I had been resisting Netflix because I'm wary of subscription services. But I wanted to watch No Maps for These Territories and my beloved Scarecrow didn't have a copy. And I miss Kozmo.com—am I the only one? God, I loved ordering up a movie and ice cream and getting the evening's entertainment within the hour while I sat here on my ass and browsed the Web or cooked dinner or some such while the rain claimed those who had to go outside for theirs.

Anyway, the movies no sooner arrived than I was happy to let them languish unopened without the threat of a late fee. I say Here! Here! Take my $20 every single month, now and forever. I'm sold.

I have watched the documentary and all of its features the past few days. It's really not that good. The intro is histrionic and forced, besides being just too damn long. It tritely bills Gibson as a visionary or foreteller and takes the predictable path of showy high-tech images and sound. Geez, they even brought in Ana Voog and faded in some cliched cyberpunk chick with bleached hair, black tattoos, and bare breasts. It's like the manufacturer wanted to pander to adolescents, people just becoming aware of neuromancer and their own struggles with isolation and existential problems.

As for watching Gibson talk, it's like eating candy. He says nothing I disagree with, nor does he say anything I haven't thought about before. He just says it with an elegance I would hope to command when I am his age. This leaves me with the facile satisfaction of identifying with Gibson and believing that I'm smart, too. But really, we're being short-changed. The documentary did not show him saying anything that really challenged the present, even the present of a few years ago when the documentary was filmed. I would've liked to hear what he was really thinking about, not what he'd already said so many times that it had become packaged.

Perhaps it's Gibson managing his privacy, carefully marketing the Gibson product. I can imagine that that would be more preferable than being passively sold.

It's funny the different ways we all mediate our public and private selves. Those receiving too much attention have to tightly control the flow of information. Those of us who feel that we don't get enough attention relinquish privacy, though highly selectively, to get more attention, such as through writing personal diaries on the Web. That is a kind of liberation, the freedom to tell your story when you otherwise cannot, for some reason, self-inflicted or not; but it probably is only a step toward true liberation, which would be more like knowing your own story and not feeling compelled to tell it or needing to be heard or seen.

Still, I enjoyed watching and listening to Gibson talk. For me, just seeing the way his body gets into the act is treat enough. I learn things in the candor of a cigarette in the hand or the small, fleeting expression of emotion, or, just in the animation of what is normally still, and, more often, not usually visible. Better, even if not novel, the content is still provocative.

One of the topics Gibson discusses in the film that is current, and that is difficult for me and lots of people to contemplate now, is the co-option of emergent subcultures into mainstream, popular culture. He says, and has said elsewhere (probably many others have said it, too) that the premature co-option makes subcultures unsustainable because they do not have time to develop. The explosion of grunge and the subsequent destruction of Kurt Cobain is a poignant and favorite example.

Along that vein, he also mentions that he thought the ante on truth-being-stranger-than-fiction is being upped at, perhaps, an exponential rate. It reminded me of a piece I heard on NPR the other day about a snowboard company signing a deal with a porn company to license the images of porn stars for use as snowboard graphics. The report called this a win-win deal because it gave the porn company an easy outlet toward legitimacy and the snowboard company a quick track to controversy, which would lead to increased sales for both companies. An advertising commentator explained how advertisers face the difficult challenge of marketing to increasingly media-savvy adolescents. Thus far, the successful tactic has been to continually up the ante on shock value: Young adults are suspicious of legitimacy and will only assimilate what they perceive to be counterculture.

I could go on about this forever I'm afraid, and it's late. There's just two things worth a minute.

First is the immediate thought: How far is this going to go? I mean, we got housemoms in suburbia sporting tattoos and nipple rings and misguided glamour-seekers spewing amateur porn all over the Web. It appears that it's getting more and more difficult for people to feel a sense of being unique, which leads to the second thing:

We conspire against ourselves with the media to drive us to extremes. It is, at this point, self-perpetuating. For example, you hear people (my contempories—not new adults) saying that they were goth/punk/into BDSM/into amateur porn/whatever before goth/punk/BDSM/amateur porn/whatever was cool. In other words, they were extreme before extreme was cool. Do people think they will find meaning in the extremes? The astonishing part is the relentless drive to establish a self through group de-identification within the media-driven context of instant homogenization.

It's all so hollow. Maybe we have always been this way, at least a little bit or in a different fashion.