William Gibson’s The Peripheral time is the best novel of his late period, and in my view, the best novel that he’s ever written. It doesn’t have the shock value of Neuromancer (which blew my mind when I read it at the age of fifteen, in a small provincial town in Ireland). However, it’s a much better novel. The Sprawl books are all opaque and dazzling mirrorshades – the surfaces of high-gloss people reflecting the surfaces of high-gloss objects that reflect the surfaces of high-gloss people. The not-quite-science-fiction novels he was writing for a decade or two take the givens of the Sprawl books as a problem, engaging in a kind of archeology of objects and brand names, and how they reflect both the vast systems around us and our individual desires. I like them (they combine the intelligence of Don DeLillo with much of the warmth of Philip K. Dick), but I like his short book of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor even better (it’s a book full of insights, which, like Borges’ version of Kafka, generates its own predecessors). The Peripheral returns to science fiction – but a science fiction that very clearly reflects present day concerns.
blue bits. red rocks.
The Peripheral
The Ellisons and Bari Weiss are doing to CBS what Trump did to the White House. 60 Minutes is the CBS east wing. They’ll tear it down and try to build a cheap, gaudy and ugly monument to Trumpism. It won’t work.
AI Worm
Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm.
I believe Christians need to avoid irrationality like the plague. Unfortunately, Christians who embrace irrational or bizarre beliefs get most of the attention.
Leo also explicitly insists that the collective demands of the common good are not something to be addressed by redistribution after market forces have played out but must be enshrined in the processes of investment and production themselves. His position here is opposed not only to the new robber barons of the tech sector, but also to their liberal critics who view the developments of the market economy as an inexorable, extra-political force, and aspire only to mitigate its impact through regulation or through redistributive taxes. In Leo’s view, both positions make the same mistake: they treat economic trends as inevitable, assuming that the political and social arrangements that make them possible are brute facts of nature. Leo claims instead that they are political choices that could have been made differently and may be made differently in the future.
During the Nixon era, the Republican Party defined itself as the party of “the rule of law.” During the Reagan era, the Republican Party defined itself as the party of “freedom.” During the Bush era, the Republican Party defined itself as the party of “patriotism.” For decades, the Republican Party had successfully branded itself as the party of “the rule of law,” “freedom,” and “patriotism”—against the Democratic Party, which it accused of standing against all of those things. For decades, those were the Republican Party’s self-definitions, until suddenly, they weren’t.
What would it mean to render to the machine what is the machine’s? To regain a sense of what it is to be a person, coupled with a subversive practice of the same, within a techno-economic system whose default settings incline us to forget this vital fact about ourselves and our neighbours? To reclaim a confidence in what we can do ourselves and for one another in the face of an array of technologies, services, and institutions that market themselves under the implicit sign of our ostensible helplessness and the banner of a debilitating liberation? Let the machine have everything that is stamped with its spirit. Let us keep everything else.
I will not resign from life; I must be dismissed.