So, I read this sentence.......................

...............................................on Arnold Kling's blog:

"I like to say that money is a consensual hallucination, using the phrase that William Gibson coined to describe cyberspace, a term that he also coined."

............and I wondered, "who is William Gibson?"   According to the all-knowing Wiki, William Gibson "is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the 'noir prophet' of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction."  If that doesn't raise the curiosity level, I'm not sure what will.  Anyway, Gibson is fairly quotable.  Here is a wee sample:

On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. 

The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

The NET is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…

 It's that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.

I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's nochicken, right?

“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”

The future is not google-able.