What if he's still right?

Denke, Patels Punkt bezieht sich auf die Zukunft von Microsoft und auf dieses Zitat: „Our end user tools business will become essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work.“

I'm just surprised that we seem to have gone through them all and are starting again at the beginning. And in the beginning, there was the word, and the word was God, etc. pp.

I certainly didn't anticipate that a perverted version of Christian eschatology would become the next rationalization tool for the broligarchy, following effective altruism and longtermism.

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This is all to convince you to read it—if for no other reason than to understand the red thread running through our work, podcast conversations, and projects.

I think that's why the book still holds up so well. It contains these vibrations of a near future that, 20 years later, we better understand as Gibson's remarkable empathy for what was coming.

In the episode we explore:
→ Why pattern recognition is both "gift and trap"
→ How to distinguish between meaningful signals and noise
→ The difference between following trends and reading underlying cultural currents

Even back in 2003, he understood something we're still learning: how to navigate volatility while maintaining the ability to act.

Gibson painted a picture of a world where you can ride along but also find your own points of agency—where you deliberately take a different turn and go against the flow.

The protagonist moves along as things unfold. That feels like such a precise description of our current times, where so much struggle comes from clinging to the idea of control and excessive planning.

What struck me in my latest reread was how much Gibson captures the notion of going with the flow, riding the wave—not being in control of the narrative.

Take Cayce Pollard, the protagonist who embodies our fascination with cultural patterns. In the book she does Reformer Pilates, which pops up in studios suddenly everywhere as the hot new thing again today.

I've been re-reading Pattern Recognition almost every year for 15 years, and it amazes me that I discover something new each time. It still feels incredibly current.

There's a fair argument that our collaborative work—including Follow the Rabbit—wouldn't exist in this form without it.

Therefore, for a special episode, we gathered in my kitchen to discuss the book that marked the beginning of our journey.

It's from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, published over 20 years ago. For both Igor and me, this has been the most formative book of the last two decades.