Johnny Mnemonic: Complexity

A recurrent theme throughout Gibson’s short story, “Johnny Mnemonic” is the decay brought about in tandem with technological progress. This decay manifests itself in the abandonment of old technologies, and the subsequent loss of the particular brand of utility that they provide.

“[You] have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness…” This is an interesting statement, something that holds true for society today. We have continued to reinvent and optimize, rendering past technology obsolete at an increasing pace. This optimization is built as a complex machine of sorts, each new idea and new application building upon the last. We use the materials at hand to create a new object, which we then use as the base for another. This allows for feats unimaginable to those that have not experienced them: giant metal constructs flying through the sky by their own power, practically instant transfer of information between any two locations on the globe, immensely tall pillars of glass and steel.

There is a paradox of sorts that has developed as a result. Machines are built to perform a given task as efficiently as possible, but are unfit for anything beyond their precise specifications. The great machine of society’s technological progress operates very much the same way. Technologies that are no longer seen as worth pursuing are forgotten, cast away, left to be a footnote in the margins of history, if that. Their utility is viewed as minimal, and their engineering obsolete. However, this distance from mainstream optimization has resulted in an interesting phenomena that, despite their purported crudity, these technologies of the past are less accessible and harder to handle than most “modern” technologies. You would be hard pressed to find a floppy disk, much less what is required to use one. It is even harder to use more obscure technologies, like a wax cylinder. It would require more work, and more specialized work, in order to make use of this. This is the thought process embodied in Johnny’s efforts to create a shotgun for his confrontation of Ralfi. He must painstakingly craft each component of the shotgun, the metal shaping tools, the gunpowder cartridges, the barrel. He must singlehandedly bring back the machine of innovations that resulted in the ability to craft such “antique firearms.”

It is because of this forward arrow of supposed technological progress that other forms of technology are neglected, and considered ‘low tech’ despite their inherent complexities. Like Johnny with his shotgun, the denizens of Nighttown utilize their own particular brand of technology, separate from that of mainstream society, but complex nonetheless. Could something so inherently simple retrieve the data that an influential black market dealer was in desperate straits to access? Rather, this technology is a side path of the history of their world, one of many futures that could have been pursued, but was ultimately not. Their “low tek” way of life and depicted squalor is analogous to the decay of the technology of yesterday. A path that has been abandoned and neglected. They are what is lost and twisted in our continual cycle of revision. They are, in a sense, the embodiment of dead media.

Johnny’s adventure takes place somewhere in the middle of these two worlds, blurring the lines between modernity and antiquity. His run from the underbelly of their society into the squallors of the ghettos of the pit and his defeat of the more well-funded and well-equipped crime syndicates represents his discovery of the sophistication of what is branded as “crude,” expanding his knowledge base and improving both himself as an individual and his financial state, functioning as a message to the reader of the universal truth of complexity.