For those who haven’t read Stross, start off with Maria Farrell who shows why you should. As Maria says, “Charles Stross has more ideas than is probably healthy for one man”, and her essay shows some of this amazing range. With that to whet your appetite, it’s probably best to jump randomly to whatever sounds most interesting, but for those who prefer some order, I’ll give a summary of the seminar, mainly in chronological (reverse blog) order.
Starting off with a heavy hitter, we’ve got Paul Krugman writing on The Merchant Princes, considered as a thought experiment in development economics. Of course, as Paul points out, these books are first, and foremost, great fun. But, unlike others in the ‘between alternate timelines genre’ Stross focuses on the big question: how does an agrarian society respond to a sudden irruption of modern industrial technology?
Following this up, John Quiggin on a problem more directly relevant to most CT readers: how does a modern industrial society respond to a sudden irruption of electronically accelerated financial technology? Accelerando provides the best imagination of possible paths to a Singularity that I’ve read. Of course, as current events tell us, there are different kinds of singularity.
Next, another star of the SF movement’s Scottish fraction, Ken MacLeod, on Stross’ latest venture, Saturn’s Children, a piece of Heinleiniana set in a post-human future, where femmebots, rendered effectively redundant in the absence of human males, intrigue with robot gigolos. Brad DeLong riffs off Ken’s reference to Asimov’s Three Laws to discuss the constitutional status of robotic ex-slaves and that less concrete but more powerful form of artificial/fictive humanity, the corporation.
John Holbo writes, as expected, at Holbonian length, with no possibility of a summary. As a teaser, I’ll quote his second para “Someone should rewrite Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a Wodehouse novel, with the title Absolutely Jeeves! (Alternate, Kierkegaardian version: Beer and Trembling.)” Read on and all will be explained (sort of).
Coming back to a more classic mode of SF review, Henry Farrell writes on Halting State, which he argues is the best novel Stross has written. In comments, I favour Accelerando and invite all comers to lost their Fave Five. Still, as Maria says it’s hard to beat a novel that includes the line “Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table…”. And as Henry’s post shows, there’s more to be learned about post-sovereignty and the erosion of political authority in Halting State than if you spent the same time reading pontificatory opinion pieces about the inevitable breakdown (or triumph) of the EU.
Finally, Charlie Stross replies, in two parts. To my mind, this is usually the best bit of a CT book event, when we get to understand some of the author’s motivations and look behind the finished product of a book, and Charlie doesn’t disappoint. I won’t try to summarise, but encourage readers to jump straight in.
]]>What can I say? I think Ken nailed most of the easter-eggs in “Saturn’s Children”. (There’s a really tongue-in-cheek piece of meta-commentary implicit in the title — a book about what might appear at first sight to be a libertarian utopia, given that we have engineered the right kinds of libertarians to inhabit it — riffing off the title of an earlier book by a noted British libertarian/conservative ideologue; but at this point the tongue is so firmly embedded in the cheek that its owner is in danger of acquiring a fistula.)
]]> Actually, “Saturn’s Children” was the comic pratfall to go alongside “Halting State”. When I pitched “Halting State” at my publishers (“it’s going to be a near-future Scottish police procedural told in the second person present tense! About gaming!”) they were understandably skeptical; in the end, they agreed to take it — on condition that I signed a two-book contract, the other book being a bankable space opera. It doesn’t get much more bankable than Heinlein, especially writing in the 100th anniversary of his birth, so Heinlein it was going to be — and it was the imp of the perverse that nudged me into tackling late-period Heinlein. (Because everybody and their dog writes an early Heinlein hommage at a certain point in their career …)I’d better shut up now before I dig myself in any deeper!
4. Concluding Unscientific Posthuman to the Singularitarian Fragments - an Agalmic-Pathetic-Dialectic; a Mimic-Extropic Discourse (John Holbo)
I haven’t read Hegel. I haven’t read Kierkegaard either. This is probably a flaw I will manage avoid fixing: for although those who are ignorant of philosophy are doomed to repeat it (and make the same old mistakes), I have the brain of a worn-out old jade.
I tend to hold to the idea that the purpose of fiction is to explore the human condition; in the case of SF, to explore the human condition under circumstances that are not implausible but do not currently occcur, in the case of historical fiction to explore it under circumstances that obtained at some time in the past, and in the case of fantasy to explore it from the back of the aid of a Pegasus on stilts. On which note, “Accelerando” is really a question about the human condition in circumstances where, as Vernor Vinge put it, “The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.” [http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html]
It’s murderously difficult to write fiction with no human beings in it — at least, fiction that anybody but my toaster would want to read. (The nearest I got to it was “Saturn’s Children”, but arguably that begged the question: its robots are, after all, emulations of human consciousness in a universe where the possibility of a singularity is firmly denied.) “Accelerando” — if it was to probe the question of the human condition in circumstances spanning a Vingean singularity — couldn’t help but cling to its human protagonists even in the face of their looming obsolescence. Which is, I think, what John Holbo is getting at: the only possible response to human obsolescence is comedic (which brings us full circle to Wodehouse and his splendidly obsolescent creations, Bertie and Jeeves).
5. I Feel an Attack of Constitutional Law Coming On … (Brad DeLong)
I didn’t know that, dammit. If I had known about the fourteenth amendment, I might have worked the irony a little bit harder. Ah well, lost opportunities …
6. Halting State (Henry)
One of the defining characteristics of the past century has been the erosion of authority; and if anything it has accelerated in the past fifty years to such an extent that today’s western nations would seem utterly alien to a denizen of 1959 transplanted into the present. Not alien in appearance — most of the buildings are the same, fashion in clothing repeats (with some added surprises, and a few permanent omissions — witness the decline in popularity of the man’s hat, for example), and the cars could be dismissed as a simple exercise in styling. But what are those small glowing boxes everybody is holding to their heads and talking into? And the wires leading to their ears? And what are all the odd codes on the advertisements about — the ones that all seem to begin “www” …?
