I'm looking for insights to help explain to non-technical people the impact of explosive growth in cloud computing, wireless broadband, infrastructure virtualization and related technologies. I want to be accurate and descriptive but not bore folks to death with dry technical details. As part of my research I’m reading a classic sci-fi book written by the guy who coined the word “cyberspace”.
 
The book is Neuromancer by William Gibson. He invented cyberspace as a way to conceptualize and describe a world of otherwise overwhelming complexity. The word has since been overused and poorly understood, but if you return to Gibson’s original description it comes alive again. He describes cyberspace as:
 
“A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
 
One of the central characters in the book is a thief hired to “penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems” and open “windows into rich fields of data”. Early in the story this thief operates out of a loft in a city on the east coast of the United States. The technology he uses to operate in cyberspace shows him a picture,
 
"...the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
 
Those different colored bright shapes are cyberspace data visualizations of corporate systems and the security software protecting them. The many kinds of security software are collectively known as Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics or ICE.
 
This thief is hired to break into the data library of a company named Sense/Net. In cyberspace he explores the company’s security systems to find ways to break in. “Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he’d take through Sense/Net’s ice.” Then he uses a carefully engineered virus to bore through the library’s ice so he can enter and steal the data construct he wants. He describes the effect of that virus like this:
 
"Five separate alarm systems were convinced that they were still operative. The three elaborate locks deactivated, but considered themselves to have remained locked. The library’s central bank suffered a minute shift in its permanent memory: the construct had been removed, per executive order, a month before. Checking for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian would find the records erased.
 
Good science fiction (like any good art) has insights that go way beyond technical descriptions. These are vivid images to cut through the boring tech-talk and describe what’s happening right now.

[FOOTNOTE: Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984 before most people ever heard of the Internet, firewalls, cloud computing, etc. Yet I bet we wind up using technology that creates visualizations just like what he describes as the best way to comprehend and manage the complexity we’re creating.]

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