Within the mid-Nineties, Hollywood started attempting to examine the web (typically referred to as the “data superhighway”) and its implications for all times and tradition. A few of its makes an attempt have aged higher than others. Maybe essentially the most considerate is the 1995 movie Johnny Mnemonic, the screenplay for which was written by cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson, primarily based on his 1981 brief story.
The movie tells the story of Johnny (performed by Keanu Reeves), whose vocation is couriering giant quantities of information uploaded to a digital reminiscence financial institution put in in his mind. As Johnny is requested to hold increasingly knowledge, his reminiscence financial institution crowds out or burns away his personal natural reminiscences. Determined to earn sufficient for a mind operation to revive them, he agrees to a ultimate, dangerously giant knowledge haul which will value him his life. Johnny Mnemonic introduced Gibson’s projections of our on-line future to hundreds of thousands who would possibly by no means have encountered them in his books.
A fan of Gibson’s books (particularly Neuromancer), I bear in mind watching the film within the mid-2000s and pondering that its effort to visualise and develop the world of the brief story felt plasticky and compelled. Critics on the time noticed one thing related, with The New York Occasions calling it “incomprehensible” and “visually garish,” Selection condemning it as a “confused mess of sci-fi clichés,” and Roger Ebert awarding it simply two out of 4 stars.
However in 2025, Johnny Mnemonic hits me in another way. The web is 30-some years old, and plenty of of Gibson’s most prescient concepts have now been extra totally realized. If Johnny Mnemonic obtained a few of the particulars incorrect, its bigger metaphorical themes of tech addiction, transhumanism, and our drift toward digital spaces have solely change into extra clear. I feel Gibson was feeling the zeitgeist of a future second once we all need to determine how a lot of our natural lives we’re prepared to provide away as our digital lives develop bigger.
This story is a part of 1995 Week, the place we’ll revisit a few of the most fascinating, sudden, and confounding developments in tech 30 years in the past.
This stress between digital and natural reminiscence arguably started on the flip of the century, when Google established itself because the de facto directory of the knowledge out there on-line. All of a sudden, we had entry to an unlimited public retailer of shared data, knowledge, and content material. Research quickly confirmed that individuals have been forgoing committing data to (natural) reminiscence as a result of they knew it was available through Google. Researchers from Columbia, Harvard, and the College of Wisconsin found the “Google Impact” in a 2011 study, which confirmed that persons are much more more likely to bear in mind the place knowledge is saved than the precise knowledge itself.
More and more, the worth of client tech merchandise appears to be measured by their potential to addict—by how a lot of the consumer’s time and mind area they will declare. Dependancy hijacks the mind, reserving increasingly time and a spotlight for the thing of need. Each main expertise wave within the final three many years has resulted in elevated dependency on digital gadgets and content material.
Cell phones proved remarkably addictive. Quite a lot of recent studies peg our each day use at between 3.5 and 4.5 hours per day. Pew Analysis found in early 2024 that 16- to 24-year-olds (tomorrow’s adults) typically spend greater than six hours a day taking a look at their smartphones. Quite a few research have proven sturdy correlations between smartphone habit and psychological and bodily well being issues, together with nervousness, despair, poor sleep, and tutorial struggles. Cell phone makers have been pressured so as to add options to assist folks average their display screen time, however utilization continues to rise.
The social media revolution in the 2010s launched extremely addictive digital areas the place nearly three-fourths of People now spend a mean of two hours and 10 minutes per day (and that’s only a third of their complete on-line time). The addictiveness was and is a characteristic, not a bug. “The thought course of that went into constructing these purposes . . . was all about: ‘How can we devour as a lot of your time and acutely aware consideration as potential?’” Fb founding president Sean Parker said at an Axios event in 2017. Congress has launched a number of payments to limit addictive design, however none have handed. Within the mid-2010s, Fb found that indignant, hyperpartisan content material was much more potent catnip for preserving folks scrolling and posting.
Within the 2020s, TikTok’s AI algorithm set a brand new normal for addictiveness. It processes 1000’s of alerts indicating a consumer’s tastes and beliefs to serve a tailor-fit stream of brief movies designed to maintain them swiping. The app reached 2.05 billion customers worldwide in 2024, with customers averaging around an hour per day. A 2024 Pew Research report discovered that about 58% of U.S. teenagers use TikTok each day, together with 17% who mentioned they use it “nearly consistently.” These tech waves construct on one another. Web utilization elevated with cellular gadgets; cellular utilization elevated with the social net.
Generative AI apps could show much more addictive and intrusive. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer app in historical past, amassing 100 million customers simply two months after launching in late November 2022, and 500 million weekly energetic customers by March 2025. ChatGPT generates every little thing from pc code and companionship to customized pictures and video. Web websites and social platforms now not rely strictly on human-created content material—they’ll quickly generate a lot of it utilizing AI. This may be a personalized companion, a enterprise coach, or perhaps a model of a liked one who’s gone, just like the ghostly AI character who advises Johnny within the movie. That is more likely to additional improve the share of our time spent in digital areas.