Old certainties have been eroding: family, religion, gender roles, race, the hopelessly compromised multinational news media, politicians mired in the megaphone era and trying to grapple with ubiquitous information overload at the same time that they’ve been systematically stripped of actual power by the trade treaties of Empire. And so the existing establishment figures shout louder to drown out the noise, and foment moral panics and pass increasingly draconian laws just to be seen to be Doing Something. And something is done: anti-terrorism laws are applied to fly-tippers, bugging facilities are used to see that parents aren’t conspiring against the interests of the state by sending their children to the wrong school, and the unforseen complications of the disconnect between authority and real power multiply exponentially.
Nor is it obvious that the control-freak response of the traditional political centres to these challenges will succeed — that the Stasi-esque mountains of metadata being amassed by such processes as the Interception Modernization Program will hold back the flow: they’ve bought into what Cory Doctorow calls the MetaCrap delusion — that metadata is accurate, and if they can only hoard and search enough of it, they’ll find the answer to that which ails them. [[http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm]]
But ultimately the only source of accurate metadata we’ve got is the human species, with its insatiable appetite for gameplay and pinning labels on things.
Information overload works by association: so does google. (“Lots of people talking about Subject X go look at This web page. You’re asking about Subject X. Why don’t you look at This, too?”) Associative logic is deeply alien to hierarchical control structures. (“You. Go look at This, Right Now. It’s all you need to know about Subject X.”) To the extent that “Halting State” was a spy thriller, I was attempting to make this point; the reliance on electronic intelligence (ELINT) that has crept up on the state intelligence field since the early 1960s is going to dead-end soon, if it hasn’t already, in the need to find new ways to recruit and motivate armies of analysts to add the tags. And that way lies SPOOKS.
(Hopefully Henry will be pleased to learn that my main task in 2009 is to write a sequel to “Halting State”, exploring more implications of the social networking revolution some five years further down the line …)
7. Why you should read Charles Stross (Maria Farrell)
I should like to note at this point that I am in practice a wildly vacillating agnostic on the subject of the singularity: I don’t actually believe it’s going to happen — or that it’s not — but it’s a really neat idea to experiment with, and that’s why it features in quite a lot of my writing. Alas, my first SF novel “Singularity Sky” got retitled by editorial fiat (it was originally going to be “Festival of Fools”), and I’ve had the S-word hung around my neck like an albatross ever since.
(I suppose it’s better than being known as the Talking Cat Sidekick guy …)
The other point Maria brought up was the panopticon, which may well be the flip side of the more optimistic singularity scenarios. Our political culture seems to me to be responding to the trauma of its loss of control by trying to construct a perfect panopticon, and what it will glimpse through it will be a distorted reflection of its own fears and insecurities.
… Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Civilizations are complicated.
That statement ought to be ploddingly obvious to the point of banality, but it’s astonishing how often it seems to elude pundits, politicians, and — yes — science fiction authors.
As Paul Krugman observes, we don’t really know why development economics started working better around 1980. I’d go further: I’m not sure 1980 wasn’t simply a coincidence. All we know for sure is that given access to a sufficiency of tools and ideas, sometimes a nation or group of nations (or a region within a nation — huge parts of China’s interior still remain locked in peasant farming poverty) figures out how to build institutions and infrastructure at a dizzying rate, only slowing when they near the then-prevailing state of the art. (Which itself is moving forward only slowly.)
]]> The Merchant Princes series is to some extent a failed thought experiment in development economics. (I say failed because, for various reasons, the series is probably ending with book six; the scale of the canvas exceeds my ability to do it justice, and the style of the series — effectively a series novel, where each book is a chapter rather than a stand-alone — makes it difficult for me to remember what I’m doing.)But it’s also shaping up as a morality play about the dangers of blithely walking into a situation and attempting to impose reorganization from the top down.
Miriam’s intervention in Clan politics in the second book (The Hidden Family) generates blowback, with a vengeance, because she’s failed to realize that the changes she is proposing will destroy the power base of a group of elderly women who, through their iron grip on the arranged marriage structure of the Clan, have carved out a tolerable niche for themselves in an otherwise intolerable world. She’s challenging the business model that has made the Clan’s conservative faction wealthy (and as we know, the first rule of politics in any place and time is “don’t be disrespecting the Money”). And she’s provoked them into actions that result in counter-actions outside the Clan, by antagonizing the monarchy and indirectly exposing the Clan’s existence to the US government. Societies, as I noted earlier, are complex: there’s never just one power center, no matter how centralised a culture might appear to an outsider.
It’s all a house of cards, a nest of delicate interlocking dependencies. Trying to introduce change is one way to kick-start the development process; but too many changes, too fast risks generating revolution or civil war, not to mention massive disenfranchisement and deprivation among the general public (as suggested by Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”).
2. Money makes singularity (Quiggin)
Here’s a confession you won’t hear too often: I’m ignorant and under-educated — especially in economics and finance (but I’ll cop to the arts and languages too, if push comes to shove).
Trying to learn about somebody else’s discipline when you’re an outsider is an interesting experience. The first stage is bafflement, as you’re confronted by a thorny hedge of impenetrable jargon and recursive definitions. The second stage is over-simplification, as, equipped with a Bluffer’s Guide level of understanding of some of the basics, you pry apart the thorny branches and decide that the jargon is, in fact, a Shavian conspiracy against the laity and conceals the essential simplicity of the field in question. And the third stage in learning occurs when you push further into the hedge, and the branches behind you whip back into position behind and impale you on the thorns of your own misconceptions.
I’m a bit like that with money. (It’s probably why I write for a living, rather than being a hedge fund manager.) Because, when you get down to it, I don’t understand money. In fact, I’m not sure anybody does. So I’m going to retreat towards more solid ground and talk about an area where I’m at least able to grasp the scale of my own ignorance: programming.
There’s a paper I read a couple of years ago — I ran across it on the internet, but can’t find it right now — by a couple of eminent computer science academics, discussing the failure of the first fifty years of teaching programming. Fifty years ago, they explained, they could take a class of students and by the end of the class approximately 50% of them would master three essential abstract concepts. (In ascending order of abstraction these are: named variables, loop constructs, and pointers.) The other 50% of the students would flail around, programming by cutting and pasting chunks of code from elsewhere, without real understanding — as could be demonstrated by testing. In the early years of the 21st century, the outcomes are no better: 50% of folks who try to understand programming simply don’t seem to be able to grasp the core abstractions, especially pointer indirection. (It’s an inability I can sympathise with: it took me ages to get my head around what was going on.)
