So how do these three topics tie together, and how are they related? That the release of Microsoft Windows, the Apple Macintosh, and William Gibson's Neuromancer occured in the same year, events obviously related to one another yet equally obviously unable to have been influenced directly by one another, can be explained by two systems theory terms: autopoiesis and resonance.

Autopoietic systems are autonomous and self-maintaining unities which contain component-producing processes. A technical term to be sure, but what does it mean? It means that there are components organized and bound together via overarching structures that produce themselves. (This is in contrast to an allopoietic system, which produces other things.)

The largest autopoietic system is actually society itself, but this can be a difficult thing to grasp on to, conceptually. The model used by the scientists who originally desribed the process, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, is the biological cell. Acids, proteins and other biochemical processes are bound within the structures of the cell, and via outside inputs of energy, work to maintain or produce themselves. The canonical example of an allopoietic system would be a car factory, which takes resources into the system on one end, and produces another product at the other. (Car factories do not produce more car factories.)

Autopoieic systems are both open and closed systems; they are open to outside provocation, but closed in that they only produce themselves.

We have to ask, then, if society is indeed an autopoieic system, how it can be provoked, if it encompasses everything?