Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Primer

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Primer (1995). This seminal work of postcyberpunk and of steampunk is also a seminal work of gamification SF. All the ingredients of a utopian vision of a comprehensively gamified society are present in the story, but connected and motivated in messy, subtle and unexpected ways.

For instance, we've got these "ractors" (actors in interactive media entertainment), who receive work via a kind of ThespRabbit. An individual employment may go on for years, or be as brief as a few seconds. Crucially, the human inputs are mapped onto avatars: if you were to take over from Jennifer Lawrence for a bit in the portrayal of Katniss Everdeen, the media system would autocorrect your voice and perhaps your walrus mustache. (Apologies to the community who are Jennifer Lawrence, who must feel confused and left out by this example). Why is this so important? The general point is that what workers feel that they are doing, and what they are objectively doing in terms of the production chain, can be interfered with at an intimate grain. The necessary unity of any task can be interrogated: is there another way to tease this task apart, to give a bit more of it (or perhaps, a bit less of it) to the machines?

There's plenty more in the book related to gamification: Nell's Night Friends -- Dinosaur, Duck, Peter and Purple -- have an aura of a small primitive social media site; the ecstatic Drummers are a kind of grotesque example of "flow," of loss of ego through immersion in action; there's that stuff about the street vs. the telephone switchboard.

But. The altar piece is clearly the Primer itself -- a majestic technological tome, with shades of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and a splendid illustration of Arthur C. Clarke's celebrated maxim that "Any sufficiently magical magic is indistinguishable from magic" -- which somehow floats into the hands of a poor and vulnerable four-year-old girl called Nell. The Primer mediates Nell's world for her, spinning her an epic interactive fairytale (starring "Princess Nell") which allegorises her various violent, abusive and increasingly philosophical predicaments, whilst teaching her all she needs to survive and existentially flourish (martial arts, decorum, hacking, obviously). As The Diamond Age progresses, Nell's book begins to feel more and more like a computer game (clearly influenced by 90s point-and-click adventure games). The convention of using a different font to represent the Primer's text becomes more scarce.

Like most good allegories, the Primer's allegory is a slippery one. The Primer's Queen of the Dark Castle is clearly a correlate of Nell's mother, but the Queen does plenty of significant stuff which doesn't seem inspired by Nell's mother, and vice-versa. Nell's brother Harv appears in the Primer as just Harv, but also seems to have a connection with Peter Rabbit (they disappear around the same time, for instance). There's not a one-to-one cipher: correlations come and go. You get the impression that the allegory might work a bit like the racting: 'let's see what's available at the moment.'

Likewise, Nell doesn't simply unlock achievements in her Primer or advance to the next story by demonstrating she has mastered some real world skill. Nor does the Primer elide its fairytale with her surroundings so that winning the game is indistinguishable from winning life. The Primer informs and incentivises, it provokes action, but it also comforts, cares, offers the solaces of shrouds and distortions, and immersive escapism. The relations between game and extra-game world can be just as slippery and mercurial as the relations of allegory.

(JLW)

Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (1999). A sprawling hysterical-realist adventure techno-thriller that made me a bit sad, in a what-a-waste-of-enormous-talent kind of way. Although it did make me laugh a bit too. Perhaps the kindest thing you can say about its politics is that they dated rapidly? Bro? Anyway, the novel partly concerns the establishment of a kind of cryptocurrency, although it never gets the careful infodump treatment Stephenson gives to some other subjects. In general the presiding political economy of the book has a belligerent libertarian goldbug feel to it, though Stephenson wisely never quite commits himself. Trust goes a long way in establishing a currency, but eventually you're going to need something with intrinsic value, like shiny heavy yellow metal. (I'm exaggerating). Some of the bits that I enjoyed, from an economics perspective, include the long description of how it is possible to have some gold and yet not really have it (it's in the jungle, through miles and miles of geopolitics), and the final lines of the novel, in which a enormous cache of gold is literally dynamited into liquidity.

(JLW)

Stephenson, Neal. 'The Great Simolean Caper'

Neal Stephenson, 'The Great Simolean Caper' (1995).

Bitcoin appeared around 2008, although there had been plenty of 'centralised' e-money systems (such as DigiCash and e-Gold) since the early 1990s. This short story published in TIME in 1995 concerns a digital cash start-up (Simoleon Corp.) that attracts some unwanted attention from higher up:

“Why should the government care?”
“They care big-time,” Codex says. “They’re going to destroy Simoleons. And they’re going to step all over your family in the process.”
“Why?”
“Because if they don’t destroy E-money,” Codex says, “E-money will destroy them.”

With a little help from magic cyberlibertarians, they outfox the Big Bad Government's dirty tricks, and transition to a safer form of digital currency ... CryptoCredits.

“The First Distributed Republic,” says the big panarchist. “It’s a virtual nationstate. I’m the Minister of Data Security. Our official currency is CryptoCredits.”
[...]
 “Wait a sec,” he says, and puts his hands to his temples. “You can rig it so that people who use E-money don’t have to pay taxes to any government? Ever?”

CryptoCredits is encrypted, but it's not blockchain. Nevertheless, there is a sense here of a distributed ledger. With their suspicion of centralising authority, how else would the FDR deal with the banking of CryptoCredits? It's very tricky to interpret this story except through the lens of the subsequent appearance of blockchain and BitCoin.

Questions:

• Consider different ways in which a currency can be both centralised and decentralised. Critically evaluate the claim of most Bitcoin proponents that the currency is decentralised.
• Is Bitcoin really 'trust-free'?
• Can we imagine non-blockchain implementations of CryptoCredits in the First Distributed Republic? 

Further reading:

• David Chaum, 'Blind signatures for untraceable payments' (1982)
• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)
• Satoshi Nakamoto, 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' (2008)
• David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (2016)
• Brett Scott, 'How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance?' (2016)
• Nigel Dodd, 'The Social Life of Bitcoin' (2017)
• Satoshi is Female