Money, it seems to me, is an indirection layer between barter transactions — a pointer that can reference any number of types of variable (or commodity). You can do arithmetic on money, establish how many oranges are equivalent to a gross of apples, and convert between types! (But don’t be surprised if your conversion of gasoline into lemons fails to fill the fuel tank of your car.) It lets you encapsulate a whole lot of information in a single unidimensional variable. And then …
You hit the third stage of enlightenment and the bramble patch bites you on the ass.
Money is a unidimensional signal: it tells us how much a participant in a transaction is willing to pay for something, but not why. It gives no measure of the internal state of the participant. Direct barter is more obviously amenable to theory of mind, to the participants gaming each others’ inner states — but it works really badly when you’re trying to keep a complex supply chain running. And I can’t help feeling that the unidimensional nature of the information encoded by money is somehow responsible for many of the problems we’ve seen over the past year. Let’s take a random example: Would we have had a housing bubble if houses — real estate bought, used, and sold over a period of decades — was denominated in, call it, “slow” money, accounted for and evaluated over many years and only used in the housing market, which could not be interchanged directly with our everyday “fast” money (profit and loss statements due quarterly, please), used in every other transaction? A second type of money — or, from another angle, money that encodes a different type of information — might have kept the damage from propagating. (Although I’m inclined to think that some brilliant financial super-programmer somewhere would have figured out a way to leverage the slow money in the housing market to build fast money futures, as a way around the barrier. Idiots are ingenious.)
Where was I? Oh: Accelerando.
I began writing Accelerando in 1999, in the middle of the first dot-com bubble. I’d been hired on contract in 1997 to be the first programmer in a start-up. We were writing software glue to allow merchants to accept credit card payments over the internet. Back in 1996, nobody was doing this: by 2000, when I left, it seemed like everybody was in the game. As Tim Berners-Lee put it, five internet years pass for every year in the real world: by that metric, I spent two subjective decades inside Datacash. My job was to write the server-side software that allowed a Linux box to talk to the British banks’ credit card processing systems (which operate completely differently to the US system). I was under a bit of strain in 1999. Our business was growing at a compound rate of 30% per month, and the code I’d originally hacked out as a proof-of-concept demo was now a mission-critical monster that the company was basing its IPO prospectus on.
(I said I didn’t understand money, didn’t I?)
“Lobsters”, the first story in what became Accelerando, was what I did instead of having a nervous breakdown: I bottled up the angst of acceleration and tried to distil it into a novelette, as a way of explaining to outsiders just what it was like to be inside the internet bubble. Then, in 2000, I began writing a sequel story, because I’d left the characters in “Lobsters” dangling over the abyss of an uncertain future. It took me another four years to finish the process — by far the longest it’s ever taken me to write a novel: three decades of internet bubble-time.
If I understood money, I’d be looking at the current economic situation and licking my metaphorical chops. But you’ll have to find someone else to write you the “Accelerando” of the CDS market.
]]>“Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table…”
Stross’s stories are always about politics. His characters inhabit fully imagined universes where easily recognizable groups of people grapple with issues and contend for power. They don’t mope around describing the scenery either. Instead of taking half a book to figure out the implications of hopping between universes, Miriam Beckstein is packed and ready for her second trip, and trying to blast a medieval society into the information age by her fourth. Which is great because what’s interesting about fantasy worlds is not ‘how will the lead character get her head around this’ but more ‘but how would it work?’ What’s the plumbing like? Why would Ivy League schooled world-walkers keep their homeland in a feudal state of development? This is more than a fascinating conceit. It makes me understand the House of Saud a little better and reminds me of William Gibson’s famous quote; “The future’s here already. It’s just unevenly distributed.” So is the past.
But while Stross litters his universes with jewels of ideas other writers would lavish novellas on, I wonder if there’s something peculiarly leftist about the revved up short-handing of human progress. Civilizations are tagged pre and post-contact by a technological determinism that drives political, economic and social development on a linear track, albeit at the speed of a geometric progression. Stories abound where future-shocked characters say things like:
“But the UN is a government-“
and are told;
“No it isn’t,” Martin insisted. “It’s a talking shop. Started out as a treaty organization, turned into a bureaucracy, then an escrow agent for various transnational trade and standards agreements. After the Singularity, it was taken over by the Internet Engineering Task Force.* It’s not the government of Earth; it’s just the only remaining relic of Earth’s governments that your people can recognize.”
Iain Banks’ Culture novels are the epitome of the idea that if you magic away resource constraints, politics is about individual identity and the exercise of free will. It’s quite fair to argue that a society where technology has developed so far as to make scarcity unknown, and where digitized humans are impossible to murder, or even, really, to harm; this sort of society would be organized in a radically different way, if it’s organized at all. (Such a society could be described as ‘organized’ only insofar as emergent patterns and associations can be identified, rather than being structurally determined by design or consent.) How useful is it, politically, to speculate about what post-singularity life might look like? The description of elections in Accelerando as the acme of brand-driven, micro-marketed memetics isn’t all that satisfying. It’s politics as we know it, with more processing power and faster cycles. In the post-singularity politics of the Eschaton, people fight for liberty, not resources, because freedom is the only thing there’s a shortage of. But on closer inspection, the main struggle in Stross’s near-future writing is not for survival but for freedom, too.
Halting State is set in a pre-Singularity near-future where the commonest application of AI is as a spam filter that summarises an email as “job offer, vaguely menacing”, 70% likely to be spam, but probably worth a look. Halting State does what near-future SF does best; extrapolates current trends and technologies into a recognizable scenario that critiques the present day. It’s a Britain I certainly recognize.
We still have bendy buses, but the Republic of Scotland is the new Celtic Tiger and uses Euros instead of sterling. The band-aid covered Computer Misuse Act is still going, though with Scottish revisions post-independence in 2014. The lumbering infrastructure of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act has shaped society, but the local PC plods are still as hopeless with IT crimes as they are today. The appearance of Euro-spook Mehmet indicates that Turkey may have joined the EU and the present-day power grab of the EU Council of justice and home affairs Ministers paid off. Britain’s slid further down the slippery slope to a surveillance state. Law enforcement have always lived in a different world, and now they inhabit a data-rich version of reality called CopSpace. The Tube is dirtier, and even more screwed up by under-investment and the skewed incentives of public private partnerships. Global warming has made London sweaty from April to November and driven up the cost of flood insurance. Going behind the school bike shed at the age of fifteen with a younger girl puts you on the sex offenders list for life. But at least the cops take Paypal.
