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The absence of truth, the withdrawal from consensus that is unproductive, is intolerable to "reality". Pleasure and play with technology, as suggested by Neuromancer, and, as we recall, by the technological subcultures introduced in the previous chapter, is often actively and symbolically concurrent with the use of drugs.
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"...I got really interested in these obsessive things. I hadn't heard anybody talk about anything with that
intensity since the 60's. It was like listening to people talk about drugs. (William Gibson, "Eye to Eye with William Gibson," interview by Tom Maddox, in Science Fiction Eye, 26.)
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Gibson learned technology through analogy. He knew technology, in a sense, through a previous knowledge of drugs. Technology and drugs became somehow synonymous, related through their respective intensities. Gibson's association is meaningful with respect to this question concerning "obsessive things"; for people to talk about technology like they talk about drugs suggests that the experience of these intensities is similar. Tracing these intensities through the metaphors of technologized drugs and technology as drugs may allow a closer reading of this excessive project.
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Prior to Neuromancer, these metaphors were already in circulation. Before the development of contemporary technologies people were already getting wired on a more mundane stimulant, caffeine. The language of drugs includes a technological vocabulary. In certain places, these metaphors draw from and map onto cultural identities and experiences, exposing a system of exchange through representations.
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