William Gibson on Google and Childhood

“Perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not.

Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.”

–From sci-fi legend William Gibson‘s excellent New York Times op-ed [go read it] on our simultaneous fascination with and repulsion from Google. “Science fiction never imagined Google.”

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Robert Quigley