‘Cyberspace’ 3.0: Geohacking and Spatial Specters in William Gibson’s Spook Country
Hypertext Abstract for HASTAC II Conference

In his 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, William Gibson famously coined the neologism “cyberspace” to describe “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions.” Over two decades later, this prescient spatial metaphor has come to describe a world infused by ceaseless cyber-connections, social networking sites, and synthetic worlds. To put it more strongly, through transportable innovations (including mobile text messaging, handheld GPS devices, RFID tags, and wireless Internet), space and technology have become inextricably interconnected in the early years of the twenty-first century. As new media critics such as Howard Rheingold have argued, this contemporary technological transformation has transcended the realm of technical and economic innovation. In an era characterized by a more literalized and omnipresent form of “cyberspace,” we are witnessing unprecedented social effects that include novel modes of collective and emergent human behavior.

In his most recent novel, the present-day cyber-adventure Spook Country (2007), Gibson directs his ever-timely social commentary precisely to the intersection between space and technology in order to explore the phenomenon of “geohacking.” In this paper, I discuss geohacking as both a real-world practice and a trope of the cultural imaginary that creates a bridge between the early concept of the Internet and the more recent Web 3.0 vision of a world augmented by spatial technologies. Focusing on the hacker, I argue that this central figure of cyberpunk literature and cinema gestures toward a technological being that is perpetually mobile. Rather than denoting a stable subjectivity, the hacker connotes a constantly shifting boundary: an interface between writing and reading, knowledge and information, power and resistance, creation and destruction. Building on previous representations of oppositional programmers, Spook Country updates this iconic figure with the “geohacker.” For Gibson, this new subjectivity embodies a novel approach to negotiating a landscape filled with mobile technologies. Furthermore, the geohacker enables the production of what I call spatial specters: spatially tagged hypermedia that serve as “cartographic attributes of the invisible.”

Through a reading of the haunting world of Spook Country — an aesthetically augmented literary grid populated by annotated virtual environments, locative art, geo-advertising, GPS-enabled psychological disorders, and a perpetual cognitive homelessness — this paper argues that the continual emergence of spatial technologies transforms everything from contemporary selfhood to political agency. Following Gibson’s novel, I also contend that even as we move from one contemporary techno-utopia to the next, we must remain mindful of the connection between the cool technologies that structure our subjectivity and their roots in such violent conflicts as World War II, the Cold War, and the more recent War on Terror. Indeed, without attending to the social, political, and ethical implications of spatially integrated technologies, we lose track of their relation to a larger military-industrial-media-entertainment complex.

Spook Country serves both a valuable descriptive and prescriptive function. That is, the novel engages in a slippage — a techno-literary mobility — among such categories as fiction, history, technology, and theory in order to explore the impact of geo-spatial technology in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, following a long historical trajectory of literature that works through the effects of emerging technologies, this text taps into the persistent power of metaphor to understand and imagine the most recent revolution in locative and mobile media. Ultimately, I contend that even as we experience an increased proliferation of new media forms, literary narrative continues to play an important part in analyzing the affective wonder and social complexity of emerging technologies.

Contact: ppj2@duke.edu