Well, this is quite a cool book I feel. Charle’s Stross’s accelerando website.
It kind of screws with my head as I read it, as I find myself mentally fighting/opposing some of his ideas, but finally I just decided to accept them, at least for the duration of reading the book, and see where they lead.
I tried Charles Stross before, a book called … it starts off with the Festival offering people unlimited goods in exchange for… an idea I think? I was put off quite rapidly by the description of a nerdy engineer in conversation with a high-level political person in a highly-centralized regime, and found the resulting conversation rather unconvincing, a little nerd-centric. I felt that generally an engineer, foreign or not, would not be held in such high regard in a highly-centralized regime, and I live in China, so it’s not like I have no opinions on the subject.
Accelerando avoids I feel what I feel are overly fantastical nerdy wet-dreams, and comes up with a whole plethora of ideas that I feel are pretty cool. I find myself fighting with many of the opensource concepts, despite the string of opensource projects to my own name, none of which have been particularly successful, but for example this one is in active development AILadder Specifically, the concepts to do with music distribution through p2p, I found somewhat dubious.
Nevertheless I’m really enjoying it. It screws with my head, and makes me think.
As I read it, I remember back in 1996 I said that the internet was not that great because it was impossible to find anything: there was no table of contents. I totally did not predict the power of search engines coming along and completely negating the necessity for such a hierarchical structure.
I feel that possibly many of the ideas that Charles Stross presents really could have a lot of strength in them, and that occasionally I see them through a passee mindset, just as I thought at one time that the internet should have a ‘table of contents’.