Wealth & Money Quote by William Gibson

Gibson lands the punch in the phrase “instinctive mammalian certainty”: this isn’t ideology speaking, it’s the body. The line yanks class awareness out of politics and drops it into the animal brain, the part that reads threat, dominance, and hunger before language catches up. By framing recognition as “mammalian,” Gibson implies the divide isn’t merely economic; it’s species-level. The rich don’t just live differently, they trigger the same hardwired alarm as something that looks human but isn’t.

“Soft blue eyes” is doing quiet, ugly work. It’s an intimate detail, almost tender, the kind of feature we’re trained to trust in ads and movies. Gibson weaponizes that familiarity: the gaze is direct, the eyes are “soft,” and the conclusion is still dehumanization. That inversion exposes how wealth can launder predation into charm, how systems of extraction wear good skin.

The real acid is “exceedingly rich.” Not the comfortable, not the merely wealthy, but the tier where money stops being a tool and becomes a physics: private worlds, private rules, private moral weather. “No longer even remotely human” isn’t a literal claim so much as a diagnosis of insulation. At a certain altitude, consequence doesn’t reach you. Empathy atrophies. Other people become abstractions, data points, disposable labor.

Written in Gibson’s cyberpunk orbit, the sentence reads like a snapshot from late capitalism’s uncanny valley: elites as a different organism, not because they evolved, but because the rest of society has been engineered to feel that they did.