From The New Atlantis, Summer 2025:
From megastructures in the Arabian Desert to urban decay close to home, we are pulled between utopian and dystopian visions of the modern city. Sci-fi novelist William Gibson offers a more likely scenario.
There is a profound paradox in great cities today. We are accustomed to thinking of our cities as engines of creation, where creatives and disrupters of all stripes go to prosper. Yet at the same time we see widespread fears that in the future the very urban structures that have come to be the incubators of change will be particularly vulnerable to the destructive powers they have unleashed.
Futurist-oriented thinkers have easily envisioned city- and civilization-destroying conflicts since at least World War I. With the advent of nuclear weapons, such futures became even easier to imagine. Add to that decades of the looming specter of environmental destruction, with its direct or indirect consequences for the viability of cities, and dystopian urban futures only become more plausible. Covid seems to have called into question just how necessary great cities are in a world of broadband communication.
Widely acknowledged as the originator of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction and inventor of the term “cyberspace,” the novelist William Gibson writes of future cities as working out the consequences of this paradox. Many of Gibson’s science fiction novels start with serious destruction through war, natural disasters, climate change, or global ecological collapse. And his cities of the future are the stage where he plays out stories about virtual realities, brain–machine interfaces, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology — the very constellation of technologies that some anticipate will allow, and in Gibson’s work have allowed, humans to interact in all kinds of new, non-physical ways that will both obviate the need for physical cities and create posthuman forms of intelligence far exceeding our own, calling into question the primacy of our creative efforts.
What makes Gibson’s portrait of great cities thought-provoking is that, despite all this change, he imagines them persisting at all, in some ways operating no worse than the worst that can be found today. This situation becomes all the more thought-provoking when we see how he links the fate of his cities to the fate of the modern project itself, whose deep impact on making cities what they are today will persist into the future.
The modern project — meaning here not just scientific and technological progress, but also liberal democratic politics, free market economics, and social egalitarianism — promised to alleviate many of the historical givens of the human condition, like material scarcity, rampant disease, inequality, and social and political oppression. And it absolutely has expanded the possibilities of human life for vast numbers of people over the course of time. Yet for Gibson, the modern project is also in some ways responsible for, or at least unable to prevent, the civilizational crashes his stories anticipate. Modernity does not survive unaltered in his stories. The technological center no longer holds, and we see increased social stratification and the rise of oligarchic political and economic arrangements of a sort that some will say are quite familiar today.
In fact, it is Gibson’s critique of what he calls the “modern program” that accounts for his belief that cities will persist under circumstances seemingly so unfavorable to their existence. By his account, a failing of the modern program is that it puts too much emphasis on the material conditions of urban life, and pays insufficient attention to its ethical dimension — how a city supports or undermines what people think of as a good life. The great modern city, Gibson understands, has no unified vision of the good, but becomes what it is by being an arena in which many such visions can interact. This situation creates dangers, most obviously the potential for conflict. But it also creates opportunities for accommodating diversity, adaptation, a certain kind of freedom, and even the adoption of ways of life that stand in a countercultural relationship to modernity. Each of these in turn presents its own set of dangers and opportunities. This complex way of life, Gibson seems to be saying, is what the modern city is, and what cities of the future could remain.
Like all science fiction authors, Gibson is an imperfect prognosticator. What we call cyberspace today has little resemblance to what he envisioned. After some forty years of anticipation, hackers still do not “jack into” cyberspace through a direct brain–machine interface. And we remain only on the verge of the various grand apocalypses that frame his stories. But we should not judge a science fiction author merely by how many of his or her inventions have come true.
What is of greatest interest in William Gibson’s portrait of cities is that for decades he has reflected and anticipated some of our biggest social, political, and economic concerns about their future, and has placed them within a plausible critique of the modern project that has been so central to their formation.
So ennui, stasis, entropy, death. Meh, boring.
The dystopia I fear is not one in which superintelligent machines achieve self-awareness and wipe out the human race, it is the prospect of a tightening grid of dysfunction and paralysis, achieved through the final victory of “the rule of Nobody,” to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt. The Nobody cannot be addressed.
Matthew B. Crawford Archedelia substack, June 8, 2025