"I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil"
About this Quote
Gibson’s line sounds like a calming shrug, but it’s really a provocation aimed at our favorite alibi: blaming the machine. “Morally neutral” is the bait. He invites you to agree, then forces you to notice who gets smuggled into the sentence as the agent of history: “we.” Not inventors in a lab, not CEOs, not states, but a collective that pretends it has equal access and equal control. That’s where the subtext turns sharp. Technologies don’t arrive like weather; they’re funded, designed, marketed, regulated, and unevenly distributed. Calling them neutral can be true in the narrow sense (a tool lacks intent), while still dodging the politics baked into the tool’s shape.
Coming from the writer who effectively gave us cyberpunk’s street-level view of the future, the quote reads less like Silicon Valley optimism and more like a warning about narrative. If you treat tech as inherently good, you stop asking who it harms. If you treat it as inherently evil, you stop noticing how willingly people outsource responsibility to systems that flatter them with convenience. Gibson’s genius is to re-center culpability without turning into a preacher: good and evil aren’t properties of devices, they’re consequences of choices made under pressure - profit pressure, state pressure, social pressure.
Context matters, too: post-1948 means Gibson has lived through the Cold War, the personal computer, the internet, surveillance as infrastructure. The quote is a compact ethical checksum for the digital age: stop mythologizing the gadget, start interrogating the users and the institutions steering their hands.
Coming from the writer who effectively gave us cyberpunk’s street-level view of the future, the quote reads less like Silicon Valley optimism and more like a warning about narrative. If you treat tech as inherently good, you stop asking who it harms. If you treat it as inherently evil, you stop noticing how willingly people outsource responsibility to systems that flatter them with convenience. Gibson’s genius is to re-center culpability without turning into a preacher: good and evil aren’t properties of devices, they’re consequences of choices made under pressure - profit pressure, state pressure, social pressure.
Context matters, too: post-1948 means Gibson has lived through the Cold War, the personal computer, the internet, surveillance as infrastructure. The quote is a compact ethical checksum for the digital age: stop mythologizing the gadget, start interrogating the users and the institutions steering their hands.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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