Reminds me of how Stephenson describes Los Angeles in Snow Crash
"Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States, as the federal government of the United States has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs"
I know it's polular to predict a dystopia future that resembles 1984; but I'm much more inclined to believe we are more heading into a Cyberpunk future where corporations hold the real power and nation states are more puppets for their will.
> we are more heading into a Cyberpunk future where corporations hold the real power
I believe we're more heading into an Idiocracy future where corporations also hold the real power (e.g. "Carl's Jr machine: Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother.")
We have seen this coming for a long time. The thing is that 30 years ago, we thought it was going to be a technologically sophisticated, slick ultra-IBM type corporation that managed everyone's lives. Now, it seems like it's going to be more like a television station's advertising department manages your life.
You mean, regarding the dystopic aspect? Of course the societies depicted in those novels are dystopic, but I mean that it's possible to have similar systems of societal control in place without their being taken to an extreme.
Yea totally, Sawyer filters fit them nicely too. They're VERY durable, as in I've got one bottle I've carried probably hundreds of miles by now over several trips and it's been dropped and squeezed thousands of times. Looks like a bear chewed it up, but it still does not leak.
Pro tip: you can replace the O-ring that comes with the filter for a durable rubber one used for garden hoses for a real nice fit on the smartwater bottles, and have some extras because the worst is if you lose that seal (or it is damaged) and you are out in the wilderness.
President Trump's experience with the World Wrestling Federation qualifies him as the literal embodiment of Idiocracy's Wrestler President. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkghtyxZ6rc
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Short parents can have tall kids and vice-versa. Smart parents can have dumb kids and vice-versa. Genetic inheritance is complicated. Effective IQ can be downwardly influenced by factors such as nutrition. Reality is far too complex to be captured by your pithy sentence, or my pithy paragraph.
I think it's fair to say in some instances that a person would have had a higher IQ but for some thing, but the term "effective IQ" is semantic jibberish. The score simply is whatever the test says it is.
Fair enough, it was a term I just made up to concisely convey the notion you described: “were it not for these factors, the results of the test may have had substantive differences.” Perhaps I failed, but I think my failure was an unfortunate distraction from the main point which you seemed to apprehend anyway. So there’s that.
We've already been there. The 18th and 19th centuries were largely like that. The great wars of colonial Europe were heavily financed by private money.
Corporations held the real power in the US from ~1870 - roughly the beginning of the industrial revolution - until the vast Federal expansion of power and taxation of the WW2 build-up and thereafter.
Rockefeller single handedly stabilized the finances of the US Government by pledging his wealth as a support prop to JP Morgan. That premise is laughable today. The Federal + State governments spend the equivalent of a Jeff Bezos fortune every week. Meanwhile the US military is radically larger and more powerful than it was a century ago, as are all the agencies of the State.
If you think corporations are powerful today, the reality is they're hilariously weak compared to what they were a century ago. Further, back then there were very few regulatory restraints on corporations, while the giants were simultaneously drastically larger in comparison to the Federal Government and as a share of GDP. Most of the state governments barely even existed financially.
Indeed, the primary history of the last century has been the growth and centralization of power into the state, via the growth of state-capitalist ideology. Not just in the US, but across the whole world governments are larger and involved in 100x more areas they never were in the early 1900s.
I've posted this here before, but the first half of this book "The Fourth Revolution" has a really great history of how western governments have grown into behemoths.
The 2nd half about moving more towards a Singapore style limited gov - which has proven to be wildly successful there - is less persuasive, even though is fundamentally well motivated. As I believe they benefit from being small by nature not just design. Smaller states > large federated countries, as federalism constantly gets eatten away by centralized growth towards the executive/federal gov, away from state power. Without a concerted push-back and a strong culture, federalism will always result in top heavy administrations, where fewer and fewer people have more and more power over the whole country.
federalism will always result in top heavy administrations, where fewer and fewer people have more and more power over the whole country
You could say that about any form of government. I think it's human nature to want a single dictator, so the governed seem to eventually give their consent to one.
Your assertion seems off... Sure, the US federal government may spend far more money than any individual corporation or mega-wealthy person today, but who controls the spending? Corporations and wealthy individuals are simply using leverage today, buying influence with legislators via lobbying and campaign donations, to guide government spending.
Regardless the power has still fundamentally shifted from the private domain into public top-down control. Just because there are areas where lobbying has been influential in getting gov to help them doesn't make this not the case. If anything the corporations are then not private corporations as they were in the 1800s/early 1900s, but merely an extension of the government. They are being handed monopolies/oligopolies top-down, much like state owned corporations are sanctioned market power centrally.
So no, it's not the same. The corporation in a modern state-capitalist context doesn't have to provide value to the public to gain power and wealth, merely influence the right people in politics. That's way different than private industry, and potentially far more destructive and wasteful of resources (see: "private" prisons which depend completely on government for survival and have little of the benefits of market functions like competition and growth via customer value).
Not to mention special interest groups, unions, influential individuals, etc also have significant pull in the government as well. It's not just corporations. There have been plenty of economic intervention by the government, politicians have hardly been monopolized only by (pseudo private) corporate interests.
I can’t second this enough. Snow Crash and Diamond Age were fun page-turners. I slogged through Cryptonomicon, but beyond that I haven’t been able to finish anything else.
I’ve heard good things about Seveneves, but I’m a little hesitant to pick it up given that it’s huge and there are thousands of other books to read.
Pick up Anathem before trying Seveneves. Anathem might be his strongest novel, and it's the only one that holds up to Snow Crash and Diamond Age in my estimation.
I adore Zodiac as well but am in a decided minority in that regard.
I even liked _The Big U_. Pre Cryptonomicon Stephenson was weird and full of wacky ideas barely held together with a thin veneer of a story. I think he's a much better storyteller now, but the books aren't quite as dense with weird, magic and crazy ideas.
I loved Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I've read Anathem twice and loved it. And even though it clocks in at around 3,000 pages, The Baroque Cycle trilogy is so good I've read it 3 or 4 times and I'll probably read it again.
The first 2/3s of Seveneves were pretty good. I think you can reasonably skip the last 1/3 of the novel. Anathem is definitely his best written work. Don't bother with REAMDE.
REAMDE was interesting to read when it came out as it had many ideas about the very-near-future that had yet to come about but are now true. One was how malware will grow dramatically in frequency and sophistication once there is an anonymous way to pay the criminals online. Written before criminals started using Bitcoin. I would agree it is now not worth reading unless one just wants to read everything by Stephenson.
Yeah, agree. You'll reach a point where you very obviously know you can stop.
I sometimes don't mind his "explain every little detail of the physics of how things work" style of writing, but when that's the majority of what you're reading over several pages of being introduced to new characters, it's a bit much.
Was in a similar position. The world building in Snow Crash (first 150ish pages) is one of my favorites in the genre. Unfortunately, the plot kind of lost me towards the end and I came out slightly disappointed.
"Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States, as the federal government of the United States has ceded most of its power and territory to private organizations and entrepreneurs"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash