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| Subtitle | or, Dodge in Hell |
| First Written | 2019 |
| Genre | Scifi |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | William Morrow |
| My Copy | library copy |
| First Read | January 07, 2025 |
Fall
I'm working on a project with a really ambitious client group, who are trying to rethink all kinds of things about identity and work on the internet. I do keep referring to ideas from this book and I've been biting my tongue trying not to give them a plot summary.
But highlights: a pretty human-scaled explanation of 'holography' as identity management in the future: I don't have user passwords anymore, there are just AIs out there that can piece together a unique footprint from my activity - face scanning, how I type, analyzing my gait, what sort of language I use, etc. The systems just know it's me.
Also the big events in the book are about scanning brains and bodies and uploading those to a cloud - what would that life be like? In what sense are those scans, those 'processes', alive? How would it start? What would its limits be? What kind of visibility to it does How would society change if we knew there was an afterlife (and you REALLY wanted your brain and body to be in good shape when you die?)? etc.
Noted on January 15, 2025
Is this a good book? No. Is it a fun book? I'd say about half of it.
Noted on January 15, 2025
There's a bit set in a near-future, say a couple of decades from now, when the US is so divided into red and blue that 'the reality-based community' can only travel between cities - say between Des Moines and Sioux Falls - along interstate roads, and if you stray from there you'd better have a machine gun mounted to the top of your pickup truck. Both for protection, and to signal to the red staters that you speak their language. I found this whole section very distressing.
Noted on January 7, 2025
But lots of fun callbacks for readers of the greater Stephenson Cinematic Universe - Shaftoes and Waterhouses, Enoch Root child out for a while.
Noted on January 7, 2025
Another LONG Stephenson that I picked up before the election, hoping to keep my eyeballs from the news. This is a split - half in the usual Stephenson style about a vaguely scifi situation, and half in an allegorical / fable mode, describing a digital afterlife that mimics a mashup of creation myths. It's fine? I ended up enjoying the 'meatspace' bits and skimming really quickly thru the 'bitworld' parts.
Noted on January 7, 2025
One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything.
Quoted on January 7, 2025
I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”
Quoted on January 7, 2025