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