Incredible claustrophobic footage from inside the Kowloon Walled City
http://io9.com/5713565/incredible-claustrophobic-footage-from-inside-the-kowloon-walled-city
video z Kowloonu; a diskuse pod tim;
And it's a great set of books and stories Gibson wrote, don't get me wrong. But Gibson is very clever. He wanted to write science fiction that was only a "little bit" into the future. He just turned on his TV and looked at all slums in the developing world and just projected that a little bit.
Unlike a lot of other writers in the genre at the time, he wanted to wallow in that poverty. He wanted to show us what poverty would look like in the future. That was part of his genius.
The poor person might have a cheap computer in his trailer park or run down apartment building but he's still poor.
That computer is sadly not a powerful enabler for him. It could be, but mostly he just uses it for porn or entertainment that someone else packaged for him in walled gardens like Facebook or Hulu or Youtube.
And yet at the same time, that computer does make him richer and smarter than the kings of ancient times. He's literate, vaguely, and the potential exists for him to use that computer to change his life.
There may be something to the Flynn effect but since everyone is roughly proportionally enhanced, the stigma of poverty clings to him. He may have a computer and a dial-up Internet connection but his credit cards are maxed out, he's forced to continuously cash bad checks at sketchy check cashing markets instead of proper banks, he only goes to emergency rooms instead of having a proper doctor and his debts never go away.
Maybe if he's very lucky he's got some sketchy deal going with criminals where he sends spam from his computer for a pittance. Or he's a mule for drug dealers.
He's in the future that Gibson imagined.