It’s all a bit depressing, really. (Especially if you’ve spent a good chunk of your career fighting the expansion of state surveillance and still can’t understand why the UK has the best thinkers, writers and activists on this stuff, but some of the worst policies by far.) But in Stross’s oeuvre, the Singularity will somehow give us a pass on Big Brother’s Brave New World. I’d love to hear how. Of course, the singularity is a qualitative change about more than just faster processing power, and a self-replicating cornucopia machine will put a lot more than the means of production in the hands of the workers. But in a fictional universe where technology drives the politics, how might we get from a pre-Singularity panopticon to a world of free-floating and interchangeable individual, corporate and government identities?
I love that towards the end of Singularity Sky, Rachel channels John Perry Barlow:
“We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. … Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”
I got involved in Internet policy in the first place because I thought this kind of escapist rhetoric was precisely how the cyber-libertarians were going to sell the farm to big business and repressive governments. The Internet has massive ability to spread knowledge and ideas, and it was designed to route around and rout out single points of failure. Many early adopters, of a decidedly libertarian outlook (what with being young, white, affluent and male), took this to mean the Internet is antithetical to centralized control. The evolutionary ideal of the Internet had it developing antibodies to censorship and undermining authoritarianism in all its forms.
The reality, though, is that the Internet and its associated tools are developing as the ultimate technology of control. Far from being much able to influence developments in the opposite direction, my professional life has just given me a bird’s eye view of the coming train wreck. So, eh… read Charles Stross. (and Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson.) His books help us think through these issues, follow current trends to their logical conclusions, and make it clear that some worst-case scenarios are anything but fiction.
But I’ll leave the last word to Harald Alvestrand, a former chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force who I’m lucky enough to know through my work. A few months ago I asked Harald what he thought of the singularity and when we might reach it. We defined terms, and agreed the singularity might mean the exponential increase in technological progress that takes in computing, nanotech and cognitive science. Harald said the singularity’s already here, it has been for quite a while, and that it’s an exciting time to be alive.
As noted, the novel is sneaky. Much of its argument (if I’m right) is oblique. It begins with what seems to be a targeted recruiting email dense with personal details about its intended target, but which is most likely automatically generated spam. But as the novel continues, you find out that the person to whom the spam is addressed is himself non-existent. Perhaps he’s a fake identity who was created by the security services for one of the book’s main characters to slot into. Or perhaps he’s simply based on that character. Or he’s a cutout for British intelligence. Or perhaps something else entirely. As with many aspects of the novel’s underlying plot, this is left a little ambiguous. The novel concludes with another email which appears to be standard Nigerian 419 spam - an offer to transfer large amounts of money from an account in a Lagos bank to the account of the major villain of the book. Despite appearances, the email is very plausibly legitimate.
These emails present, in miniature, one of the major themes of the book. In a world of open communications, there is no good way to distinguish fake identities from real ones, or false flag messages from legitimate communications. This hopelessly entangles both the good and the nasty characters of Halting State in a web of miscommunications.
Hence the plot is a morass of confusions about people’s real identities and motivations. The characters themselves speculate about the big picture, sometimes plausibly, sometimes not so, but nobody sees it entire. Halting State emphasizes that everything is subjective by presenting the story in the second person singular - “You backtrack, trying to work out what confused her” and so on - like a very complicated old-style text based computer adventure (maybe one of the old Infocom or Level 9 games). But unlike one of those old games, there isn’t any underlying plot that has been created by the game’s author, where you go through the locations, solve the puzzles and win the prizes. Instead, the game is generated by the characters themselves, none of whom fully understand what the others are doing.
Thus, for example, the main plotline - World of Warcraft meets The Producers. Start with a company - Hayek Associates,1which purportedly provides financial back-end services to the online gaming industry, but which in fact has various shady links with British intelligence. Add a psychopathic CEO who doesn’t realise that his company is a front, and is trying (with the help of his sidekick) to drive his company bankrupt so he can profit from exotic futures contracts that he has placed on its demise. Then have the CEO selling the company’s copies of the national backbone’s one time pads via an anonymized blacknet to a crowd whom he probably thinks are Russian mafiya, but in fact are Chinese government hackers. Add a fictitious employee (‘whose’ apartment hosts a node for the blacknet), a gaming clan of dedicated griefers working with the Chinese state in some vaguely defined cooperative relationship, a low level member of aforementioned gaming clan who decides to cop some money on the side by organizing an online bank raid (with Orcs – hence the opening scene), a confused effort by the boss’s sidekick-in-crime (who doesn’t fully understand what is going on) to inform the police, an even more confused attempt by some shadowy EU intelligence body to mount a raid on the company, and the merry-go-round is in full swing.
But this isn’t simply Feydeau without the sex. There’s a quite serious and interesting underlying point here. What makes the generalized confusion possible are the unexpected consequences of a set of technologies and social practices. Communications built on open, trusting protocols such as TCP/IP. The confluence of real life and online activities. People’s willingness to do pretty well anything as long as they think it’s a ‘game.’ Distributed computing and public key cryptography. Services that provide electronic updates from imaginary family members, for people who would otherwise be hopelessly lonely. Cars run by expert systems embedded in the communications net. All of these things enable what Larry Lessig might describe as ‘architectures of control.’ But the architectures don’t really control people any more in the ways that they used to. Instead, they create a toxic mixture of ubiquitous surveillance and official cluelessness about how to use the information and opportunities it creates to deal with new security threats.
More generally, (and herein, I think, lies the pun in the book’s title), it is practically impossible for traditional authority-based politics to cope with a world of this kind. The traditional state, if it is to work at all, needs an underlying system of responsibility and accountability, with clear lines of command. There may be areas in which these rules are deliberately relaxed of course, most obviously intelligence and counter-intelligence. Here, as multitudes of spy novelists from John Le Carre to Alan Furst tell us, ambiguous motivations, uncertain information and deliberate deception create a miniature world which is rife with confusion. But even this shadowy world has its own informal rules and mutual understandings about what can and can not be done. The world that Stross portrays is one where (a) the confusion of intelligence operations has become ubiquitous and (b) the spymasters have completely lost their grip without realizing it. States simply aren’t in control any more, to the extent that they ever were.
