In a way, Gibson has quoted me. Oh. My. God. This Guardian UK article gave me credit for the “database of intentions” which readers will recall was post #63 (of about 4500 or so) and the basis of my first book. Gibson then goes on to quote Borges and the idea of the DBoI.
William Gibson was my hero at Wired, I worked with him as his editor (if you can call it that) while at Wired, but we’ve lost touch.
Wow, what an honor. Cool!
John, you may not know. I made a mathematical economics model around the phrase “database of intention”, and analyzed it. I have presented several talks around my work worldwide, in several countries!
Long term,the picture which my equilibrium analysis draws is quite scary (from consumer perspective). My analysis is not biassed for/against any company. It works in a mathematical model, where the commodity being traded is “intention”. A user gives his/her “intention” to a desired search engine in exchange for a free but high quality search. The search engine then sells this “intention” to the highest bidding advertiser. That’s your contribution in my model, which is also the main ingredient. The rest is the mathematical outcome, which would take the whole paper to explain. To the degree your “database of intention” paradigm holds, the outcome of my math holds.
Let us not go in detail here but you could already feel that you have a distinct influence on my work by clearly describing the commodity being traded on a search engine. Most other media trade another kind of commodity, which results in different long term equilibrium characterstics. Fortunately, these different characterstics are benefecial to consumers even in the long term.