Termination Shock

by Neal Stephenson

There was an odd bending around in back at the extreme limits of culture and politics where back-to-the-land hippies and radical survivalists ended up being the same people, since they spent 99 percent of their lives doing the same stuff.

perhaps she was cutting Rufus too much slack here, dreaming up post hoc rationalizations for the actions of a deranged man. Anyway, he was driving the truck and their fate was in his hands.

Here, insects seemed a good default explanation for just about anything that might require explaining.

“You wear one of these, you can walk just about anywhere down where you’re going and people will think you’re doing something official.” “And I have the vehicle to go with it,” Willem said. “A generic white pickup.” “Oh, you can get in anywhere with that and a reflective vest!”

Debris of beer cans, Subway wrappers, and chip bags attested to the fact that Jules, by dint of youth, good genes, and an active lifestyle, could consume as many calories as he pleased with zero impact on the eminently fuckable physique on display through his tie-dyed tank top and his voluminous cargo shorts.

commonly translated into English as “temple.” But this conjured up all manner of wrong ideas in the minds of Westerners, who tended to imagine something more in the Hindu or Roman Catholic vein.

“So just when the Greens might be fixing to dance on the grave of the automobile, software crams twice as many of the little buggers onto the roads, makes the commute safer and easier for everyone. Guess what? People buy more cars! Burn more fuel.

“He did not understand—none of these people did—that this is stochastic land on the edge of a stochastic reservoir. They didn’t understand it because those are statistical concepts. People can’t think statistically. People are hardwired to think in terms of narratives. This guy’s narrative was: the little missus and I want to settle down and raise a family, here’s a house we like in a neighborhood full of folks like us, they can’t all be wrong, let’s take out a thirty-year mortgage on this thing. And now he’s probably taking out a reverse mortgage or a HELOC to pay the house-jackers so he can have a prayer of being able to sell the thing. Multiply his story times all the houses you can see from here and you get an idea of what kind of money we’re talking. Now, we gotta recharge.”

“It spreads where it succeeds. Or leastways where people make believe it’s succeeding. Young fellas, they’re predisposed to love that shit. They want to have guns and violence and adventure.

“The guys and gals in the black hats are also here to keep you safe, in another sense which is perhaps hinted at by the color of their headgear. They are bad dudes and dudettes. They will not be bad to y’all, of course, but they will be bad in your service and for your protection should any issue with trespassers of the two-legged sort arise. They are, as a rule, less approachable than the white hats or the brown hats. But you may certainly approach them if you need anything. Just don’t sneak up on them. They hate that.”

“That’s why we have caretakers. Ranch hands. Oh, sure there’s always chores to keep that kinda person busy. But the real reason to hire people like that is so we can sleep better at night. Because then we know that there is intelligence—active intelligent minds—right there on the ground.”

“Of course you would. Maybe part of what you can do is be a red team for us—heh! Think of how an adversary would use drones, anticipate their moves, develop countermeasures. Shit, I don’t know!” T.R. checked his watch. The hard stop was drawing nigh. “That’s kinda the point of hiring intelligent people, Red. You don’t exactly know what they’re gonna think of.”

tree-huggerish feeds that were all about ERDD as a kind of synthetic umbrella deity for everything related to environmentalism. These Greens were making no bones about it. They weren’t claiming to have rediscovered a lost religion. They were cheerfully admitting right up front that they’d just made it all up, like dungeon masters prepping for an all-night Dungeons and Dragons session.

I’ve lost track of all the things I can get in trouble for even talking about.”

Black Hat Practical Operations and who by and large were some combination of weird, dangerous, and expensive.

“And it’s just bad luck,” Willem said. “That, sir, is my stock in trade. I am the bad luck man. Gandalf Stormcrow.”

he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That (invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle) such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes.

“You throw darts at random into a spinning globe, the odds of hitting Connecticut are small. The odds of hitting what you call a weird, difficult part of the world are high.”

the problem with Ph.D.-havers is overthinking. Y’all live in this alternate universe where everything has to be made perfect sense of before y’all can do anything.

the United States was a different story. It was, as all the world knew, a completely insane and out-of-hand country, unable to control itself.

“That’s what you do, ain’t it?” T.R. said. “What? Talk to people and make them feel seen and appreciated? That’s part of it.” He sat down and reached for his napkin. “I can also be a cold-blooded son of a bitch.” “And under what circumstances, pray tell, would you allow that side of your personality to come out?”

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king.

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.

Piet was a rucker, meaning a practitioner of a sport that consisted of putting on a backpack loaded with weights and then covering ground on foot in open country. When he’d first explained this shortly after his arrival in West Texas, Rufus had suspected the Dutchman was pulling his leg. It sounded to him like army boot camp stuff. As if peeling potatoes or scrubbing toilets had been made into an extreme sport. Why would a forty-year-old man like Piet do this voluntarily? Why would he consider it fun? But he had to admit it went well with Piet’s personality type.

it had completely taken over America a long time ago. Old-school Christian values and straight-out racism had held it at bay through the world wars and the fifties, but then the barriers had fallen one by one and before you knew it there was a white guy in red-white-and-blue war paint sacking the U.S. Capitol in what the media described as some kind of Viking getup but Rufus knew perfectly well was a Plains Indian–style bison headdress. And just like Comanches with their raids, those people didn’t stick around and try to plant their yellow rattlesnake flags on the Capitol dome. They just wandered off, having counted coup on democracy and taken a few cop scalps, and melted back into their nomadic trailer park encampments.

the timeless doom of fierce independent-minded tribespeople. The world just didn’t fucking like them. And if you were too disorderly for too long, and it started to cause problems for people, then order was going to be imposed.

Laks had an insight about how over-reliance on technology could lull you into a dangerous complacency.