In one sentence
William Gibson is the design-source novelist for this Dictionary: the writer whose fiction supplies not predictions so much as architectural patterns for reading mediation, authority, distributed agency, and the strange social texture of new technologies.
Gibson matters here because his work does not treat technology as gadgetry. In Neuromancer, cyberspace is not a device; it is a new social space. In The Peripheral and the Jackpot books, agency is distributed across people, systems, markets, history, and machines. Lowbeer, Netherton, the Aunties, stubs, klepts, the Jackpot itself — these are not just fictional ornaments. They are names for recurring structures.
The Dictionary uses Gibson as a design source in that sense. Aunties names the supervisory layer. The Lowbeer Question names the authority problem. Mediation (a la Gibson) names the operator’s acceptance that the world is increasingly encountered through layers. Jackpot names convergent collapse without one cinematic catastrophe.
Gibson is useful precisely because he is not an AI theorist. He is a novelist of atmosphere, institutions, and power. That makes him better at seeing what purely technical accounts miss: that new systems arrive not only as capabilities but as manners, incentives, class positions, dependencies, and forms of attention.