inversions of the Golden Age

??Gernsbach Continuum??

https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/149/149syllabus2gerns.html
shaping of 'collective imagination'  

...We learn that madness might merely be a symptom that follows our brush with semiotic ghosts. These phantoms are artifacts - buildings, postcards, song lyrics, comic books, speeches, pieces of wall paper - fragments of a collective imagination of public life that has been forgotten, but not fully eliminated.

... Some cities and places and artifacts, it seems, possess the power to intersect with alternative continuums of public life.

...How might we critique our assumptions about public life without stepping out of our continuum of places and values and texts? Perhaps we must occasionally visit other rhetorical continuums to discern the shape and limitations of our own


https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/66/bredehoft.html
...The Gernsback Continuum of the story is not a dying or dead world; it remains as a force influencing present day reality in its old artifacts and as a still-present alternate universe which continues to coexist next to reality—indeed the hero is still haunted by his vision of it as the story closes. 

...a vision of the future as deeply rooted in wishful thinking as in the past.

...such sightings are “semiotic ghosts,” “bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own” (29). The “Gernsback Continuum” of the title is the future imagined by dreamers of the thirties, an extension of the futuristic dreams shared by real-world designers and architects as well as science-fiction pulp artists

...The Gernsback Continuum is a true continuum, Gibson suggests, continuous and uninterrupted, a still-present legacy of blindly visionary thirties futurism and thirties science fiction. It is something we might not always see or feel, but something we can never wholly avoid or exorcise. Gibson is not simply repudiating or rejecting the technolatry of the Golden Age, but acknowledging the unavoidable and continuing presence of the Gernsback legacy, including its uncomfortably totalitarian resonances. The Gernsback Continuum is not just one of the worlds behind us; instead, it embodies the continuing influence of that world. The persistence of that “world,” this story tells us, is something we need to be warned about, and “The Gernsback Continuum” can be read as such a warning, a story firmly entrenched in the monitory branch of sf writing.