Daemon
With technology increasing, we’ll move closer and closer to Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse in Snow Crash, where we live as much online as offline and conduct ourselves according to the online laws and customs, working in the cybereconomy.
James Dale Davidson • The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
While we may begin using tools for our collective benefit, we slowly remake our world around the needs of technology, such as building highways and suburbs to support the automobile, or changing school curriculums so that they work on computers. Once we’ve done that for long enough, we eventually find ourselves inside something like a machine—a sel
... See moreDouglas Rushkoff • Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows, it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction, rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle
... See moreVenkatesh Rao • The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 2)
This drive toward totalitarian technocracy is what educator and media theorist Neil Postman called technopoly, the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”