3 ms·
Was I the only one who thought about Y.T's mother reading the bathroom tissue memo in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (quoting below)? Y.T.'s mom pulls up the n
by EvanAnderson 9y ago
Was I the only one who thought about Y.T's mother reading the bathroom tissue memo in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (quoting below)?
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
- Erwin 9y agoThat's how I imagine the Machine Intelligence dystopia. Not some kind of General Intelligence ruling like a evil human despot, but a inscrutable algorithm making decisions based on millions of data points, all affecting your life. Just like the gmail spam filter but affecting your job reviews, your access to health care, education, loans etc.
- sireat 9y agoGoing back to Gibson's Neuromancer 10 years before 'Snow Crash' is also eerie: "He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man's right hand. Was it authentic? If that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic."
- pjc50 9y ago"Cyber-" as in cyberpunk comes from cybernetics: control systems. A key theme in cyberpunk is control and means of escaping or disrupting it. Both of which might be physical violence, chemical (qv Case, or the salaryman), informational, or psychological.