Time & Perspective Quote by William Gibson

A line like this lands because it treats "the future" less as a date on a calendar and more as a supply chain. Gibson, the novelist who essentially taught late-20th-century culture how to picture cyberspace, isn’t predicting so much as pointing: look around. The shock isn’t that new worlds are coming; it’s that they’re already here, humming quietly in certain neighborhoods, balance sheets, and server farms.

The intent is diagnostic, almost journalistic, but with Gibson’s signature cool dread. He’s puncturing the comforting myth that progress rolls in like weather, evenly, inevitably, for everyone. Instead, progress arrives like capital: concentrated, gated, and monetized. That’s the subtext baked into the phrase "not evenly distributed yet" - the "yet" sounds hopeful, but it’s also a shrug. Distribution is political. Someone chooses where the infrastructure goes, who gets the upgrade, who becomes the beta tester, and who becomes the raw material.

Context matters: Gibson wrote from the late Cold War into the dot-com era, when technologies escaped labs and started reorganizing daily life - surveillance, finance, communication - faster than the public could name the consequences. The quote doubles as a warning about perception. If you only look at average trends, you miss the outliers where tomorrow is already normal. Those outliers are where power incubates first.

It’s a one-sentence map of inequality, told as science fiction’s most useful trick: making the present feel strange enough to notice.