Editor's Desk 
The science fiction author William Gibson’s pithy observation that “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed” has had different shades of meaning since it was first formulated. In its original context, Gibson meant it as a measure of technological progress: certain people have access to gizmos, gadgets, and virtual reality dugongs before that blessed day when those innovations trickle down to the rest of us.
There has always been an economic valence to this quote: its first full appearance includes a mention of the “elite.” Over time, though, what I might call the post-Gibson interpretation of this insight tended increasingly towards economic inequality and left the technological aspect behind, since economic security is the axis along which “difference” has seemed to vary the most meaningfully across society since, say, the dawn of the iPhone, and “progress” stopped feeling like the right way to describe how technology has been changing once we all started to pack more computational power in our pockets than what was necessary to take humans to the moon. The most salient ways the rich differ from us these days no longer seems to lie in the technological horsepower they can harness, but more in the privacy they can rely on, the laws they can break, the impunity with which they can disregard the social compact, the scorn they can have for the future of the planet, and more. Or so I’ve heard.
But the uneven temporal and spatial impact of technology qua technology is having its moment again. Your experience of driverless cars is a lot different if you live in the Bay Area or Boston; the quality of your drinking water and the size of your electric bill depends on your proximity to a data center; and so on at ever finer scales, intruding on the neighborhood level, depending on how down your neighbors are with Flock cameras.
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