In the world of Winter Market, people are not treated as humans, and the world is not full of beautiful ideas and hope. Instead, the world is filled with junk, or as Gibson calls it, “gomi”. Gomi consumes land and lives. Casey, the narrator, says, “Where does the gomi stop and the world begin? The Japanese, a c

Lise is marketed and sold as gomi that has been made into something that can be sold. Lise is a cyborg, seen as a monster with an exoskeleton that keeps her together as her muscle deteriorate. Lise has been tossed aside by society and lives in isolation. There is no place for her in the world. Ruben finds her as he is on a gomi run. He tells Casey, “She was out by then, unconscious, so I brought her back here and ran a check on the exoskeleton. Batteries were dead. She’d crawled back there when the juice ran out and settled down to starve to death, I guess.” (127) Even in her dying moments, Lisa is an outcast, junk no one wants. However, Ruben, the master of gomi, knows more, and by bringing her in, begins the process of her demise.

Through the story, Lise is molded into a sellable form of gomi, and exploited to make money in the corporate world. In Winter Market, there are no movies and entertainment form like the ones in our society today. Movies are made in the mind. Casey is an editor, who helps to package up the subconscious and dreams of his stars. He says, “But artists, the kind I work with at the Autonomic Pilot, are able to break the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into Jug’s sea, and bring back – well, dreams.” (123) Lise is being sold for her innermost thoughts of “poverty and lovelessness and obscurity.” (125) Casey explains, “I guess some artists have always done that, in whatever medium, but neuroelectronics lets us access the experience, and the net gets it all out on the wire, so we can package it, sell it, watch how it moves in the market.” (123) Corporate society takes Lise and changes her into a sellable commodity. “They brought in hairdressers and makeup artists, too, and wardrobe people and image builders and articulate little PR hamsters…” (131) However, through all this, in the end, Lise, like all the others, will end up being tossed aside, turned into a program, and sold until they cannot sell anymore.

Winter Market is set in the future, in a world we do not yet know, however, is it really so abstract? The world of Winter Market is a technological society filled with fear and hopelessness, and an isolated society filled with gomi. Some people are the gomi, while other, like Ruben, are the masters of it. Casey explains, “He has nothing to say about gomi. It’s his medium, the air he breathes, something he’s swum all his life.” (120) Some might argue that we are closer to this world than we think. Social scientist Manuel Castells would agree that our lives are not much different from those of Casey and Lise. He talks of the world in separate tribes instead of a united society. People are losing a sense of who they are, as the new technological system is gaining more control. There are those on the outside of the world who have no access to the new information and methods being used today. Instead of trying to connect us all, those who are apart of the “have-nots” are tossed aside and ignored, much like Lise is. Those who are “in the system,” like Casey, are still isolated and lonely, as they lose human connection. Castells describes the system as on of exploitation and indifference. He talks of a new relationship in which we will be saying, “I don’t need you. I can do things by myself, with my computer, I don’t need you, go to hell.” (4) Once we have lost

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