"But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention."

The science fiction blog io9 has a great interview up with cyber/steam/techno-punk novelist William Gibson, touching on everything from the surveillance state to Godzilla. Here's Gibson's response to being dubbed a "dystopian" writer:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

Whole thing here. reason's legendary look at the upside of "zero privacy" here.