“On Friday I attended a lousy meeting in which an ass, Dr Popper from London, talked more mushy rubbish than I’ve heard for a long time! I talked a lot (as usual) & felt no bad effects.”

“Freud hat durch seine phantastischen Pseudoerklärungen (gerade weil sie geistreich sind) einen schlimmen Dienst erwiesen (Jeder Esel hat diese Bilder nun zur Hand, mit ihrer Hilfe Krankheitserscheinungen zu ‘erklären’).”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.”
– XKCD # 915

Daniel Suarez, an American information technology consultant, followed up his first book “Daemon” (selfpublished 2006, published 2009 by Dutton; I wrote about it two weeks ago) with “FreedomTM”.

The first book is brilliant fiction in the sense that Suarez takes several things that exist in our world and puts them together in a way nobody else seems to have thought about before.
The second book “FreedomTM” continues with his ideas, but gains a new quality because Suarez’ ideas for a modern and truely democratic civilization are stated much more explicitly now.

Content
The Daemon, a computer program Matthew Sobol released when he died to take over the corporate world, has infested many companies. Whereas the fight between the Daemon and our world and the way the Daemon functions were portrayed in “Daemon”, now the US secret services decide to abuse the daemon for their own good, try to hack their way into it and manipulate it. One of the protagonists on this side is The Major:

“Bastards like me serve a purpose. People need order. They need to be told what to think, what to do, what to believe, or everything will fall apart. This miracle of modern civilization doesn’t just happen. It requires careful management by professionals willing to do whatever is necessary to keep things running smoothly …”

On the other side, we have farmers, hackers, our old friend Pete Sebeck and many others – members of the so-called “darknet”, a community that is hosted by the daemon. What was written between the lines in the first book is now written very explicitly in statements of characters. Suarez’ critique of the modern, globalised world starts before the book starts, with a quotation from Theodore Roosevelt (1906):

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befout the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statemanship of the day.”

The critique continues.
Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of months ago I finished reading Daemon by Daniel Suarez, an inspiring book. Creative, fantastic to read, inspiring – and very plausible for fiction.

When a designer of computer games dies, he leaves behind a program that unravels the Internet’s interconnected world. It corrupts, kills, and runs independent of human control. It’s up to Detective Peter Sebeck to wrest the world from the malevolent virtual enemy before its ultimate purpose is realized: to destroy civilization…

I bring this up here because I found an interview with Daniel Suarez today which was published in the German newspaper FAZ. He sums up a point I always make about the slow development of the human brain in terms of evolution (there haven’t been major changes in the last 75.000-100.000 years), contrasted to the rapid changes in our environment, especially within the last 1.000 years.
But he uses a computer metaphor to explain this:

“The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to cope with its environment, and we can’t fundamentally change our ‘wiring’ overnight. However, in a rapidly evolving technological world our slow, biological version cycle puts us at a disadvantage against those who’d like to push our mental buttons. We’re a stationary target. In some ways this is akin to being forced to run an unpatched version of Windows even as malware authors are scanning our source code for flaws.”

“Wer seine Bücher verleiht, dem sollte eine Hand abgehackt werden; wer aber geliehene Bücher wieder zurückbringt, dem sollten beide Hände abgehackt werden.”
– Sa`di

“Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen: Redet man zu ihnen, so übersetzen sie es in ihre Sprache, und dann ist es alsobald ganz etwas anderes.”
– J.W. von Goethe

“It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rapages and even assist it to the utmost.”
– Carl G. Jung

“Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream [...] is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”
– Sigismund Freud

(thanks to Patrick)

Signals play a particularly important role within organisms and among individuals of highly cooperative species. Because in both these cases there is little or no conflict of interest, signals should be as cheap as possible while still maintaining reliability. Cheap signaling systems enhance the efficiency of the organism or cooperative system but they are also more easily subverted by exploitative agents (Markl 1985), such as pathogens or politicians.

( Peter Hammerstein et al. (2006). Robustness: A Key to Evolutionary Design. Biological Theory. )

“Living is a sequence of episodes in which organisms attempt to reach goals and avoid losses.”
– Randolph Nesse