Critical Impression
Bigend is described by Times Union reviewer Michael Janairo as a "hyper-connected, ever curious, multigazillionaire", and by biopunk writer Paul Di Filippo as amoral and egocentric. Other appellations include "imperious" (SFGate), "enigmatic" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), "pontifical Belgian ad mogul" (The Village Voice), "filthy-rich man-behind-the-curtain" (Seattle Times), "untrustworthy corporate spiv" (The Guardian), "accentless Machiavellian fixer with unnervingly white teeth" (New Statesman), and "information-sucking android-like advertising guru and godgame magus" (John Clute, Sci Fi Weekly).
Academic Alex Wetmore identified a parallel between the relationships of Bigend and Cayce Pollard and that of Case, the protagonist of Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and the entity which recruits him, characterizing both Bigend and Case's recruiter as "mysterious and potentially untrustworthy". Wetmore observes that Bigend "espouses a curiously communal and transnational approach to marketing" compared to that of the money-hungry dot-commers whose frontier individualism the corporate universe has rejected in favour of the Bigendian approach. The character of Bigend thus represents for Wetmore "a shift in the nature of capitalism and, consequently, a change in the way postindustrial technologies deployed by capitalism interact with the self."
Read more about this topic: Hubertus Bigend
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