “small table in a corner.” This shows that the bar isn’t overfilled. My image of the typical cyberpunk bar is that it’s packed to the brim with a restless humanity where everyone is trying to line up their next score. Gibson seems to feint in that direction – this is the place that console cowboys looking for that next big score hang out – but he ultimately contradicts that image with an image of three people just quietly talking in a small table in the corner.

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I find the Gentleman’s Loser’s minimal description fascinating. The layout or the look isn’t described at all. Just that a certain type of clientele likes to hang out there – the console cowboys and those who want to date them.

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In my writing, I am always tempted to be detailed as possible and describe what someone walking through the door would see. But Gibson doesn’t do that. He describes it’s function and that’s it. Writing out another boilerplate description is unnecessary.

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In fact, Gibson probably could have dropped the “chic” part and maybe the “small tables” part as well. Although, I guess you can’t become such a minimalist that it ceases to be a lived experience.

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Perhaps better would be to describe the small table more fully. Is something carved in the table? Is the table next to a wall? What’s on the wall? There has to be something more specific than just it’s a small table. Something that gives you a sense of time and place.

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The name “Gentleman Loser” is an interesting choice. Apparently it’s form a Steely Dan song from the 70s. The “Loser” part is obvious. The hackers and their girlfriends are losers because they are the ones on the outskirt of society and not the ones running the big Mega-Corps.

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But what does “Gentleman” have to do with anything. Are these outcasts gentleman? At first glance, the answer is no. They’re hackers not plantation owners. But I think Gibson is saying is that in this society there are no old-school gentleman left. So the hacker with a cybernetic arm scrounging for a big score is the closest thing to a gentleman remaining. It’s hilariously ironic, actually.

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My latest cyberpunk story also takes place in a bar. This bar is called “Moe’s Ashtray” which is a name I put a lot of thought into. The story is called THE LAST BLONDE. You can find it at www.blackflagliterature.com

This blogpost is my review of the short story Burning Chrome by William Gibson. The Burning Chrome master blogpost is here.

“Cyberspace” And The Ono-Sendai VII

Burning Chrome is famous for two things. First, it is the story where the term “Cyberspace” was coined. Second, it serves as an unofficial prequel to Neuromancer, Gibson’s famous novel that mainstreamed the Cyberpunk genre.

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The story opens in Bobby’s loft as Bobby and the narrator are jacking into the matrix to burn Chrome. Bobby is a “console cowboy” – a hot shot hacker – looking for one big score. Bobby’s weapon of choice is the Ono-Sendai VII, a matrix simulator that allows him to access cyberspace.

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It is important to realize off the bat that the cyberspace in Burning Chrome is not the cyberspace of the internet in 2026 or even the internet of 1990-something. Cyberspace in Burning Chrome is “the electronic consensus-hallucination” that facilitates the exchange of mass quantities of data. And that SOUNDS like the internet as we know it. But it isn’t.

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The Cyberspace in Burning Chrome is closer to today’s virtual reality. It isn’t something that can be accessed on whim that is part of the every day world. Compare that to the internet today where I can look at the internet on my laptop and easily look up and talk to someone in “meatspace.”

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It is a second world separate from the physical world. It can only be accessed by having special equipment – the Ono-Sendai VII – unlike Grandma accessing Facebook on her phone.

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The people who call Gibson a futurist and a visionary because he saw Cyberspace coming before its time are very mistaken. Gibson wasn’t trying to predict the future and if he was trying to it, he basically failed. His Cyberspace is much more visual than our Cyberspace, where people navigate by clicking links that act as wormholes whisking you around the internet. In his Cyberspace you have to visually (although virtually) navigate and manipulate the various objects floating around. His Cyberspace is a much more physical space.

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Gibson uses Cyberspace as a purer form of the physical world. Gibson’s cyberpunk world is a world of mass deregulation where the economy is the wild west and everyone man is forced to fend for himself. Cyberspace visually mimics this by being a place where a person is untethered by any natural laws of physics and is just floating around like a character in a video game. This “floating around” parallels the borderless world the physical world has become.

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Second, Gibson uses Cyberspace to show how technology distances people from each other. Burning Chrome is very Black Mirror-esque in the way it shows how people relate to technology.

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It criticizes the “gee-whiz” Golden Age SciFi’s focus on cool gadgets, by showing that technology doesn’t just solve some problem, but it distances people from one another. Cyberspace shows this by being a second world. You enter Cyberspace by effectively leaving this world. You’re literally off in your own little world divorced from the real world.

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In fact, in several interviews over the years, Gibson has stated that the idea of Cyberspace came to him when he saw some teenagers in a video arcade and how they were just in their own little world.

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Cyberspace really has nothing to do with the modern internet.

