Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

When Gibson published his last novel, Pattern Recognition, he announced that he was no longer writing speculative or science fiction including the cyberpunk genre he is widely credited for inventing with his incredible Neuromancer, written in 1984-5. Neuromancer got a lot of things right about a not too distant future that increasingly resembles the present. Because the present is evolving so quickly, Gibson now sets his books in these times. And that’s why I’m reviewing his latest as a business book rather than a sci-fi novel.

Anyone starting a tech-related business (which is really any business) these days has to try to anticipate where things will be a year or more out. This used to be relatively easy as there was a much slower development pace and information traveled in predictable ways. Now a business can be vaulted to the stratosphere in hours or plunged into non-existence by a previously nonexistent competitor. To survive we must all be futurists and scenario planners on a daily basis. Since Gibson is, at his core, a scenario planner par excellence, his new books are a crash course in this arcane art of predicting ‘what if’ situations so you can develop a business response.

Spook Country sets up a plausible scenario: A shipping container with a mysterious payload is being tracked and sought by several groups spread across North America. One is a Cuban crime family, another a journalist covering technology-enabled art and another a possibly Government-backed set of spooks (agents). Gibson weaves this together with an array of innovative uses for technology including iPods, GPS, virtual reality (remember that?), etc. The locations are wired and the characters are imbibing various exotic drugs and cocktails. It’s all very entertaining but it is also enlightening. How will the way we do transactions change? What does being trackable in real time, anywhere do to consumer behavior? What are the valuable commodities of the near future?

As you read this and Pattern Recognition (which accurately predicted the advent of consumer-generated video with a brilliant premise) you will find yourself speculating on these and other questions. Put your business in the context and you may find opportunities others are not seeing.

Any book that accomplishes that is a great business book. And Spook Country is even better: It’s a great read too.