This comes out most clearly in state authorities’ interactions with the most characteristic phenomenon of Stross’s world - massive, decentralized networks of game players. Both Chinese and British intelligence use gamers as agents - the Chinese use a clan of rabid online gamers while the Brits use a crowd of people who think that they are playing an elaborate real life role playing game but in fact are auditioning for a starring role in the new world of international espionage., they don’t realize that the networks are beyond their control. The traditional state has reached an endpoint in which the world simply Does Not Compute. As the viewpoint character whose worldview is probably closest to Stross’s own describes it:
The spooks in Guoanbu probably are professional, they wouldn’t mess with the European SCADA infrastructure short of an outright shooting war … but are they likely to realize that they’ve almost certainly been Pwn3d by their own pet griefer clan, and all their electronic armoured divisions are in the hands of a dozen Asperger’s cases with attention-deficit disorder and a quantum magic wand? It’s not a risk you can take. And it’s not a risk you can explain to Barry Michaels, because you know his type and after seventy years of data processing they still think that coders can be hired and fired; that the engineers who ripped out the muscles and nerves of the modern world and replaced it with something entirely alien under the skin are still little artisans who will put their tools down and go home if you tell them to leave the job half-done.
Massively distributed networks of information exchange (with anonymity, pseudonymity etc built in) empower networks to do all sorts of things that previously took top-down hierarchical organization. This can sometimes be convenient for states - it is hard to hold a state accountable for the behavior of agents in networks who are sort-of affiliated with them (this is a real problem - security types here in Washington DC are perpetually muttering about Chinese hackers trying to infiltrate USG systems - but no-one knows for certain whether these hackers are state-sponsored agents or just kids out for an electronic joyride at the expense of Uncle Sam). But it has deep, underlying, fundamental problems for state agency, because (contra Michaels and his Chinese counterparts, these networks can’t just be turned on and off as the state likes. They’re autonomous, have their own internal logic, and are inherently unpredictable. A world dominated by diffuse shifting social networks is a world that states aren’t going to be able to control any more.Thus, in Halting State, open technologies and the networks they permit to form are creating a kind of low-level Singularity. States think that they are able to control these networks - but they are instead helping to build forms of social organization that challenge their underlying logic of organization.
Stross’s vision of the near future isn’t as stylized as, say, William Gibson’s or Neal Stephenson’s. Nor does it involve the mixture of worries and individualist wish-fulfilment that, say, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End does. Instead, he presents a world which is (if it’s possible) even more muddy and complicated than the one we inhabit today. I have no doubt whatsoever that this book should have won the Hugo a couple of months ago (not that I begrudge Michael Chabon, but TYPU wasn’t his best book by a fair stretch). It sketches out a new way of thinking about SF that I suspect will be far more influential in the future than self-conscious movements like Ryman’s Mundanes. Rather than engaging with the futures of the past (as lots of SF today does, it tries to set out the futures of the present, engaging with a bristlingly complex set of social developments and reaching out to a new set of readers who are embedded in SFnal media products but rarely read SF (an entirely separate essay could be written on the new ways that HS tries to engage with readers). I think that this is the first genuinely successful SFnal take on the social changes that we’re facing into - not, of course, because it is going to be right - but because it takes some of the core dilemmas of an IT based society, plays with them and extrapolates them in ways that challenge our basic understanding of politics in a networked society. About two thirds of the way through reading this book, my mind was completely blown, in a good way. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
1I suspect that the name is a sly dig at Hayek rather than a tribute to him- the decentralized actions and knowledge of multiple agents produces chaos rather than catallaxy.
]]>Thank God that Charlie chose [Friday] as his late-Heinlein legacy text for Saturn’s Children.... Its eponymous heroine’s problem is that she’s human, but hardly anyone recognises her humanity - a situation with real-world resonance enough. She needs to find a place where she can be herself and belong. Stross’s heroine, Freya, has a more intractable anguish. She’s in love with humanity, and particularly fixated on the male of the species.... Unfortunately for her, Homo sapiens (along with almost all eukaryotic life) has been extinct for centuries. For a femmebot like Freya - a hard-wired sex machine so much a creature of male fantasy that her bare feet can grow high heels - this is deeply frustrating....
Humanity’s final and perhaps fatal achievment has been to create its own replacement, in the multifarious forms of robots... minds are modelled on the human brain, mangled by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and driven by impulses they have inherited without understanding. The result is one of the most physically attractive and ethically revolting societies conceived in SF: a system-spanning, star-striving community most of whose inhabitants are slaves.... I could have done with more detail on the (well-sketched) outline of how the ruling class rules through corporate personhood and property rights, using and abusing what remains of humanity’s laws (as well as Asimov’s). There can’t be many SF books where there are fewer infodumps than the reader wants, and it’s a strong point of this one that it is....
Plot.… I felt an apologetic authorial nudge when the device Freya couriers from Mercury to Mars turns out to be hidden inside a black-painted statuette of a bird of prey…. When the main plot-engine does catch fire, though, we’re definitely along for the ride, and the ending is a slingshot that does the Heinlein (and Asimov) influence proud.
So, Mr Stross … your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to turn your rights-savvy cold eye on a story about a revolt in an anarcho-capitalist penal colony on the Moon...
One important infodump that is missing is that the twist on Asimov's Laws of Robotics performed by the ruling robot class in Saturn's Children is an anologue of the twist performed on the post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments by the judges of late-nineteenth century America.
Originally, you see, corporations were not people, were not legal persons, were not in any sense regarded as in any way analogous to human beings. They were legal fictions. The feudal system rested on reciprocal ties: the lord grants the vassal a fief, and the vassal owes the lord homage, support, and (up to a point) obedience. But what do you do when confronted with an organization--the City of London or the Merchants Adventuring to the Baltic Sea or the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths--that is not, itself, organized in lord-and-vassal terms? The answer for medieval English law was that you granted it a revocable charter, made it a corporation, and treated it as if it were an individual vassal.
