Time & Perspective Quote by William Gibson

Gibson’s line lands like a shrug with teeth: the future isn’t a distant sci-fi destination, it’s already running in the background, unevenly installed. The brilliance is in the misdirection. “The future” normally promises novelty and progress; Gibson reframes it as a supply-chain problem. That single phrase, “not widely distributed,” turns utopia into logistics, and wonder into a question of access.

The intent is diagnostic, not prophetic. Gibson, the patron saint of cyberpunk, spent his career showing how technological change arrives as an atmosphere before it arrives as policy: corporate power, surveillance, and digital identity seep in through culture, not legislation. Here he’s pointing to a pattern that now feels obvious but still cuts: innovation appears first as privilege. The cutting-edge is a gated community. A rich city block gets electric cars and AI tutors; a rural clinic fights for broadband; an “early adopter” gets convenience while someone else gets algorithmic scrutiny.

The subtext is political without moralizing. If the future is already here, then the story we tell about “progress” can’t be a clean upward curve. It’s a patchwork of prototypes and leftovers, and distribution determines whether tech reads as liberation or extraction. Gibson also smuggles in a warning to journalists and trendspotters: stop chasing shiny announcements and look at who’s already living inside the new system, voluntarily or not.

Context matters: Gibson said variations of this in the 1990s, when the internet was still a frontier myth. Today, it plays like an indictment of the present tense: we don’t “enter” the future; we negotiate its rollout.