Posted by
Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-case-for-universal-basic-income-UBI-tp7601843p7601873.html
I also consumed DA on tape/CD and appreciated the reader as well, but a
decade after it was written. I read it (on paper) when it came out,
mostly following up his Snow Crash which I did not discover until just
as Diamond Age came out. I was previously introduced to him via his
eco-thriller Zodiac (the first of the genre for me) not long before
that. His work since then has been epic and in some ways amazing but I
don't feel it really matches those early works... I believe he
followed on Cormac McCarthy's heels as SFI's "writer in residence" but
apparently has not really been "in residence" in the usual sense?
Regarding DaveW's implication/assertion about the story providing a good
post-abundance image to consider I heartily agree. I was also moved
(re Jon's comment) by the way the human-in-the loop 'ractor
(under-employed actor working inter-actives in a gig economy) bonded
with her "client" in a completely anonymous context. Stephenson did
some amazing forecasting of many of the implications of ubiquitous
networking. His nanotech prophecies are still a few decades away I
suspect but he is such a master of 'casting utopian/dystopian tensions
that I *want* to believe much of what he put out there for us.
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