“The Street finds Its Own Use For Things”

In addition to coining the term “Cyberspace”, Burning Chrome contains some famous quotes. One is “the street finds its own use for things.” This is mentioned near the end of the story about a drug that is supposed to be used by senile patients, but people going through breakups use it because it helps you to remember. People who have just broken up will want to replay every second of their relationship.

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The quote has gotten traction in tech circles in Silicon Valley because it shows how technology can be designed for x, but it’s ultimate use will by y. Radio is a good example because it was designed for rural church goers unable to attend church to hear some pastor’s sermon. And it wind up being used by the likes of Howard Stern.

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Another quote is the opening line: “It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.” I think this is a much better opening line than the Neuromancer line about the polluted sky being the color of TV tuned to a dead channel. The Neuromancer line is mannered and pretty for its own sake and doesn’t tell you anything other than the writer likes to be cute.

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But the Burning Chrome line actually tells you something. “It was hot” is such a simple phrase but that’s why I like it. Not only is it something people would actually say, but it tells you something of the world Gibson is creating.

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It tells you that this world is focused on the everyday tangible concerns people have rather than just some cool tech. It’s a revolutionary break from the Golden Age SciFi “gee whiz” stuff. And it tells you that in just 3 words.

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The rest of the line about “burning Chrome” is interesting because it hooks you right away: Who or what is Chrome and what does it mean to burn it? I usually find opening lines way too try-hard and I think this might be my favorite in all of literature.

The HOly Trinity of Cyberpunk

Burning Chrome is the last story in the collection also named Burning Chrome. Ordering the story that way seems to give the impression that all the other stories lead up to this one story. But that’s not how I look at it.

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I see the three cyberpunk stories in the collection, Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel and Burning Chrome, as equals. Together they not only started the cyberpunk genre but completely defined it. While Neuromancer gets the headlines, everything in Neuromancer is already in these stories. Including a number of characters and all the themes. If one wants to really “get to know” Cyberpunk it would be better to make an intense reading of these three stories than to plow through Neuromancer.

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And if you find Neuromancer a struggling read and too confusing, that is exactly what you should do.

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In short, Burning Chrome is a fantastic story and a must read if you want to understand the cyberpunk genre. But if you do read it, throw away your conception of Cyberspace and everything else. Instead ask yourself what Gibson is trying to do by incorporating Cyberspace and depicting it the way that he does.

THE LAST BLONDE

I wrote my own cyberpunk story. It is called THE LAST BLONDE and it is available at www.blackflagliterature.com

This is the master blog post for the short story Burning Chrome by William Gibson.

Spoiler-Free Review of Burning Chrome: here

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The Gentleman Loser in Burning Chrome: here

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The House Of Blue Lights in Burning Chrome: here

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What Does The Matrix Look Like in Burning Chrome: here

This blogpost is about the dolphin in Johnny Mnemonic and how what it says about addiction in cyberpunk and modern society. The master blog post about Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson is here.

It’s Cyberpunk, So We Need A Hacker

Remember the red swastika? That’s the password Ralfi put on to encrypt the data in Johnny Mnemonic’s head. Johnny Mnemonic is a data courier who is carrying some encrypted data in his head that he wants to download. So he meets up with Ralfi to get the password and get paid. But A corporate assassin kills Ralfi as he leaves the meeting.

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So, Johnny needs to hack the password because Ralfi is dead and he is the only one who knew the password. Having just met Molly Millions (incredible name that’s worth paying attention to), she suggests a hacker. The hacker’s name is Jones. Jones is a dolphin.

Jones The Dolphin

Jones is a dolphin who was trained by the Navy to be used militarily. He’s retired now and lives in a small cage in Nighttown, the section of town that is inhabited by the few remaining holdouts on technology called the Lo Teks.

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He’s a cyborg. He has “crusty plates” attached to each side of his body and his natural grace is lost under the artificial armor.

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Here’s how Gibson describes Jones when we first meet him: “He was more than a dolphin, but from another Dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less.”

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That is exactly what a natural human seeing Johnny would say. They’re both cyborgs weighed down by their technology. And just like Jones is in a cage, so is Johnny. He’s in the cage of the rat race. Going from one job to another, fighting for that next paycheck. And needing cyber enhancements to stay competitive.

Jones The Dolphin Is Hooked On Heroin

While in the military, Jones gets hooked on heroin. Molly Millions notes that “How else you get ’em working for you?” So to get Jones to hack Ralfi’s password, they dangle a heroin syringe in front of him. Jones dutifully hacks the password and gets rewarded with a syringe full of heroin.

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The password turns out to be a red swastika. This fits given that Ralfi is a huge fan of Aryan Race Rock as discussed here.

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After getting the password, the corporate assassin shows up and there’s a climatic final showdown between him and Molly Millions. Molly dispatches the corporate assassin and with the password hacked Johnny is able to blackmail the corporation that sent the assassin.

