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Digital Reality, Digital Shock: Growing Up at the Dawn of Cyberspace
For those of us born around 1980, William Gibson’s Neuromancer might be the most prophetic novel we never read as teenagers. Published in 1984, it
Beyond its surface narrative of machines and simulated reality, beyond its Hot Topic aesthetic, the film tapped into a profound truth about coming of age in the digital era: the experience of ontological shock. Neo’s journey in The Matrix — discovering his reality is a simulation and learning to see “the code” behind it — paralleled our own experience of watching the physical world become increasingly overlaid and mediated by digital systems. The Matrix arrived amid a perfect storm of millennial anxiety: Y2K fears about computers failing catastrophically, a disputed presidential election that would be decided by the Supreme Court, and then the shocking events of 9/11.
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