The central theme throughout the novel involves the natural human propensity to search for meaning with the constant risk of apophenia. Followers of the seemingly random clips seek connections and meaningfulness in them but are revealed to be victims of apophenia as the clips are just edited surveillance camera footage. Likewise, Cayce's mother turns to investigating electronic voice phenomena after Cayce's father disappears. Science fiction critic Thomas Wagner underscores the desire for meaning, or pattern recognition, using a comparison between the film clips and Cayce's search for her father after the attacks:
[T]he very randomness and ineffability of the clips flies in the face of our natural human tendency towards pattern recognition ... [T]he subculture that surrounds "following the footage" ... [is] an effective plot device for underscoring the novel's post-9/11 themes: to wit, the uncertainty of the fabric of day-to-day life people began to feel following that event… [We] as people don't like uncertainty, don't like knowing that there's something we can't comprehend. And if we can't fit something into an existing pattern, then by golly we'll come up with one.
Within the marketing world, Cayce is portrayed not as an outside rebel, but rather a paragon of the system. Inescapably within the system, she seeks an epistemological perspective to objectively interpret patterns. The review in The Village Voice calls this search "a survival tactic within the context of no context—dowsing for meaning, and sometimes settling for the illusion of meaning".
Using 20th-century relics, such as a Curta calculator, an excavated Stuka, Hobbs Baranov, and Voytek's planned ZX81 show, Gibson raises the question of how a contemporary society views past societies. Gibson portrays the past century as dominated by conflict, suspicion, and espionage. Following the disappearance of Cayce's father, a designer of embassy security systems, on September 11, 2001, Cayce is left feeling "ungrieved" until she reviews footage and records of that day tracking his movements until he vanishes.
Following this line of thought Gibson raises the question of how the future will view today's society. The novel "adopts a postmodern historicism" perspective, through the arguments presented by Bigend, Cayce, and Parkaboy. Bigend and Cayce's view of history are compared to those of philosopher Benedetto Croce in that they believe history is open for interpretation when re-written from the frame of reference of another society. Parkaboy rejects this view, believing that history can be an exact science.
The book explores a tension between originality and monoculture by focusing on the artist's relationship with a commercialized world and its marketing of free art and consumer products. Critic Lisa Zeidner argues that the artist's "loyalty and love" involved with creating originality counters Bigend's assertion that everything is a reflection of something else and that the creative process no longer rests with the individual. Commercialism is portrayed as a monoculture that assimilates originality. The Tommy Hilfiger brand is used as an example, "simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A dilute tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row ... There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."
One critic points out that the marketing agency Blue Ant is named after the wasp Blue Ant: "it's a wasp with a painful sting. The female hunts for a ground-dwelling cricket. She paralyses it with a sting and lays her egg on it. The still living yet immobile cricket becomes food for the wasp's young. What a clever metaphor for the process of targeting, commodifying, and marketing cool." On the other hand, as Rudy Rucker notes, while new art is constantly threatened by commodification, it is dependent on the monoculture for its launching point and uniqueness. Gibson's product positioning language and Cayce's analysis of consumerist trends show that society is not a victim of consumerism, but rather its creator who helps shape it without ever stepping outside it. Alex Link argues that rather than a simple attack on consumerism outright, the novel outlines a complex interrelationship between art, brand design, and terrorism as varying attitudes to history, terror, and community.
The novel's language is viewed as rife with labeling and product placements. Postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson calls it "a kind of hyped-up name-dropping ... [where] an encyclopaedic familiarity with the fashions ... [creates] class status as a matter of knowing the score rather than of having money and power". He also calls it "postmodern nominalism" in that the names express the new and fashionable. This name-dropping demonstrates how commercialism has created and named new objects and experiences and renamed (or re-created) some that already existed. This naming includes nationalities; there are eight references to nationality (or locality) in the first three pages. Zeidner wrote that the novel's "new century is unsettlingly transitional making it difficult to maintain an individual identity". One character argues that "there will soon be no national identity left… [as] all experience [will be] reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing." This is juxtaposed against the footage that contains no hints of time period or location. Globalization is represented by characters of varying nationalities, ease of international travel, portable instant communication, and commercial monoculture recognizable across international markets. As an example, Gibson writes how one ‘yes or no' decision by Cayce on the logo will impact the lives of the people in remote places who will manufacture the logos and how it will infect their dreams.
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