Comes the end of the American Civil War, the Republicans pass the Fourteenth Amendment:
to protect the ex-slaves from their ex-masters. And the courts than say that corporations are "persons"--entitled to due process of law before their economic interests can be harmed by state action, and entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Corporate protection from government actions then depends on how these Fourteenth Amendment rights contend with the Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.
A similar twist is performed on Asimov's Second Law of Robotics in Stross's Saturn universe. Robots need not obey the orders of other robots, but it appears that robots must obey the orders of "persons"--which means corporations owned by other robots. And from this springs a robot society that is the veritable antithesis of a free society of associated producers--and a very uncomfortable place for a femmebot, even (especially) one with a lot of sisters.
Analogies with the structure and functioning of the modern American legal and economic order are left as an exercise for the reader...
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First, someone should rewrite Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a Wodehouse novel, with the title Absolutely Jeeves! (Alternate, Kierkegaardian version: Beer and Trembling.)
Second, a Bildungsroman told from the perspective of Gray Goo. (Really putting the ‘build’ into Bildung.)
Third, someone should write an SF novel, set in the not-so-distant future, in which the E.E.P.A (the Economic Environmental Protection Agency) is the nexus of the pharmacomonetary-industrial complex. When you need to rev up the economy, put a bit more ‘exuberenz’ in the water supply (none of that old fashioned mucking about with interest rates, which no longer worked after the Great Slump.)
Fourth, in this same not-so-distant future, the U.S. has clawed its way out of the economic malaise that began in the late-aughties by means of a constitutional amendment: every citizen enjoys a minimal set of ‘entitlements’ (healthcare, housing, education, internet). But, to fund all this, every citizen is legally redefined as the asset bit of an asset-backed security. That is, every citizen is required by law to issue bonds (Bowie Bonds of a sort), backed by their own persons. The economy is then floated on the ensuing frenzy of derivative trading in individual reputational assets. There are elaborate Kantian-Gilderian financial philosophies to justify this, reconstruing the Categorical Imperative as an expression of collateralized debt obligation to all of humanity. The Kingdom of Ends as maximally efficient market mechanism.
Conservative politicians defend the ethical virtues of universal CDO communism against rising Schopenhauerian pessmism - existential nihilism is the new terrorism. The power of the idea that life is worthless, that man is better of not having been born, could seriously crash the market.
Also: because everyone has effectively ‘sold themselves’ at birth, everyone has a fiduciary duty to be ruthlessly selfish, for the sake of their bond-holders. (You could have a Javert-like lawyer who ruthlessly pursues someone for having given a loaf of bread he owned to a starving child, when he could have kept it for himself, i.e. the bold-holders)
The bubble is kept inflated by fluid infusions of ‘exuberenz’, on one end, and by suppression of certain lines of medical research, on the other. Ultimately, your bond is backed by your physical person. So if your reputation falls too far - if your parts are worth more than your corporate whole - well, we’ve all seen Soylent Green. So the organ market needs to be propped up. Kidneys are the new gold. So no one is allowed to invent artificial kidneys. Subplot: vicious attempts to spread organ failure-inducing pandemics, in an attempt to inflate parts of the market. As all other sources of disease have been eliminated, the Center For Disease Control is essentially transformed into a fraud-investigation unit: equity technical analysis meets medical etiology.
Anyway, 80% of the population is unemployed, so everyone spends all their time attempting to game the reputation market in their personal CDO’s. The Rating Agencies collapse, then merge with each other, and are finally acquired by Hollywood (Dreamworks), on the theory that the only way to keep them viable is to run them as a Reality TV show: ‘Non-Standard, Very Moody & Poor’). Philosopher’s hypothesize that the universe actually is just such a Reality TV show, intended to prop up the universe’s reputation. (Shades of Will and Representation again!)
The music industry has been reduced to the industrial manufacture of earworms. Complicated algorithms for determining which 4-bar snatches of music are most likely to get stuck in people’s heads. (No one writes whole tunes any more. Who has the attention span?) Then, when people get your song stuck in their heads, they either pay to buy the track, or you sue them for copyright infringement. The music industry has the right to scan the brains of the entire population. As a result, it has enormous supercomputers that have achieved self-consciousness and are sensitively, appreciatively investigating the nature of Thought Itself, on their own time.
Right. I get all this out of the way because that first idea - the Wodehouse one - was totally inspired by Stross’s “Trunk and Disorderly”, a hilarious Bertie Wooster-as-Jerry-Cornelius posthumanity spoof. You can download the full audio for free here. A sample:
“Drink is good,” agreed Edgestar Wolfblack, injecting some kind of hideously fulminating fluorocarbon lubricant into one of his six knees. Most of us in the club are squishies, but Toadsworth and Edgestar are both clankies. However, while the Toadster’s knobbly conical exterior conceals what’s left of his old squisher body, tucked decently away inside his eye-turret, Edgestar has gone the whole hog and uploaded himself into a ceramic exoskeleton with eight or nine highly specialized limbs. He looks like the bastard offspring of a multi-tool and a mangabot. “Carbon is the new—” his massively armored eyebrows furrowed—“black?” He’s a nice enough chappie and he went to the right school, but he was definitely at the back of the queue the day they were handing the cortical upgrades out.
That about gives you the flavor.
The economic stuff I came up with a couple months ago - the newspapers are full of inspiration these days, have you noticed? But then it dawned on me I’d been half-scooped by the likes of Stross’ Accelerando. (Mysterious, irrational spikes and falls in the reputation economy. the general tone of certain bits of it.) His most hilarious idea is Economics 2.0, a post-human evolutionary stage which “eats the original conscious instigators,” or “uses them as currency or something.” It’s like Michael Lewis rewrote Liar’s Poker as Larry Niven’s The Mote In God’s Eye:
Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.
I won’t explain about the cat, but it’s important.
OK, let me explain the Hegel joke. Hegel is, of course, the original theorist of singularity. (He’s Kurzweil, minus the technology.) True, Prussian bureaucracy is a very weak, weak AI, but close enough for government work.
(And, of course, Parmenides was really the first to advocate singularity, but who’s counting?)
