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 predicted the digital world we would inherit: a reality where human consciousness extends into cyberspace, where corporations control the digital commons, and where being “jacked in” to a global information network is the default state of existence. But it was The Matrix, arriving in 1999 when I was nineteen, that ...