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e$: Neal Stephenson's geodesic economy
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From: [email protected] (Robert Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 18:19:49 -0500
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Subject: e$: Neal Stephenson's geodesic economy
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e$: Neal Stephenson talks e$
I used to joke that I read science fiction by the yard. I certainly *buy*
it that way.
I finally got around around to reading Neal Stephenson's The_Diamond_Age,_
or,_A_Young_Lady's_Illustrated_Primer. I thought that his first book,
_Snow_Crash_ was marvellous, and thought that, in ability to create utterly
er, novel, reality out of whole cloth, he was right up there with Gibson. I
was wrong. He's much better. Gibson's first book, _Neuromancer_, was his
best. _Diamond_Age_ was an order of magnitude better than _Snow_Crash_ ,
and I get the feeling that Stephenson's just getting warmed up.
Why am I saying all this? Well, I'm in the process of reading
_Diamond_Age_, and there, on page 270 of the recent paperback edition,
(Copyright 1995, Neal Stephenson), Stephenson describes, in perfect detail,
a geodesic economy-- complete with digital cash, payer anonymity, and money
as software food.
The story concerns a girl named Nellodee, Nell to her friends, an abused
waif of no means whatsoever, and her adventures with a very large
nanocomputer disguised as a book. The scene in question is about Miranda, a
"ractor", an interactive actress, who has been effectively raising Nell
interactively through a cleverly disguised Grimm-like fairytale with Nell
as the protagonist. Actually, Miranda's just been acting lines provided by
the nanocomputer in the book, back through to Nell over the net.
After 2 years of this, Miranda decides she wants to meet Nell. She goes to
her boss for help...
Miranda sat very still for a moment, hypnotized by the colorful flashing
lights on a vintage jukebox.
"This is related to Princess Nell, isn't it?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"Yeah. Now, what do you want?"
"I want to know who she is," Miranda said. This was the most guarded way
she sould put it. She didn't suppose that it would help matters to drag
Carl down through the full depth of her emotions.
"You want to backtrace a payer," Carl said.
It sounded terrible when translated it into that kind of language.
Carl sucked powerfully on his milkshake for a bit, his looking over
Miranda's shoulder to the traffic on the Bund.
"Princess Nell's a little kid, right?"
"Yes. I would estimate five to seven years old."
His eyes swiveled to lock on hers. "You can tell that?"
"Yes.", she said, in tones that warned him not to question it.
"So she's probably not paying the bill anyway. The payer is someone else.
You need to backtrace the payer and then, from there, track down Nell."
Carl broke eye contact again, shook his head, and tried unsucessfully to
whistle through frozen lips. "Even the first step is impossible."
Miranda was startled. "That seems pretty unequivocal. I expected to hear
'difficult' or 'expensive.' But--"
"Nope. It's impossible. Or maybe" -- Carl thought about it a while --
"maybe 'astronomically improbable' is a better way of putting." Then he
looked mildly alarmed as he watched Miranda's expression change. "You can't
just trace the connection backward. That's not how media works."
"How does media work, then?"
"Look out the window. Not toward the Bund -- check Yan'an Road."
Miranda swiveled her head around to look out the big window, which was
partly painted over with colorful Coke ads and and descriptions of blue
plate specials. Yan'an Road, like all of the major throughfares in
Shanghai, was filled from the shop windows on one side to the shop windows
on the other, with people on bicycles and powerskates. In many places the
traffic was so dense that greater speed could be attained on foot. A few
half-lane vehicles sat motionless, polished boulders in a sluggish brown
stream.
It was so familiar that Miranda didn't really see anything. "What am I
looking for?"
Carl was right. At a minimum, everyone had a small plastic bag with
something in it. Many people, such as the bicyclists, carried heavier
loads.
"Now just hold that image on your head for a moment, and think about how to
set up a global telecommunications network."
Miranda laughed. "I don't have any basis for thinking about something like
that."
"Sure you do. Until now, you've been thinking in terms of the telephone
system in the old passives. In that system, each transaction had two
participants -- the two people having the conversation. And they were
connected by a wire that ran through a certral switchboard. So what are the
key features of this system?"
