Modern Proverb: The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed (attrib William Gibson 1995 Sept 1)

[Garson O'Toole]

Who said "the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed"?

These are the words of a questioner at the Quotes Uncovered:
Freakonomics website in September 2009.

Members of the digerati periodically attempt to trace this quote.
Science fiction luminary and one-time wunderkind William Gibson is
always given credit. This is the earliest cite I have located:

Cite: 1995 September 1, Rocky Mountain News, Conflict Certain in
Cyberspace By Cyrus McCrimmon, Page 78A, Denver, Colorado. (NewsBank)

"There's a great (cyberpunk writer) Bill Gibson line: 'The future is
already here, it's just unevenly distributed ,' " said Electronic
Frontier Foundation co-founder and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry
Barlow. "You really can see that in this room. It's the high end on
the getting-it spectrum but the spectrum within this room is
incredibly broad. It makes you think about how broad it really is
across the face of society."

There is a lead of unknown reliability to a possibly earlier cite.
Here is an excerpt from a website called BrianStorms about a thread on
Usenet:

Ok, it looks like this subject was covered fairly well in a USENET
thread from Feb 2004, wherein one of the participants mentioned that
the original quote comes from a 31 August 1993 interview with Terry
Gross in NPR's Fresh Air.

http://www.brianstorms.com/archives/000461.html

I have checked another radio program in 1999 and verified that the
quote does appear in the audio stream on November 30th 1999 in the NPR
program Talk of the Nation. It is possible that the 1993 claim is
incorrect and is due to confusion between radio programs. I have been
unable to check the 1993 claim because I cannot find an archive for
NPR's Fresh Air in 1993.

Garson

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