Sprawl technology   The sprawl series, by W. Gibson, did certainly make an impact on the way computer technology developed. Ideas such as "cyberspace" and "corporate states" were not invented by Gibson, but his mediation of these memes has been most influtential in the instrumentation of the future. In this article we go deeper into what more can be extracted from the sprawl series. The books are really about what happens when the future has already happened. This is where we are now. Our collective dreams of the future crashed down in us. We started to live in futureland. The technology we used was just another version of tomorrow's tech, just that it was version 2.0 instead of 3.0. Unconsciously we all understood that tomorrow would repeat the same scenario, only that the dreams would be version 4.0. This paradigmatic leap, the realization of the mechanics of future creation, started to change the world in a way. Irony - the infertile bastard son of this realization - became a prominent feature in popular culture. Also, a kind of meta-awareness spread through society, kitsch made itself popular again. This was the only way to deal with a future exploded - when everything was totally meaningless - we had to create our own values. The hacker movement, that florished during this era, was somehow based on this realization too. The hacker's approach was similar to the cyberpunk writers': the future can be created here and now. The writers created their future in the virtual reality of text; the hackers created the future by making tomorrow's tech. It's all mental anyway. The ones who did not realize their future now, still believe that tomorrow's technology will be spectacular, interesting, mindblowing... Well today's reality is yesterday's future. That means today's tech is mindblowing - all it takes is a small amount of mental hotwiring... The hacker's question: if the lead characters of all that fiction can have such a cool time, why shouldn't I be able to realize that too? by Joel Westerberg copyright (c) 1997