These applied sciences seize our brains by capturing our consideration, however the tech business is already growing gadgets that seize area in our bodily our bodies—similar to Johnny’s reminiscence financial institution. Neuralink’s mind–pc interface (BCI) is implanted in the brain and might translate mind exercise to speak with exterior tech gadgets. Within the close to future, we could select to make use of such interfaces to enhance our brains with specialised data bases or join “reminiscence prosthetics” that permit us to retailer, retrieve, and even offload reminiscences digitally. Some in AI circles even imagine the one means people can keep related within the age of AI is by integrating AI fashions with their brains.
Human–pc fusion is a significant theme in Gibson’s work. In Neuromancer (arguably Gibson’s most revered book), the protagonist Case has a bodyguard/sidekick named Molly who has implanted cybernetic eyes that see at the hours of darkness, show knowledge to her, and enhance her spatial imaginative and prescient throughout fights. His characters typically use “dermal sockets” within the cranium behind the ear to achieve new expertise (like working weapons or automobiles). Case and Johnny use these neural interfaces to plug their brains and nervous techniques into another, digital world known as “our on-line world” or “the matrix.” One of the best-known description of this realm comes from Neuromancer:
“A consensual hallucination skilled each day by billions of legit operators, in each nation . . . A graphic illustration of information abstracted from the banks of each pc within the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Strains of sunshine ranged within the nonspace of the thoughts, clusters and constellations of information. Like metropolis lights, receding.”
Within the many years after Johnny Mnemonic, tech firms would make investments closely in developing virtual reality spaces for each customers and companies. Corporations like Second Life, Microsoft, Magic Leap, Oculus Rift, and extra lately Meta and Apple, have taken up the chase. However to date, the tech business’s makes an attempt at creating entertaining, social, and purposeful digital areas have didn’t go mainstream. After Fb sunk billions into constructing the “metaverse”—even appropriating part of the term as its firm identify—mainstream customers determined it wasn’t the brand new digital “city sq.” and never a spot they wished to spend their time. However that was primarily as a consequence of shortcomings within the {hardware} and software program, not a cultural rejection (like with video telephones or Google Glass). As prolonged actuality (XR) {hardware} will get smaller, extra highly effective, and extra comfy, and digital experiences change into extra plausible, XR might but go mainstream. It might nonetheless change into one other wave of addictive expertise that traps customers in digital area.
Gibson’s presentation of expertise in Johnny Mnemonic betrays an consciousness of its addictive qualities. Johnny’s final and largest courier job seems like a drug deal. He meets a crew of Chinese language underworld figures in a Beijing lodge room to select up the info. The add process itself, with its cautious assortment of digital paraphernalia, smacks of an allegory to administering a harmful drug like heroin. As a result of Johnny lacked sufficient area in his reminiscence financial institution for the info, his post-upload response seems like an overdose. His physique shakes. He grinds his tooth. He perspires closely. After staggering to the lavatory, he’s bodily jolted by hallucinatory flashes of the info because it bursts via the bounds of his reminiscence financial institution and into his mind. Staring into the mirror, he discovers his nostril is bleeding.
Later, Johnny’s love curiosity, Jane (Dina Meyer) is proven to endure from a tech-related illness. She has a system of interconnected contact factors on her inside forearm—just like the monitor marks of a junkie. She suffers from a condition called NAS (nerve attenuation syndrome), or the “black shakes,” a neurological dysfunction attributable to overexposure to computer systems and different electronics. Requested for the reason for NAS, Henry Rollins’s Spider character (an anti-corporate activist and underground cybernetic physician) gestures round in any respect the digital gear in his lab and huffs: “All this . . . technological civilization, however we nonetheless have all this shit ‘cuz we are able to’t dwell with out it!”
Later within the movie, an affiliate named J-Bone (Ice-T) informs Johnny that the info he’s carrying is definitely the remedy for NAS, full with medical trials knowledge, and the property of an enormous pharma multinational. The corporate, Pharmakom Industries, had been hiding the remedy from the general public to proceed promoting drug remedies for the illness’s signs. That too has a prophetic ring.
In 2025, I already reserve a big a part of my cognitive capability for my on-line, digital life. Most of us do, and we’re already shouldering a heavy cognitive load of digital data—and paying for it. We’re extra stressed, depressed, isolated, and lonely. As digital gadgets like Neuralink deliver the digital world even closer to our brains, the unwanted side effects could change into extra visceral. By giving up a part of his mind to another person’s knowledge, Johnny gave up a part of his reminiscences. He gave up a part of his identification—a part of himself. At instances, as knowledge burst from the bounds of his reminiscence financial institution, items of it flashed in his thoughts like damaged pictures and mingled with flashes of his personal, actual reminiscences.
Sooner or later, an AI implant could introduce a international intelligence into our brains that mixes with our natural, “earned” data and expertise. Did Johnny ever surprise the place the digital a part of him ended and his actual self started? Will we?
