31 Quotes About Postcyberpunk

It’s an open secret that the sneakernet is used for a lot more than moving a few dozen terabytes more quickly than you could across the lines. The kids — "chucks" in local argot — pick up your external drive and walk it to wherever you want to send it. Along the way they add on a few other jobs, like grabbing prepaids from some chick and delivering them to the person she owes. Most of the industry uses them.

Those who wake...do not regret the dream.

..you can't just break through a person's defenses like thatl the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.

I pulled the Net chip out of my head, cutting her off. The chip was long and white, with many metal legs; cupped in my hand, it looked like some pale, crawling thing that you'd find living under a rock. Vermin.

You think we have a connection because of all the things you've sucked out of my mind by screening, but that isn't real. Trust comes when you've worked with someone for years; it doesn't speed up just because you can think fast, and it doesn't materialize when you stick a cable in someone's head. What you get from screening me isn't friendship, it's data. We're strangers.

The mind has doors...even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers.

First the bugs divide your mind into parcels that are almost independent--I always picture paper growing up between the wrinkles of the brain like the membrane between cloves of garlic. The ants descend on each clove in turn, carry it off to grayspace, and reconnect it. As this happens, you briefly lose certain capacities, sight, mostly--I was blind for a time, and when the sight came back I was agnosic, and then paralyzed.

In print news your job is to know things about others, you peer out at the world through an arrow slit. In telepresence you _are known_. If I'd still been writing for a newspaper--if there still were newspapers-- I could have forgotten...

...you can't just break through a person's defenses like that; the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.