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After that Molly and Johnny team up and work together. The money starts to roll in and everything is right in the world.

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Jonny realizes that he could pay someone to get the cyber implant out of his head and finally live with his own memories and instead of other people’s memories. But he refuses to do it. He says he’ll do it sometime, like the heroin addict who’s always planning to get sober but never does.

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Johnny can’t give it up. He’s addicted to the tech just like Jones is addicted to the heroin. They both want to get the next hit.

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Think about how they both got addicted. For Jones it was the military, and for Johnny it is the economy. The economics of the borderless world force Johnny to compete in the globalized economy. And to compete in that economy requires taking every edge you can get.

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So he’s forced to get the cyber implants to compete and once he has them, he becomes addicted. The borderless world of cyberpunk has made Johnny no different than the Dolphin rolling around his fish tank waiting for his next fix.

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Check out my cyberpunk story called THE LAST BLONDE over at www.blackflagliterature.com

This blogpost is about how in Johnny Mnemonic, Molly Millions dispatches Lewis, the blond henchman, who represents the golden age of scifi. The Johnny Mnemonic master blogpost is here.

Molly Millions

Molly Millions – what a name. Even without knowing anything about her, the name clues you into what kind of world we are living in: a world where everyone is chasing that next dollar, a world where all traditions, nations, and borders have been swept away. Money. Money. Money.

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When she shows up at the bar to gate crash the meeting Johnny is having with Ralfi Face, his boss/fence, she has to face off with Lewis, Ralfi’s henchman. Lewis decides to get in her face, and she dispatches him quickly by cutting the tendons in his wrist with the razor tips that come out of her fingers.

Lewis The Blond Henchman Represents The Golden Age of Scifi and its inadequacies

Here’s how Gibson describes Lewis: “eighty kilos of blond California beef.” I want to focus on the blond hair. It’s a tiny detail that is easy to miss if you only read the story once or twice. It is especially important to contrast the description of Lewis with the description of the other characters.

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Only Johnny’s hair is described (“dark hair”). Ralfi’s hair is not. Molly Millions is not. The Magnetic Dog Sisters is not. The corporate assassin’s hair is not. The Lo-Tek’s hair is not described. Only Johnny and Lewis get their hair described. This isn’t arbitrary. Gibson is being very particular here (as he always is).

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Blonde hair, especially Blond California hair, evokes the golden age of scifi from the 1950s that cyberpunk essentially replaced. Lewis is a blackbelt in martial arts who has no cyber enhancements. Ralfi refers to Lewis as a meatball. He’s basically your typical villain from a 1980s Hollywood movie – like Cobra Kai in Karate Kid or Biff in Back to the Future.

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But his imposing physical presence is no match for Molly Millions. She quickly cuts his wrists and that’s the last we see of him. It isn’t much of a fight.

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This shows how the 20th Century American ideal – the 175 pound blond guy who’s a black belt and can handle himself in a fair fight – is no match for the cyber-augmented creatures that inhabit this cyberpunk world. This seems to be Gibson’s way of saying that the golden age of scifi, with its competent men of science, is simply incapable of dealing with the challenges of the present and the future.

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Just like there is no place for a White Christian in this completely deregulated world, there is no place for a natural blond guy who apparently refuses to get cyber enhancements. Getting by solely on martial arts skills just won’t cut it in a world where people can get razors put into their fingertips or get face implants at the mall.

THE LASt BLONDE

Gibson uses blond hair as a metaphor for the golden age of scifi, but blondeness could represent a number of things. I wrote a story where blondeness is almost extinct because the world is completely overrun by third-worlders. It’s called THE LAST BLONDE and you can get it at www.blackflagliterature.com

This blog post is about Gibson’s use of the swastika and Aryan Race Rock in Johnny Mnemonic. The master blog post on Johnny Mnemonic is here.

The Plot So Far

Johnny has some data stored in his head and he arranges a meeting with his boss/fence to get paid. Except his boss/fence doesn’t want to meet with him, because the information was stolen from the wrong corporation. But Johnny arranges to meet him under a fake name. His boss/fence is named Ralfi Face. He’s called that because he has a second face. He has the face of Christian White, a member of the Aryan Reggae Band, the final champion of Aryan Race Rock.

Aryan Race Rock

The reason that Ralfi has the second face is “a singular vanity.” He doesn’t have it for economic reasons like Johnny’s memory implant, the Magnetic Dog Sisters’ height enhancements, or Molly Millions famous mirror glass eyes. Instead of economic reasons, Ralfi wants to look like the Aryan Race Rock singer because he like Aryan Race Rock.

Red Swastika

Later on we find that the password Ralfi used to encrypt the data in Johnny’s head is a red swastika. Clearly Ralfi is some hard core racial idealogue who seems to just be moonlighting as a fence.

