e$: Neal Stephenson's geodesic economy

--- begin forwarded text Sender: e$@thumper.vmeng.com Reply-To: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Mime-Version: 1.0 From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 18:19:49 -0500 Precedence: Bulk To: Multiple recipients of <e$@thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: e$: Neal Stephenson's geodesic economy -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- e$: 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMUipXfgyLN8bw6ZVAQGhfwP/SpOP6F07hLzxTxyR8XpBBZsqUzPKMSRK 3OLc0xYjTLkQvunuhZ6vyGwUqadCu0My2wIMspgSakjhUJkN0dmMBWif2zzWBsLP fSe+WUJiVuT8dJkcLC844pkLE2fjg07rqRMdHRXSbq5TDEMsHllfyBKb5GfW+NM3 TVUgwwiIX/A= =YDVU -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -------------------------------------------------- The e$ lists are brought to you by: Making Commerce Convenient (tm) - Oki Advanced Products - Marlboro, MA Value-Checker(tm) smart card reader= http://www.oki.com/products/vc.html Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info@hyperion.co.uk See your name here. Be a charter sponsor for e$pam, e$, and Ne$ws! See http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ or e-mail rah@shipwright.com for details... ------------------------------------------------- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/