Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

This and other alternative versions of reality were shouted down by stentorian typists even as they were being embellished on fringe talk radio programs and fervently taken up by upstart networks of true believers.

The only open question was whether they were nihilistic trolls who just liked to see the world burn, or motivated trolls with some vested interest in gulling credulous millions into clicking on this or that link.

But one of the Miasma’s perversities was that it made otherwise sane people like him—people who had better things they could have been doing—devote energy to arguing with completely random fuckwits, many of whom probably didn’t even believe in their own arguments, some of whom weren’t even humans.

at least if you were among the small minority of Miasma users who actually cared about logic and evidence.

He saw that Cancer Land was a whole alternate civilization, as complicated as everything he did for a living.

The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”

In normal circumstances, his edit space and Sophia’s were totally disjoint; they would never encounter each other online, never meet, never see the same news stories.

Anything that originated from the likes of Tom would be fastidiously pruned by the algorithms used by Sophia’s editor before human eyes ever reviewed it, and anything that came from Princeton or Seattle would never reach Tom’s feed until it had been bent around into propaganda whose sole function was to make Tom afraid and angry.

Sometimes there was no gap between joke and real.

they had found themselves in this small and apparently stable town that, while a far cry from Iowa City, was definitely a Blue State pocket.

It was completely surrounded by Ameristan but it was populated by people like Pete who had a college degree, asked questions, and seemed to be plugged into sane and responsible edit streams.

“They can go a surprisingly long time without bumping up against reality,”

“but at the end of the day when a pregnant mother needs a C-section or you can’t get your Wi-Fi to work, or a thousand other examples I could give, why, then you do actually need someone nearby who can help you with that.”

The vacancies between—the interstices between the intersections, as Dr. Johnson would have it—were the domain of the fantasists, subsisting on an intoxicating mélange of homemade pharmaceuticals and hallucinatory memes.

Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy.

“Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There’s no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and ‘vote with bullets.’”

Now, theater, and later movies, eventually get us into the realm of shared hallucinations.

You buy the ticket, you enter the theater, you sit down, the lights dim, everyone in the place shares the same hallucination at the same time, lights come back up, it’s over, you go outside.

It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed,”

“and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/seven in their own personalized hallucination stream.

“What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?”

“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.

Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”

In the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.

The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.