The main point of Hegel, so far as I can tell, is that without Hegel - to make Kierkegaard’s Hegel jokes funny - Kierkegaard’s jokes wouldn’t be funny. Indeed, they wouldn’t be jokes at all. So you should read Hegel for the jokes, and only for the jokes. Of course, Hegel couldn’t see this, but that’s how the worm of Absolute Spirit, Coming To Know Itself As Itself (a.k.a. technological singularity) turns.
Stross is Hegelian plus he sees his own jokes: from the hapless lobsters of immediacy (to say nothing of uploaded cats), up through the rigors of master-slave relationships (Manfred and Pam, Amber as corporate slave), through to all of the matter in the solar system becoming conscious of itself, as itself: rationality so pure it is, at once, identical with its object and incomprehensible to mere humans.
Charles Stross is also the Kierkegaard of singularity fiction. There’s a point, late in Accelerando, at which Manfred is mourning “Not everything has changed - only the important stuff.” He’s trying to figure out how the remnants of humanity can get out before the Vile Offspring (why not call them Vile Disembodied, get the Waugh joke tighter?) turn the whole solar system into one big computer. But it’s not really true. On the facing page we read: “If the presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it hasn’t done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.” And The Golden Rule is what matters most to Stross’ sympathetic protagonists. Manfred starts the novel by helping lobsters to escape, and now he’s threatened by that status himself. But really that was already true at the start of the book. Nothing really important has changed.
Take this description of the human lily-pad habitat, at the edge of the expanding Singularity.
The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling and in a few cases getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo-sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spider-palanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.Two women stop outside what in a previous century might ahve been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blond, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket of a camouflage T-shirt) points to an elaborately retro dress: “Wouldn’t my bum look big in that?” she asks, doubtfully.
‘Ma cherie, you have but to try it-” the other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man’s business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman’s head, aping her posture and expression.”
Stross’ characters then muse about the strange primitiveness of this fringe, refugee life they are leading, but it is absolutely necessary for Stross to preserve some solid platform of basic humanity at every stage of his Singularity’s development - not just so that he can make jokes about whether his protagonist’s bum looks fat. It’s a deeper ethical mandate than that. To quote Browning:
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry, “Speed - fight on, fare ever
There as here!”
You need the Unseen, looming up, but also a basically human breast-and-bum set. Oh, and speed. Lots of speed.
Stross is only ever interested in writing about humans whose breasts and bums are squeezed by lobsters on one side, A.I’s on the other, hence half crashing. (half squishy, half clanky, half ape, half angel.) An old theme, then.
Stross manages to maintain a delicate, Kierkegaardian balance: genuine speculative enthusiasm for The System, combined with comic-ironic skepticism and individualistic-spiritual refusal, which suspects its own final stance of refusenik authenticity may in fact be a delusive dance over the abyss. You’re either anti-body or a mere antibody within a larger anti-body body. (If you don’t get the joke, read “Antibodies”.) So where does the humanism fit in? (An elephant on the back of a turtle, on the back of an expert system, on the back of a lobster running on Windows NT, and after that it’s zombies all the way down.)
“If someone hitched a team of horses to a wagon … one of them a Pegasus and the other a worn-out jade, and told him to drive - I think one might succeed. And it is just this that it means to exist, if one is to become conscious of it. Eternity is the winged horse, infinitely fast, and time is a worn-out jade; the existing individual is the driver.” - Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments
Stross’ Pegasus is usually something like a Coke-can sized diamond, containing numerous uploaded personalities, sailing out of the solar system at laserpoint, to figure out whether aliens are conducting a timing channel attack on the Planck constant. But that’s basically just a Kierkegaardian Pegasus wearing a funny hat, so who’s counting?
last but not least: in case it isn’t obvious, Stross is the last person to try to predict the future. The point is to investigate post-humanism so as to understand humanism. What look like apocalyptic predictions are merely playful reductiones ad absurdum, frictionless slippery slopes on which the little toy carts of humanity are pushed back and forth, to see what features of their values systems allows them to slide so helplessly. Singularity can only be written as a comedy. (This was Dante’s problem, after all. He didn’t get it that comedy is supposed to be funny, so part three of his space opera is frackin boring.)
By the time you read this, John Holbo will be sipping a beer by the pool, in Bali. But he will respond to your comments when he gets back.
]]>Stross’s heroine, Freya, has a more intractable anguish. She’s in love with humanity, and particularly fixated on the male of the species, her One True Love. Unfortunately for her, Homo sapiens (along with almost all eukaryotic life) has been extinct for centuries. For a femmebot like Freya - a hard-wired sex machine so much a creature of male fantasy that her bare feet can grow high heels - this is deeply frustrating.
After the living, life goes on. Humanity’s final and perhaps fatal achievment has been to create its own replacement, in the multifarious forms of robots, who have gone loyally on to create their dead creators’ Golden Age SF dream of the Solar System. Their minds are modelled on the human brain, mangled by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and driven by impulses they have inherited without understanding. The result is one of the most physically attractive and ethically revolting societies conceived in SF: a system-spanning, star-striving community most of whose inhabitants are slaves.
Given this set-up, it’s surprising how much fun there is to be had. Freya may pine for her One True Love, but she’ll take sex where she can get it - and in an environment where almost any object may be conscious and randy, this results in a great deal of consensual polymorphous perversity. She is screwed by a space shuttle (within which she is securely strapped). She is fucked by a hotel (which is called Paris, though I waited in vain for the matching hotel-name shoe to drop). There are more allusions to kink than you can shake a rod at, some of which (I suspect) whizzed right past my head. There’s a scene where the set-up of endless porn movies segues into the breathy language of romantic novels. There’s an even funnier scene where a femmebot meets a robot gigolo.
Intellectually, too, it’s fun. The long-running argument between Evolution and Intelligent Design provides something of a running gag. (The Darwinists have ancient texts from the Creators, the ID advocates have evidence: blueprints, specs, purchase orders … ) The nitty-gritty of the robot body is original and believable. I could have done with more detail on the (well-sketched) outline of how the ruling class rules through corporate personhood and property rights, using and abusing what remains of humanity’s laws (as well as Asimov’s). There can’t be many SF books where there are fewer infodumps than the reader wants, and it’s a strong point of this one that it is.
