“We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture,” Gibson says in the Paris Review. “Consumers don’t buy products so much as narratives,” Bigend says to Hollis, elaborating on what he means when he talks about “brand vision transmission”. She tells him the idea’s old (which it is, though the rise of the ebook gives it a literal new twist), and he concedes the point. “Once you have a way in which things are done,” he continues, as if this were the line he’d wanted to take all along, “the edge migrates”. In an interview last year, Gibson described Bigend as someone “who presents himself as though he knows what’s going on, but who in fact doesn’t … he’s bullshitting himself”. Which is clearly true, and the way he talks is a finely judged send-up of vacuous marketing-speak. But at the same time there’s no denying that Bigend is very successful, very rich and very powerful. The “edge” that he’s most interested in is the edge of his own sphere of influence. He seeks out whatever lies just beyond it and finds a way to incorporate it, and in that way his sphere of influence expands.
