Today the internet and cyber and potentially the metaverse will flatten access and provide upward mobility in a techno-flattened world. But the Young Woman’s Primer is a positive provider of info-power. IA breaks down the barriers of access to knowledge and power. And, the Primer breaks this divide, putting AI power in the hands of the middle and lower class. The upper class, the Equity Lords – can read. Being illiterate hurts the lower-class characters of The Diamond Age by removing their opportunities and alienating them from society. In “Notes Towards A Postcyberpunk Manifesto,” (Person) Lawrence Person writes that the class structure is defined clearly by one thing – literacy, the lower class are only able to understand mediaglyphics, animated picture writing, memes by today’s definitions. But when, after he loses control of it and it ends up in the hands of a poor young woman, does its power and knowledge break down barriers and create an information revolution.
When Percival creates the Young Woman’s Primer, he hardly thinks of it as a revolutionary device. The arrival of cryptocurrency (though not called that), the electronic transfer of money and information, has erased nations and borders. It is in Diamond Age that the impact of technology on society seems – today – remarkably prescient.
To be fair, inventions like lighter-than-air buildings and bacteria-size cameras seem plausible even back in 1995. Feynman, Drexler, Merkle are among the scientists whose portraits are displayed. In the world of nanotechnology, characters on the walls of Merkle-Hall – make clear that this story is based on real-world science. The technology was heading toward powerful, general intelligence AI and microtechnology. Past the first and second ‘winter’ of AI, but before Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov and gave popular culture a look at what the future might hold.īut unlike the fanciful adventures of Star Wars, the world that Stephenson brought to life wasn’t hard to imagine. The book was published in 1995, twenty-seven years ago. But rather than craft a story in the spirit of a swashbuckling adventure of Luke Skywalker, author Neal Stephenson paints a neo-victorian world and tells the story of a young girl, Nell as the story’s protagonist. Technology so tiny it is, by almost any reasonable measure, invisible. In the future, we will live in a nano-world.
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