On Neal Stephenson's Fall

Driven by the inscrutable algorithmically generated memes that dominated their edit streams, locals would from time to time gather on the opposite bank to empty mag after mag of 5.56mm rounds into the underpinnings of the local infrastructure. As Pete put it, " their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn't really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There's no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and 'vote with bullets'. "

this seems obvious given its the same author but ... this book is definitely a spiritual successor to diamond age. idk what order all the books came out in, but one of the overarching themes has been memetics as it relates to anthropology... if that doesn't sound like I'm intentionally using fancy words...
this was a theme in diamond age and in snow crash , in anathem it took a sort of more apocalyptic kind of aspect ... in snow crash you had the " burbclaves " and in anathem there was the stark difference "Intramuros" , with these sort of convents that only opened there doors once every ten years, others once every 100, and thousand year convents ... isolated from society. In Diamond age there was the nanotech cult and the massive difference between rich an poor. In Fall there's a continuance of these theme but integrated with the idea of " fake news " in which america is made up of cities and rural areas referred to as " ameristan " , where people have extremely radicalized beliefs based on the massive amount of misinformation heaped upon them daily, combined with their lack of education and lack of finances to afford an " editor " to filter the misinformation for them ... in the worst cases these people are essentially barbarians. the point is , he's tying together Diamond Age , Snow Crash ( how odd, it seems so important now, but its always been the odd one out of all his books... now I can see how it lead to diamond age, if that didn't come first, an anathem, and now this. ) and attaching them in a way that seems very natural to the concept of the " post truth era " of Trump .


Enoch root : " I would say the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible - states of affairs removed from them in space and time - ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high
level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to so something interesting with your life . Before it - before that three hundred year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts- we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A /lot/ better. Now were back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe. "
" but in order for the rich to get what they want, they also have to have a functioning tech economy "