"I don't know -- I'm asking you," said Miranda.
"Number one, only two people or entities can interact. Number two, it takes
a dedicated connection that is made and broken for the purposes of that one
conversation. Number three, it is inherently centralized -- it can't work
unless there's a central switchboard."
"Okay, I think I'm following you so far."
"Our media system today -- the one that you and I make our livings from --
is a decendant of the phone system only insofar as we use it for
essentially the same purposes, plus many, may more. But the key point to
remember is that *it is totally different from the old phone system*. The
old phone system -- and its technological cousin, the cable TV system --
tanked. It carshed and burned decades ago, and we started virtually from
scratch."
"Why? It worked, didn't it?"
"First of all, we needed to enable interactions between more than one
entity. What do I mean by entity? Well, think about the ractives. Think
about _First_Class_to_Geneva_ . You're on this train -- so are a couple of
dozen other people. Some of those people are being racted, so in that case
the entities happen to be human beings. But the others-- like the waiters
and porters-- are just software robots. Furthermore, the train is full of
props: jewelry, money, guns, bottles of wine. Each one of those is also a
separate piece of software-- a separate entity. In the lingo, we call them
objects. The train itself is another object, and so is the countryside
through which it travels.
"The countryside is a good example. It happens to be a digital map of
France. Where did this map come from? Did the makers of
_First_Class_to_Geneva_ send out their team of surveyors to make a new map
of France? No, of course they didn't. They used existing data-- a digital
map of the world that is available to any maker of ractives who needs it,
for a price of course. That digital map is a separate object. It resides in
the memory of a computer somewhere. Where exactly? I don't know. Neither
does the ractive itself. It doesn't matter. The data might be in
California, it might be in Paris, it might be down on the corner-- or it
might be distributed among all of those places and many more. It doesn't
matter. Because our media system no longer works like the old system-
dedicated wires passing through a central switchboard. It works like
*that*." Carl pointed to the traffic on the street again.
"So each person on the street is like an object?"
"Possibly. But a better analogy is that the objects are people like us,
sitting in various buildings that front on the street. Suppose that we want
to send a message to someone over in Pudong. We write a message down on a
piece of paper, and we go to the door and hand it to the first person who
goes by and say, 'Take this to Mr. Gu in Pudong.' And he skates down the
street for a while and runs into someone on a bicycle who looks like he
might be headed for Pudong, and says, 'take this to Mr. Gu.' A minute
later, that person gets stuck in traffic and hands it off to a pedestrian
who can negotiate the snarl a little better, and so on and so on, until it
eventually it reaches Mr. Gu. When Mr. Gu wants to respond, he sends us a
message on the same way."
"So there's no way to trace the path taken by a message."
"Right. And the real situation is more complicated. The media net was
designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people
could use it to transfer money. That's one reason that nation-states
colapsed-- as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial
transactions could no longer be monitord by governments, and the tax
colelction systems got fubared. So if the IRS, for example, wasn't able to
trace these messages, theen there's no way that you'll be able to track
down Princess Nell."
"Okay, I guess that answers my question," miranda said.
"Good!" Carly said brightly. He was obviously pleased that he'd been able
to help Miranda, and so she didn't tell him how his words had really made
her feel. She treated as an acting challenge: Could she fool Carl
Hollywood, who was sharper about acting than just about anyone, into
thinking that she was fine?
Apparently she did. He escorted her back to her flat, in a hundered story
high-rise just across the river in Pudong, and she held it together long
enough to bid him good-bye, get out of her clothes, and run a bath. Then
climebed into the hot water and dissovled into awful, wretched, blubbery,
self-pitying tears.
Eventually she got it under control. She had to keep this in perspective.
She could still interact with Nell and still did, everyday. And if she paid
attention, sooner or later she would find some way to penetrate the
curtain. Barring that, she was beginning to understand that Nell, whoever
she was, had become marked out in some way, and that in time she would
become a very important person. Within a few years, Miranda expected to be
reading about her in the newspapers. Feeling better, she got out of the
bath and climbed into bed, getting a good night sleep so she'd be ready for
next day of taking care of Nell.
Go buy this book.
Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
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Robert Hettinga ([email protected])
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
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