3 ms·
I think this is a classic by now, with reason. I think some of the concepts in the book are both very prescient and very disheartening, e.g. the autonomous cor
by riffraff 2y ago
I think this is a classic by now, with reason.
I think some of the concepts in the book are both very prescient and very disheartening, e.g. the autonomous corporations that keep haggling with each other way past their usefulness to the beings who created them.
- askvictor 2y agoOne of my favourite bits is how most of the mass of the inner solar system gets converted to Computronium consisting almost entirely of legal bots battling other legal bots.
- shadowgovt 2y agoThe bit about jamming up democratic representation by creating living copies of individuals that have a particularly-useful mindset to those who want to jam up the system is the part that stuck out to me. Fortunately, I don't think it really has an analogue in the modern day (other than, perhaps, "when you have the capacity to craft culture, the culture you craft around you will become self-reinforcing").
- sangnoir 2y ago> Fortunately, I don't think it really has an analogue in the modern day How about conglomerates having defense contractor and mass media/news subsidiaries? An on-the-nose author may write a newscaster who says that they were "brought to tears by the beauty of the war machines" on air, or some such.
- OgsyedIE 2y agoIt was a fairly new concept in 2005 but the idea that the evolution of life as determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe terminates in inwardly-facing capitalist computronium predates Accelerando. While I'm unaware of the intermediate steps the idea took to get to Stross it's the thesis of many of the various essays that Nick Land scattered across Usenet in the nineties and probably goes back to Lyotard's writings in the eighties and earlier.