Ralfi Dies

And it is the idealogue who dies. Ralfi gets killed by a corporate assassin once Ralfi, Johnny, and Molly leave the bar. The corporate assassin has a cybernetic augmentation – just like Johnny and Molly – where his thumb pops out and a razor wire comes. The assassin swings the razor wire and it slices Ralfi in three places, including through his skull. Ralfi “tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids.”

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It is important to note that of the four characters (Johnny, Molly, Ralfi, Corporate Assassin) the only one who dies is the guy without any cybernetic enhancements. In this cutthroat cyberpunk world, where everyone has to look for that extra edge to compete in this world of pure untethered capitalism, anyone who doesn’t have cybernetics in their body can’t compete. Only the fittest survive and a guy without enhancements won’t cut it.

No country For Mr. Aryan Race Rock

So, this world has no place for Ralfi Face, the guy who looks like the final champion of Aryan Race Rock. Some people might think that’s okay because a guy who’s into Swastikas and Aryan Race Rock is simply a bad person who doesn’t deserve to live. But Gibson’s point isn’t just that Aryan Race Rock guy has no place in this world. His point is that no White Christian has a place in this borderless world.

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Don’t believe me? Remember the name of person who Ralfi patterned his new face on? It was Christian White. Gibson’s choice of name is a dead giveaway.

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It’s actually amusing to see the type of person Gibson has become. In 2026, he’s just your garden-variety liberal who has a Bluesky account. A total NPC. But in 1980-something he was something else entirely. Here in Johnny Mnemonic, he is warning White Christians that they will have no place in a world that is completely deregulated. William Gibson in 2026 cheers that on.

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Johnny Mnemonic is a must read and so is my cyberpunk story. It’s called THE LAST BLONDE and can be found at www.blackflagliterature.com

This blog post is about the bouncer in the bar in Johnny Mnemonic and why it had to be transgender. The master blog post on Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson is here.

The Plot So Far

Johnny Mnemonic is carrying an Addidas bag with a shotgun into as he heads to a meeting. He stops to look at his face in a mirror and admires his new face. He walks into the bar, called the Drome, where the Magnetic Dog Sisters are manning the door.

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That’s it. That’s all we know when Johnny gets to the bar. We don’t even know that he is a data courier and has a cyber implant in his brain that is carrying hundreds of megabytes of data in his head.

The border around the body and gender has been broken down

Johnny has the cyber enhancement in his head, but he’s not the only one. Cyber enhancements are very common although not universal in this world.

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Gibson describes the scene in the bar: “The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. Muscle-boys scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one another and trying on thin, cold grins.”

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The cyber enhancements reflect a society that knows no border. When the border around the body has been broken down what border is left? So it should absolutely come as no surprise the border around gender has also been destroyed. In fact, if there wasn’t a trans character it would be strange and false.

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A good liberal looks at this and applauds William Gibson for having the foresight to predict a future where Trans are included. But the good liberal is an idiot. Cyberpunk isn’t about predicting the future. Cyberpunk is a warning. The Trans aren’t to be celebrated. Whoever was reading this in Omni magazine in 1981 would instinctively know how laughably absurd transgenderism is. The point Gibson was making was that once deregulation comes for a society even things as basic and fundamental as the idea of male and female get washed away.

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Let me quote the text: “The Magnetic Dog sisters were on the door that night, and I didn’t relish trying to get out past them if things didn’t work out. They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They’d been lovers for years and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.”

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The line about all the cosmetic surgery is interesting. They look exactly alike, except one is black and one is white, so that must have been a metric fuck ton of plastic surgery. Pay attention to the other detail, about how tall they are. They are 2 meters tall, which is about 6’6”. That’s a massive stature for two “sisters.”

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Reading between the lines it seems the sisters had their height lengthened. Doing so would make them more imposing and more likely to get a job as a bouncer. It seems to me that they got their enhancements for economic reasons just like Johnny.

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They are so imposing Johnny is afraid that if things go south in the bar and he has to leave in a hurry the bouncers are going to be a problem. Things do go south in the bar but Johnny easily walks by the bouncers.

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I find it quite delicious that Gibson uses the trans characters – characters who celebrate the gender border being broken down – to guard the border of the bar. That’s what a bouncer does. A bouncer defends the border between the inside of the bar and the outside of the bar.

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But as Johnny just walks through it, it’s clear that this border has also been broken down just like the Magnetic Dog Sisters have broken down the gender border. This criticism of transgenderism is one the things that makes Johnny Mnemonic Black Flag Literature and worth reading 40 years later.

I also wrote a cyberpunk story that employs a trans character in a similar way. It’s called THE LAST BLONDE and you can find it at www.blackflagliterature.com