> Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me.
While I think Stross is right on the money with this article, I would hope that the 'like' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here; last thing we need is some idiot billionaire summoning demons (as was, indeed, basically the plot of at least one Laundry Files book...)
> And no tour of the idiocracy is complete without mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, who blew through ten billion dollars trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash
IIRC Zuckerberg actually claimed to have been inspired by Rainbow's End. Presumably, in some alternate universe, taking inspiration from Vernor Vinge's other, better books, Facebook instead spent billions trying to make irritating talking spiders.
Stross has also written many books firmly in the Sci-fi category without the Lovecraft. I particularly enjoyed Glasshouse, and his other works explore the idea of singularity, far future economy, and also what a non-singular future might look like.
A lot of blame seems to be put on the Americans, but when I think of Scifi authors, I'm often thinking of Douglas Adams, Iain M Banks, Alistair Reynolds, Stross himself, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Richard K Morgan. The Brits have a lot to answer for too!
I've always wanted to write to Vinge and pick his brain about Rainbows End, because of all his novels (that I've read, anyway) it seems like the one that you could just about extrapolate from current tech and society... but it's also a bit unclear how much of this plausible future he thinks is a good idea, and how much is bad.
> IIRC Zuckerberg actually claimed to have been inspired by Rainbow's End. Presumably, in some alternate universe, taking inspiration from Vernor Vinge's other, better books, Facebook instead spent billions trying to make irritating talking spiders.
We should all be grateful he didn't think weaponised autism was a brilliant idea.
While I think Stross is right on the money with this article, I would hope that the 'like' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here; last thing we need is some idiot billionaire summoning demons (as was, indeed, basically the plot of at least one Laundry Files book...)
> And no tour of the idiocracy is complete without mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, who blew through ten billion dollars trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash
IIRC Zuckerberg actually claimed to have been inspired by Rainbow's End. Presumably, in some alternate universe, taking inspiration from Vernor Vinge's other, better books, Facebook instead spent billions trying to make irritating talking spiders.