"It's more the way it is now than it's ever been"

Pattern Recognition, Part III

Welcome back to our philosophy of technology book club. This month, we’re reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

Here’s the reading schedule:

• July 6: Chapters 1-9

• July 13: Chapters 10-20

• July 17: Members-Only Zoom Call (Recording Available)

• July 20: Chapters 21- 33

• July 26: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• July 27: Chapters 34-End

If you want to join the Zoom calls and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Next month, we’re reading selections from Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford. I’ll send out the reading schedule this week so that you can get a head start on the reading.

First off: I was wrong.

In the Zoom call on Friday, I boldly declared that I was sure that Dorotea was a red herring, that she had nothing to do with the burnt Rickson’s jacket, and that we would discover that she was motivated only by professional jealousy. I assumed Gibson’s use of Dorotea was an instance of narrative misdirection—but it seems like Dorotea is really part of something, some larger conspiracy. In fact, as we progressed through this week’s readings, it seemed like everyone was part of the conspiracy. Even Win, at least in Cayce’s dreams.

We could say that everyone is complicit. This echoes a line from early in this week’s reading, when Cayce reflects on her own role in building this artificial world:

Like Magda going out to spread whatever shabby micro-memes her Blue Ant subsidiary requires her to, Cayce knows that she is, and has long been, complicit. Thought in what, exactly, is harder to say. Complicit in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other, that disolves the membranes between mirror-worlds.

Cayce is part of a system, a system that she cannot fully comprehend, and she has so far contented herself by saying that she was just doing her job, just finding a way to make a living. (It helps that she is able to use her brand allergy, which turns a weakness into a strength.) But she is reckoning more directly with her role in all of this in these chapters.

We have the Taki-catfishing storyline, for instance, which fills her with guilt. Their American model for the Keiko photos has now decided that Taki deserves better and, according to Parkaboy, is giving her the kind of love that she has always wanted. (This raises all sorts of interesting questions, like if we can even call it love when it is founded upon a bed of deceptions.) Cayce used these individuals as a means to an end—classic spycraft, but bad ethics. Given that she objects so strongly to being used (say, by Bigend), it’s reasonable that she would object to this…though she doesn’t object enough to stop doing it.

But this week’s reading emphasized just how little control Cayce has. Sure, she has agency: she makes decisions and tries to anticipate consequences. But so much of what is happening is being orchestrated, perhaps by multiple composers. Bigend is making interesting plays, and there’s Russian involvement via Cyprus. She’s able to make a connection to (possibly) the creator of the footage after meeting with Hobbs, but remember that she only made that connection through complete happenstance—if she hadn’t stumbled on the calculators being sold out of a trunk, she wouldn’t have had anyone to make an introduction.

Then she sends an email to whoever might be making the footage, and it sends without her pressing ‘Send.’ Someone else is in control.

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I’m not quite sure where to fit this in today’s post, so I suppose I’ll just tack it on to the end (before I share some of my favorite comments from last week’s discussion). In our call on Friday, Walter asked about the brand allergy in particular—what is it doing? Like Walter, I appreciate the sort of science fiction where one or two elements of the world are changed, and the ramifications are explored, and that’s what the brand allergy is in Pattern Recognition. So what is it doing in this story?

First, it gives Cayce a strength and a flaw simultaneously, and these are always interesting in narrative terms. Like Odysseus, whose pride is carries him forward but also gets him into trouble, Cayce’s allergy allows her to do a particular job that places her closer to the hub of power, but it also means she is susceptible to certain attacks, like the Michelin Man taped to Damien’s door. We should expect this flaw to be used against her more as the story progresses.

Second, Cayce’s allergy explains some of the odd choices of narration. From the beginning of the book, we have felt disoriented; Gibson’s frenetic, rapid-fire, comma-splice-loving prose pulls us into the action. But how does Cayce describe the world? Sometimes in colors and textures, but also in brands. Her allergy makes her notice these brands more than the average person, so even though she wants to avoid them, she finds herself describing the world around her in terms of these brands.

