Science & Tech Quote by William Gibson

Gibson’s move here is classic cyberpunk sleight of hand: he takes an allegedly futuristic fight about software piracy and yanks it back into something older and more elemental - literacy. The hook isn’t “teachers deserve free stuff.” It’s the comparison that makes the current system look faintly absurd. If knowledge is the raw material of citizenship, why is the toolchain for producing it treated like a gated luxury good?

The question is structured as a trap. “Why shouldn’t we…?” forces opponents into the awkward posture of justifying friction. Then comes the alphabet analogy, a deliberately humble baseline: no one invoices a classroom per letter learned. Gibson knows software companies will protest that code is property, not a phonetic system. His subtext is that this distinction is cultural, not natural - a legal story we’ve agreed to tell, one that collapses when you frame software as a prerequisite language for modern life.

Context matters: Gibson comes out of an era when computing shifted from hobbyist commons to corporate platform, and when education increasingly depended on proprietary tools. His provocation isn’t purely altruistic; it’s a diagnosis of power. License gates don’t just raise costs. They decide whose curiosity gets to scale, whose skills become “standard,” and whose future is shaped by defaults set in boardrooms. By invoking teachers, he picks the one group society claims to venerate, then points out how casually we undermine them with paywalls. The cynicism lands because it’s accurate: we treat literacy as a right, but digital literacy as a revenue stream.