Breach (Analog, #3)

by Eliot Peper

the threat of a promise became the promise of a threat.

Victory was not a thing to savor, it was just another base camp. You reached the peak you were striving for, and the view from the summit was of the higher mountains to come. Those who bothered with self-congratulation neglected mission-critical preparation for the next ascent or, at best, stranded themselves at a local maximum.

You could follow any hobby down a rabbit hole of obsessive curiosity.

There is no justice, just us.

In a world of constant connection, this infamous club was a shadow node, a void that shaped everything around it.

The arc of history refracted through Analog like sunlight through honey.

Civilizations used to be isolated, parallel experiments. If Rome fell, Beijing might still thrive. The feed wove everything together, and now this is the only civilization we’ve got, which means disaster will be universally disastrous.

The feed had accelerated the global economy, created a single global currency, and opened borders not just for people but for capital.

Understanding how things came to be frees us to imagine new possibilities. That’s part of what our whole effort here is all about. Ultimately, the only power we have is to choose how we see the world.

so reliably prescient by being so ferociously present,

The world was disoriented by accelerating change.

Traditional sources of identity were crumbling. The old rules no longer applied. Everyone was struggling to make meaning out of madness.

“the fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.”

It was possible to be both broken and beautiful at the same time. Restoration was an act of becoming.

Technology is diverting the structure and flow of power. Computers and capital have stitched together a fractured world into a single variegated civilization, even as reactionary forces desperately try to turn back the clock. The companies that built the internet are forging global empires that Alexander the Great would never have been able to imagine. What were once scrappy startups have become geopolitical players on par with nation states.

Technology has endowed us with superpowers, but who gets to decide what to do with them?

Curiosity is my drug of choice.