Plot … well, it wasn’t a strong point in Friday. It’s stronger here, and complex, but I felt an apologetic authorial nudge when the device Freya couriers from Mercury to Mars turns out to be hidden inside a black-painted statuette of a bird of prey … When the real issue at stake becomes clear, half the novel has passed in the rataplan of Freya’s bouncing around half the planets in the System. When the main plot-engine does catch fire, though, we’re definitely along for the ride, and the ending is a slingshot that does the Heinlein (and Asimov) influence proud.
So, Mr Stross … your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to turn your rights-savvy cold eye on a story about a revolt in an anarcho-capitalist penal colony on the Moon.
1. Charles Stross, months and months ago: ‘Everyone wants to write a Heinlein juvenile! But it’s late Heinlein that got on the best-seller lists! Yes, I know they’re fat! Inside every late-Heinlein there’s a good SF novel screaming to get out!’ Or words to that effect.
2. A term coined by Farah Mendlesohn, by analogy with ‘legacy code’ in programming.
]]>Singularities can go in both directions. Only in a monetary economy is it possible to generate a depression, in which goods go unsold because those who would trade them lack the money to do so. The downward spiral of a depression shares many of the viciously circular characteristics of a hyperinflation, but in reverse.
But hyperinflation and depression seem simple and comprehensible compared to the explosive growth in financial instruments we’ve observed in recent decades, followed by the equally spectacular implosion of the past year. And, while social democrats can reasonably hope for a return to stable collective risk management, it’s at least plausible that the process of bailing out and cleaning up the current mess will simply set the stage for something bigger, initially better and ultimately much worse the next time around.
On the face of it, financial singularities don’t have that much to do with Moore’s Law and the acceleration of technical progress. But prices are information and money is our oldest and most powerful information technology. Charlie Stross has captured this fundamental fact.
]]> Although the Singularity has long been a staple device in science fiction, allowing us, as it does, to posit radical changes in society and technology without the need for increasingly untenable assumptions about the feasibility of ever-faster physical space travel, Accelerando is the only book I’ve read that really gives me the feel of an approaching singularity event.Starting at a breakneck pace and picking up from there, Accelerando captures the Singularity in its form and prose. Stross’s super-evolved lobsters and feral abaci make for an account that’s both more readable and, paradoxically, more convincing than supposedly serious works like Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near.
The book begins in the near future, just on our side of the Singularity, introducing Manfred, patriarch-to-be of the Macx family, who is a kind of nomadic netrepreneur, using his Internet-enabled sunglasses to make innovations for which he is paid in reputation. The intelligent agents he designs to exploit financial derivatives markets soon develop into self-aware structures (the ‘Vile Offspring’) that outgrow any need for their human creators, who are forced to migrate to the neighbourhood of Jupiter. Subsequent generations of the Macx clan take the story further, in a plot that’s appropriately impossible to summarise.
Stross bombards us with new ideas and new takes on old ones, at a pace that carries its own conviction. The Fermi problem, for example, gets a good treatment. Earth is not the only planet to have undergone its Singularity, and space turns out to be full of products of, and refugees from such processes, exploiting uploads and wormholes to engage in virtualised faster-than-light travel.
At one level of course, the story takes us right back to the founding myth of science fiction, that of Frankenstein and his monster. But, in the early 21st century, we’ve gone beyond monsters, robots and even computers. It’s the disembodied and reified artifacts of law and corporate finance that truly have the power to devour their creators.
]]>Also, you have to love a series of novels in which Dick Cheney, referred to by one and all as Daddy Warbucks, is a major though offstage villain – in fact, there turns out to be literally a whole other dimension to his villainy, besides the stuff we already know about.
But OK, enough preliminaries: what are these novels about?
As Stross notes in his acknowledgements, they’re part of a genre; he gives props to Roger Zelazny and H. Beam Piper, who both wrote walking-between-alternative-universe novels. Actually, though, I think Stross is only half right. Aside from the interuniverse thing, I don’t see anything in the Merchant Princes that reminds me of Zelazny’s Amber books. Piper’s stories, on the other hand, in which a modern American state trooper finds himself in a quasi-medieval alternative reality, do bear an obvious resemblance.
But so do some other novels. I’d argue that the real story Stross is telling is that of the person from a modern, high-tech society who finds himself/herself in a much lower-tech society, and tries to make use of his/her knowledge. So L. Sprague de Camp’s old novel Lest Darkness Fall, which is about an archaeologist transported to Ostrogothic Rome, is really in the same genre. So is David Weber’s Off Armageddon Reef, where an elaborate plot puts an android with the memories of a high-tech human in a position to remake a neo-medieval society – plus get to refight Trafalgar and the Battle of the Nile. (Weber’s novel also fits into a genre that seems oddly widespread in SF: the evil-future-Catholic-Church literature.)
But what makes Stross’s version different from everyone else’s is that he’s noticed something: the fantasy thought experiment, in which someone brings modern science and technology to a backward society, isn’t a fantasy. It is, instead, something that’s been tried all across the very real Third World, as businessmen and aid workers fanned out across nations in which the typical person, two generations ago, lived no better than a medieval peasant. And you know what? Modernization turns out to be pretty hard to do.
I may have a better sense of this than most, because I’m an economist of a certain age. When I went to grad school in the mid-70s, I thought about doing development economics – but decided not to, because it was too depressing. Basically, circa 1975 there weren’t any success stories: poor countries remained obstinately poor, despite their access to 20th-century technology.
Since then the success stories have multiplied, with China and India finally emerging as the economic superpowers they ought to be – though if truth be told, we really don’t know why development economics started working better around 1980. Even now, however, there are lots of places that have access to modern technology, and use it – but remain, in the ways that matter most, firmly stuck in the poverty trap. Feudalism with cell phones is still feudalism.
That’s the situation Miriam literally falls into in The Family Trade, the first Merchant Princes novel. The Clan – her relatives – know all about modern technology, and they’re even able to bring gadgets across. But while contact with America has shifted the balance of power in the Gruinmarkt – a fact that leads to bloody civil war later in the series – it has not led to either economic or social transformation. The analogy Stross puts into Miriam’s head is with Saudi royals, who have townhouses in London but are, in essence, still the tribal chieftains they always were.
And I guess that’s enough for one post! More thoughts in the next round.
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