hotter than reality by far

[freckles_and_doubt]

Gaah. This post brought to you courtesy of (a) a mad day full of angsting students, so I couldn't post during the day, and (b) a sudden quick run to the supermarket owing to the fact that my keyboard just died in the middle of a sentence. I do love a cordless keyboard and mouse, their spaghetti-wrangling capacities are immense, but Sod's Law says the battery will always die at the exact moment when you've exhausted the stash of AAAs on non-computer (i.e. inessential) frivolities like the bedside clock. Usually in the middle of a particularly good sentence, too. Sigh.

So, yesterday I did no work for several hours on account of how Cory Doctorow just released his new book, free for download under a Creative Commons license, as is his wont. For The Win (available here) is kind of a cross between Little Brother (kids resist fascism!) and Stross's Halting State (shenanigans in online worlds! news at 11!1!!1!). It always faintly surprises me how much Doctorow's books drag me in, as I don't think he's a great stylist and middle-of-the-road writing style usually jolts me slightly but continuously out of the absorption. What he does, though, is to dissect, acutely, intelligently and with a shifting, manic energy, the current zeitgeist, a word the Evil Landlord has recently taught me how to pronounce. Devouring For The Win in three hours flat has caused me to unleash two major sizzling insights, viz:

1. Good lord, economics is the new geekery. SF writers of a certain stamp have always gleefully indulged in technobabble, and they're pretty fearsome if you unleash them on the increasingly technologically-defined systems and processes of modern-day economics. Quite apart from anything else, market operations are at least as arcane as anything a SF writer can come up with in the arena of quantum gadgets, string theory or the singularity. Doctorow does it here, packaged in a YA-friendly format with lots of analogies which means even I got most of it; Stross does it, with rather more first-world political wossname, in the Merchant Princes series. What they both achieve is that particular kind of obsessive, geeky insight which delights in expounding and exploiting a system for its own sake. I'd never really expected to have the economic version infect me, but it really does.
   
2. Economics is arcane, and these days it's deeply abstract and virtual to the point of being magical. If you have to talk about life-affecting realities whose abstracted systems are weirdly dislocated from the real world, the MMORPG environment is a bloody marvellous metaphor through which to do it. The recent stock market disasters have revealed, if nothing else, that the whole house of cards is a conceptual system with a hell of a lot less to it in the way of logic, coherence, rules and self-limitations than your average online fantasy realm. I couldn't help reading the book as a nastily acute and finger-pointing satire on recent economic trends, and as such it was deeply satisfying.

I thus recommend that ye go ye forth and read the damned thing. It's a slightly odd mix of surprisingly gritty and surprisingly utopian, and gives you rather more insight into Chinese and Indian poverty than is entirely consonant with first-world complacence, but it's very much worth a read.

I now return to the loving embrace of The Vampire Diaries. Damon is turning out to be a total shit, but very, very pretty.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Have you considered rechargeable batteries? Better for the environment + you're never without. I have two cordless mice that chew through batteries, so rechargeables have been a godsend. :-)

Hugs, Dayle

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I have a deeply vexed relationship with rechargeable batteries. I have a charger, and its cohort of batteries: they never seem to hold their charge for longer than a day or so, and thus nark me off even more than good old Duracell, which at least I don't have to worry about for months at a time. I do take your environmental point, though. One of these days I'll acquire an actual high-quality charger that actually charges, and all will be gas and gaiters.

[dicedcaret.livejournal.com]

Spot on. I'm currently into the Merchant Princes series, in which the economic geekery has forced me to wikipedia concepts like mercantalism. As OGH would say, 'Phooey!'
The comparison with MMOs is depressingly apt. Economics is coded in highly arcane terms by people who get Nobel prizes for it, but is 'played' by East End wideboys and their criminal mastermind overlords at Goldman Sachs et al. I can't help thinking Damon would make a great financial regulator: pick an upstart, suck him dry and snap his neck like a twig. Not very noble, I know, but then neither is poverty and homelessness.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Hee. Try the Doctorow, then, he avoids the need for recourse to Wikipedia by the sneaky ploy of having half his characters be under-educated Indian teenage girls, which means economists have good reason to explain things to them in words of one syllable. It manages to be extremely accessible and not too "As you know, Bob", which is quite a feat. I feel considerably more economically educated than I did before I read it, even on a three-hour semi-skim read.

I am personally rather weirded by the extent to which Damon is becoming likeable even though he's clearly a narcissistic, homicidal psychopath. Possibly the pretty is growing on me.

[dicedcaret.livejournal.com]

Ian Somerhalder is rather pretty (those eyes!) but I think he also plays Damon very well. Then again he's also got one of the juiciest story arcs to sink his teeth into. Oops! [runs for cover]

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Economics has secretly been geekery since the quant shops started hiring all the physics graduates to make numeric models in ... I dunno, the 1980s or so.

Also, rechargeable batteries are good.

[herne-kzn.livejournal.com]

System hacking mentality, problems with.
Heard about something written by one of the guys who invented CDOs. They optimised the little bit of the system they interacted with to maximise the points they won, forgetting that the system extended to, you know the world.

Then may years later he was driving along a street with lots of houses for sale and stopped to look at one, to have the estate agent tell him about the amazing interest rate he could have for two years
"And after two years?"
"Well then you get a new loan with a similar deal"
Thinks "Oh shit, I'm at the other end of this. This will end well"

[rumint.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the Doctorow link, I thought FTW was pretty good.

Amusingly he occasionally pops up in the geek political meetings and security conferences I attend, speaks well. One of the joys of London are the number of authors about.

Speaking of which, how goes your conference plans to visit these Green & Pleasant shores?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

glad you enjoyed it! I always like to see what Genuine Computer People think of these things, given as how I'm a pale imitation of one.

The plans proceed apace. Apparently I have a new passport. I have funding, and am about to have exact quotes on everything. I have leave. I have a topic. I have a biopic. Writing the actual paper can traditionally wait :>. At the moment the nice travel agency lady is trying to whisk me straight to Glasgow without going through London, which would be a great pity, but I'm going to be rather strapped for time and am bound to cost my Cherished Institution as little in the way of giant airfares as possible.