This brings us to the third point, which is how Gibson uses this character trait to illustrate the theme. There is an interesting point of contact here with Charles Taylor, who wrote in The Ethics of Authenticity about the ‘medieval correspondences.’ This was an imaginative, symbolic language that was widely intelligible to artists and the audience; artists could use these symbols when depicting mundane or divine life, and the symbols would show how these realms point back to one another. Taylor says that we do not have this shared poetic language anymore, which he believes contributes to a self-centered individualism. But I think Gibson is making a more interesting point in Pattern Recognition. We have a shared poetic language: brands.

You see someone in a Patagonia shirt, and you already know something about them. The same for Supreme, Prada, or Levi’s jeans. Even those of us who choose not to care about brands end up speaking in this language—by wearing something unbranded, you’re still making a point in relation to brands. Speaking in terms of branding, then, would seem to be unavoidable.

We take this for granted, and we do not notice just how many brands we encounter every day. But as I sit in my office writing this, I can count a dozen or more brands: the Apple logo on my computer, the various imprints’ colophons on books, MICRON on my pens, and so on. We stop explicitly noticing these because they are so familiar, but we always implicitly recognize and interpret them. That’s what makes Cayce’s condition interesting in this book, I think: she always notices them explicitly. Thus, Damien’s girlfriend is characterized through her all-black Prada, Starbucks is an odd place to feel unhappy, Tommy Hilfiger is a simulacra of a simulacra, etc.

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Here are some of my favorite comments from last week.

From down in the replies, Enthusiam Girl wrote:

I did post a link on the last post very late to it about a good podcast on this subject, but it is worth considering the case of Lonelygirl15 - one of YouTube's earliest viral sensations - in relation to the concept of "the footage" in the book. Because it occurred several years after the book was written but the parallels are interesting - an obsessive community came together to care intensely about the personal life of this person who they thought was a real vlogger but who turned out to be a scripted actress working for a company trying to create a viral sensation. They dissected every video obsessively trying to figure out who she really was and where she was located and her "real" story. In doing so, they had the same kind of arguments we encounter fhe footageheads having around the meaning of her videos and the question of how real or unreal it was in ways that did in fact end up commodifying the audience and made fools of many of them.

Lonelygirl15, for those not in the know, was an early internet video hoax. Or, it was a viral stunt. It depends on how you look at it. It’s remarkably similar to the ‘footageheads’ in Pattern Recognition, though it came out in 2006. Fans thought that the girl in the footage was a real person, and they tried to piece together her story, sometimes out of personal concern.

And it turned out it was a web series. I don’t want to blame the creators—they clearly made something worth watching, and I remember first stumbling on Lonelygirl15 when I was sixteen. I admit I felt angry when I found out it wasn’t real, which is odd because Lonelygirl15 (had she been real) would have been in considerable danger. I suppose the anger came from the feeling that I had been duped.

This was from Kim:

I’m thinking a lot about the first theme, our desire to find meaning in information.

As humans, we are natural seekers of meaning - uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. Finding patterns grounds us, and there are so many things that can take advantage of that discomfort. And now, in 2026, there are so many opportunities for different sources to compete for our attention.

Companies compete for our attention to sell us things. Creatives compete for our attention to convey their unique messages, and try to build a career. All in the name of...making money. Our attention has been commodified but still, as a society we are so uncomfortable with uncertainty. So they benefit, and we stay the same (or end up worse off)

I’m thinking about “the footage” - it’s a source of uncertainty that isn’t trying to sell anyone anything, but Bigend wants to turn it into something to sell.

People are so comfortable, and even excited, about the uncertainty that “the footage” creates. Maybe because it’s an external source of uncertainty for people to decode and theorize about, vs. an internal source of uncertainty that companies take advantage of. But what will happen when/if Bigend productizes it?

Here’s my suspicion (take it with a grain of salt, after all I was wrong about Dorotea): the footage is already a product, and Bigend wants to be part of it. The reason I suspect this is that so far Gibson has undermined everything Cayce thought she knew, and it would be surprising if the footage turned out to be a genuine work of art as she suspects. I’m open to the possibility that it’s an elaborate stunt of some sort which will be monetized—this makes it very interesting for Cayce, as she’s not allergic to the footage, as there are no brands. This would be the ultimate ‘get’ for a man like Bigend: marketing that works on people who are suspicious of marketing.