Like many here I'm a huge fan of Neal Stephenson. A lot of people around weren't big fans of Anathem. I actually really liked it. One of the ideas that came up

Like many here I'm a huge fan of Neal Stephenson. A lot of people around weren't big fans of Anathem. I actually really liked it. One of the ideas that came up in that book was the Reticulum (Internet) was populated by "botnet ecologies" that subtly manipulated facts, streams and the like such that filtering this out became another industry (of course). I've seen the idea that this lies in our future raised here and it seems to get mocked. I think the idea has a lot of merit.