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I feel instantly embarrassed but I also think: Fuck you. It’s weird having your surface thoughts broadcast like this. Weird and horrible, but also a little bit liberating. If someone is rude enough to intrude on the ticking of your brain, to peel back your polite silences and your social graces and poke the fleshy grey stuff in search of secrets, they can just deal with what they find there.
The System is quite genuinely interested in everyone.
“The world is not about to end.” “Honestly, who can really say?”
with insane money comes insanity.
Finance by itself is ruthless, and that ruthlessness is its salvation. The real disasters are only possible when you bring politics into it, because politics is about pretending to care.
Pithy, but not actually true; the government-made loans actually defaulted at a lower rate than private sector
The merely rich talk about their other homes, their other houses. The gods do not. If they need somewhere, they acquire it, or someone else provides it. They do not keep track of nations or properties, because they are at home everywhere.
a man who climbs in and out of muddy holes to fix things his supervisors imagine are beyond his proper understanding, but which, on a given level, he knows far more intimately and usefully than they do.
The outcome was never in doubt, but it was never in doubt because the men treated it as if it was.
Am I a fraud, then, or a scholar? I am both, of course, as we all are. Half of what I know I do not believe. Half of what I believe I cannot prove.
The question, Annie said, wasn’t whether we could have a society like the one she wanted me to imagine, it was whether we would.
There was even a brief spot at the end of the six o’clock news, the bit where they try to cheer you up about the end of the world by showing you a swimming bunny.
They inverted the rhetoric of tolerance, and proclaimed themselves the oppressed, and not the oppressor. They made the convention that one should not use racial slurs sound like the beginning of Auschwitz.
if one seeks with sufficient ingenuity in any sample, one can create a cryptographic rationale for any output text—therefore in any investigation the key problem is not how to begin, but where to stop.
Not that they acknowledge privacy as a concept any more. The European Union had it as a baseline right, once upon a time, but the American perception was that free speech was infinitely more important in every case. All this technology flowed in its earliest days from America. With it came the political and social assumptions of a small number of engineers and entrepreneurs, predominantly male and white. This unexamined muddle of privileged anarchism and academic idealism. Security of the person was one thing—and safeguarded by the right to bear arms and the prohibition on unreasonable
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Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience, hoping to hit enough of the target that we all infer a great bulk of information conveyed as implication and metaphor in an approximately similar way.
The Turnpike Trust is one of those deceptively boring backwaters of government where power begins as the consequence of a willingness to take on jobs that are necessary but unglamorous, and thereafter accumulates because they’re already doing so much and doing it tolerably well.
It’s the future. Deal with it. Actually, as far as I’m concerned, it’s just the present, and everything I am talking about here is normal, but to your tiny, bounded and distressingly localised self my society no doubt seems like a fantasy. The seeds of it are all around you, but you’re desperate to avoid noticing them.
Corruption is power that overflows its bounds. By definition, it rarely stays contained in a single location.
The simulation is crazy real. It’s actually more real than real things are when you experience them because it’s all there, waiting for you to see it.
—Shark attack, the Witness says, forty-two miles inland. And then, almost apologetically, Anomalous.
This house is a sophisticated lie. It appears to tell you everything, to point to a woman. It does not. It is a construct. I touch the surfaces, the wood, the old, familiar sofas. I open the drawers and inhale: archetypal dry oak and old polish. The leather has cracked. There’s a hint of saddle soap, and a square which has been replaced more recently. It positively invites one to peel it up and find the secret paper hidden underneath. I think…not. This house is a rabbit hole, a snare for the unwary. It exists to consume resources and focus while something more important happens elsewhere.
The System is good only if it is inviolate and impartial. If not, it is a monster.
How many ghosts do you need, in a distributed quorate democracy, to fix a vote? To change tracks and prune possibilities? How many ghost stories would you have to tell to influence the people who actually do exist to accept something they would otherwise refuse?
And why does Neith’s instinct rebel? It is so obviously true, so reassuringly mundane: a madwoman kills in the pursuit of her obsession. It is an ordinary story, tragic and a little ironic, but it obeys Occam’s razor, requires no multiplication of entities. Perhaps that’s the problem: it is so neat, so narratively elegant, and Hunter and Smith and all their cohorts are masters of persuasive lies.
“The devil in the detail is that Smart Crowds are fragile. With a very little adulteration, they cease to be smart at all, and become remarkably stupid, or indeed self-harming. They are susceptible to stampeding by demagogues, poisoning by bad information. They can be made afraid, and when they do they become mobs. They can be divided by scapegoating and prejudice, bought off in fragments, even just romanced by pretty faces. And of course there’s choice architecture: the very thing we use at Tidal Flow to smooth your journey through London or to design serendipitous social spaces in the new
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She feels a lurch of horror: to come this far into the maze and find not a Minotaur but a collection of cattle mooing and dismayed. There are no grown-ups behind the secret door.
Yes, the ends and the means. I’m familiar with that one, too. But the means is all we ever get. We never quite reach the end.
It is no longer enough to dismiss ideas on the basis that they sound like science fiction—almost everything about our world does.
