I'd like to discuss the story itself. I thought it was fantastic, and one of the better episodes I've listened to in a long while. A very layered, deep episode, and it really hit home for me.
Alasdair weighed in on his favorite parts of the story. Here's mine: Kentaro, a used-up computer hacker in his mid-sixties, standing on the sky deck of Tokyo Skytree and quoting Neuromancer. Just think about that juxtaposition. The cyberpunk future of the 80s, where the sky is the color of a television turned to a dead channel, everyone is jacked in to cyberspace, snorting designer drugs, and showing their off their hacking skills in an underground club at 3 A.M. The cyberpunk future of the present: a lonely, single man well past his prime living at an internet cafe, scheming to steal a cell phone so he can afford nursing care for his elderly mother. And he's standing on one of the tallest, most futuristic structures on Earth, in Tokyo, Japan, used for high-speed data transmission across all of central Japan, accessible via high-speed subway station about three stories under the island where it stands. Gibson could have written about this. Except when you get out of the subway car, there's 7-11 staring you in the face and after you take the escalators up to ground level the whole place is a family-friendly tourist trap and shopping mall with overpriced gift shops and cafes. And how could it be anything different?
We're all jacked into cyberspace, just like Gibson prophesied. Only we use it for Facebook and videos of cats and porn, and maybe not in that order. I'm such a cyber-criminal, I have a copy of uTorrent on my computer that I use to jack into Game of Thrones episodes. Despite this, I still haven't gotten a nose piercing or dyed my hair purple. We're all walking around with supercomputers in our back pockets, and we use them for playing Flappy Birds.
The future has come. And the sky isn't the color of a television turned to a dead channel. It's just cloudy today.