4 ms·

From what I've read, it's not a political/ideology shift in Stross but more a shift in how you (don't) read the books. Stross has been very critical and antagon

From what I've read, it's not a political/ideology shift in Stross but more a shift in how you (don't) read the books. Stross has been very critical and antagonist against runaway effects ("anti-crypto") since his first book Accelerando. While a lot of the "cool stuff" and many of the characters, including some of the protagonists, are very "technolibertarian" most of Stross' plots are generally Very Bad Things happening to them, including various sorts of cascade failures in the "cool stuff" domains (up to and including Lovecraftian apocalyptic doom in the Laundry universe). Generally the moral arc in a lot of Stross' (as such exists) from meta/high-level usually seems to be wary of the "cool stuff" as Very Bad Things Can Happen. He's a great writer because those moral arcs are left subtle and to the reader rather than tagged on the end like Aesop's Fables. (Sometimes I wish they were blandly tagged at the end like Aesop's Fables to avoid some of these conversations, because we're living in a post-Poe's Law Singularity and subtlety is all too often easily overlooked.)

Apocryphon 6y ago
Yeah, it's hard to see Stross as libertarian at all. Pertinently, he just wrote about Neptune's Brood and medium money recently: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central-banking-on-mars.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central...
- sxp 6y ago
  > MuskCoin is required in payment for cargo capacity on Earth-to-Mars shipping, or for purchasing real estate on Mars. It has a floating terrestrial exchange rate: the idea is that it's used for mediating interplanetary exchanges. That sounds like the currency in Artemis by Andy Weir (of The Martian fame) which used "slugs" as a currency on Luna: > “It’s short for soft-landed grams. S-L-G. Slug. One slug gets one gram of cargo delivered from Earth to Artemis, courtesy of KSC.” “It’s technically not a currency,” Trond said from the credenza. “We’re not a country; we can’t have a currency. Slugs are pre-purchased service credit from KSC. You pay dollars, euros, yen, whatever, and in exchange you get a mass allowance for shipment to Artemis. You don’t have to use it all at once, so they keep track of your balance.” ... “It ended up being a handy unit for trade. So KSC is functioning as a bank. You’d never get away with that on Earth, but this isn’t Earth.”

Apocryphon 6y ago

Yeah, it's hard to see Stross as libertarian at all. Pertinently, he just wrote about Neptune's Brood and medium money recently: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central-banking-on-mars.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central...

sxp 6y ago
> MuskCoin is required in payment for cargo capacity on Earth-to-Mars shipping, or for purchasing real estate on Mars. It has a floating terrestrial exchange rate: the idea is that it's used for mediating interplanetary exchanges. That sounds like the currency in Artemis by Andy Weir (of The Martian fame) which used "slugs" as a currency on Luna: > “It’s short for soft-landed grams. S-L-G. Slug. One slug gets one gram of cargo delivered from Earth to Artemis, courtesy of KSC.” “It’s technically not a currency,” Trond said from the credenza. “We’re not a country; we can’t have a currency. Slugs are pre-purchased service credit from KSC. You pay dollars, euros, yen, whatever, and in exchange you get a mass allowance for shipment to Artemis. You don’t have to use it all at once, so they keep track of your balance.” ... “It ended up being a handy unit for trade. So KSC is functioning as a bank. You’d never get away with that on Earth, but this isn’t Earth.”