On: Revisiting Vernor Vinge’s “predictions” for 2025

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I read this novel and didn't really care for it much. I thought the idea of completing massive projects with the fractional attention of tens of thousands of people was hard to take. Coordination costs and context switching are a large overhead for that type of thing, and the novel doesn't address that at all.

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I think some of these novels have a sort of literary "uncanny valley".

By this I mean, if the story is unimaginable, it seems like a caricature or over-the-top plot and you just sort of suspend disgloss over it.

But if it's uncomfortably imaginable, it gets creepy.

I remember reading this story a long time ago (seems to have been 1997):

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

and it was fiction to me. but later reading it, it's a little disturbing.