I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture.
Interpretation
Nostalgia can be unhealthy, often tied to negative experiences, and we should focus on embracing a global culture instead.
William Gibson's quote reflects his belief that nostalgia is a negative mindset that can hinder progress and well-being. He suggests that nostalgia often connects to more serious issues and that instead of indulging in the past, we should focus on the present and the evolving global culture, promoting a forward-thinking mindset rather than being trapped in reminiscing about bygone times.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of innovation, one might use this quote to highlight the dangers of dwelling on the past.
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.
As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
The world is agreed that labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied. There is no dispute upon this point.
Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.
The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.
It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.
Fortune, not wisdom, rules lives.
All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.
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