Politics & Power Quote by William Gibson

Gibson’s genius here is the way he makes something as technical as a network feel like mass psychology with a user agreement. “Cyberspace” isn’t introduced as infrastructure; it’s framed as an “hallucination,” a shared mental projection that only works because we all agree to treat it as real. That’s the subtext doing heavy lifting: digital life isn’t just mediated by machines, it’s mediated by belief. Protocol becomes perception.

The sly bite is in “consensual.” Consent suggests choice, but it also implies a contract you don’t read. The phrase captures a modern paradox: we opt into systems that then shape what we can see, do, and even imagine. Gibson isn’t romanticizing the virtual; he’s warning that the “space” is a cultural artifact, maintained by constant participation. A hallucination can be vivid, useful, even productive, but it can also be steered.

Then he undercuts any cyberpunk elitism with “billions of legitimate operators” and “children being taught mathematical concepts.” The future isn’t a neon underworld of hackers; it’s bureaucratic, normalized, pedagogical. “Legitimate” is doing satirical work: it hints at gatekeeping, surveillance, and the way authority migrates into code. The kid learning math inside this hallucination signals how early the virtual becomes a training ground for citizenship. Contextually, coming from the era when “cyberspace” was still new language, the line predicts the most unsettling outcome: not that we’d escape reality online, but that reality would be rebuilt to require an interface.