from
Some Remarks
by
Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson

These pages: from Some Remarks:
Arsebestos
Metaphysics in the Royal Society 1715–2010
Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out
Gresham College Lecture
In the Kingdom of Mao Bell
Mother Earth, Mother Board
The Salon Interview
Blind Secularism
Time Magazine Article About Anathem
Locked In
Innovation Starvation

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Arsebestos

Copyright © 2012 by Neal Stephenson

I switched to a treadmill desk because I hate sitting down and because I suspected it would help with my neck and shoulder troubles. Beyond that there was no particular rationale. But scientific research, released during the last couple of years, now reveals that sitting all day isn’t just a little bit unhealthy; it’s seriously and actively bad for you to an extent that goes beyond merely vindicating my childhood intuitions and is actually just a bit shocking. Or at least I’d be shocked if I were the legal department of a large corporation employing many people obliged to spend most of each day on their bottoms. Ergonomic swivel chairs, it turns out, are the next asbestos.

[...] It’s not the usual suggestion that desk-bound office workers might want to spend a few minutes out of every hour on leisurely stretching exercises. What we have here is hard scientific data telling us that if you sit for any significant amount of time per day, it will kill you.

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Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out

Copyright © 2006 by Neal Stephenson

The first “Star Wars” movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs—the purest kind of vegging-out material—to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle.

All such content—as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes—was banished in the first of the prequels (“Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” 1999). In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don’t even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture.

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

If the “Star Wars” movies are remembered a century from now, it’ll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.

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Gresham College Lecture

Copyright © 2008 by Neal Stephenson

Part 4: Genre Redux

I don’t imagine that there is anything like out-and-out censorship, but I do suspect that people who write about relationships, who write autobiographical, introspective fiction, from a subjective point of view, are going to have an easier time of it, in this environment, than those who write SF. On the science fiction side of SF, such writers are working with abstract ideas from science. And scientists, who believe, and who can prove, that they are right, are notoriously at odds with post-structuralists, who are always looking for ways to bring science into the realm of criticizibility. On the fantasy side, writers are creating entire worlds inside of their brains and populating them with species and civilizations and histories: an undertaking that seems fantastically arrogant from a post-structuralist standpoint.

The characteristics I spoke of earlier, that lead SF fans to want to see intelligence at work in the faces of movie characters, when rolled over into literature, mean that they want ideas.

Post-structuralist critics, assuming they have the courage of their convictions, would say to the young Heinlein: I see that you are intelligent, that you know a lot, that you’ve worked hard and put a lot of ingenuity into this book, but the whole thing is pre-theoretical and therefore naive and as such, simply of lesser intellectual stature than something that was written taking into account the intellectual trends of the last half-century.

And this is the same attitude—for completely different reasons—that the occupants of those lecture halls and editorships and endowed chairs fifty or a hundred years ago would have taken toward the pulp genre fiction of their day: namely, that it was intellectually inferior to literary fiction. The author of a fantasy or a science fiction novel may be an Oxford linguist like J.R.R. Tolkien or a Ph.D. astrophysicist like Gregory Benford, but by taking their own ideas seriously enough to write fantasy or science fiction about them, they reduce themselves, in the eyes of critics, to pre-theoretical knuckle-draggers. A curious inversion has taken place in which the very intellectual credentials that, back in the heyday of the Standard Model, might have given such authors the credibility needed to escape from the stigma of genre-hood, today consign them irrevocably to the same.

Topic:

Critics

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In the Kingdom of Mao Bell
or, Destroy the Users on the Waiting List

(selected excerpts)

Copyright © 1994 by Neal Stephenson

The first thing that happened during Jaruzelski’s military coup in Poland was that the narcs invaded the telephone exchanges and severed the trunk lines with axes, ensuring that they would take months to repair. This and similar stories have gotten us into the habit of thinking that modern information technology is to totalitarianism what crosses are to vampires. [...] After all, how could any country whose power structure was based on controlling the flow of information survive in an era of direct-dial phones and ubiquitous fax machines?

Now (or so the argument goes), any nation that wants a modern economy has to have information technology—so economoic modernization will inevitably lead to political reforem, right?

I went to China expecting to see that process in action. I looked everywhere for hardy electronic frontierfolk, using their modems and fax machines to push the Communists back into their holes, and I asked dang near everyone I met about how communications technology was changing Chinese culture.

None of them knew what the hell I was talking about.

Topics:

Technology

Totalitarianism

Corruption in China is no secret, but the way it’s covered in Western media suggests that it’s just an epiphenomenon attached to the government. In fact, corruption is the government. It’s like jungle vines that have twined around a tree and strangled it—now the tree has rotted out and only the vines remain. Much of this stems from the way China is modernizing its economy.

If you thought zaibatsus were creepy, if Singapore’s brand of state-backed capitalism gives you the willies, wait until you see the Sino-foreign joint venture. The Russians, in their efforts to turn capitalist, have at least tried to break up some of the big state monopolies and privatize their enterprises—but since China is still Communist, there’s no reason for any of that nonsense. Instead, foreign companies form joint ventures with enterprises that are still part of the government—and, of course, everything is part of the government.

Topic:

Government

It often seems that, from the point of view of many entrepreneurial souls in East Asia, the West’s tight-assed legal system and penchant for ethical dithering have left many inviting niches to fill. Perhaps this explains their compulsion to enter such perfectly sensible fields as driftnet fishing, making medicines from body parts of nearly extinct species, creative toxic waste disposal, and, above all, the wholesale, organized theft of intellectual property. It’s not just software, either—Indonesia has bootleg publishers who crank out counterfeit bestsellers, and even Hong Kong’s Saturday morning TV clown wears a purloined Ronald McDonald outfit.

This has to do with the collective Chinese approach to technology. The Chinese were born to hack. A billion of them jammed together have created the world’s most efficient system for honing and assimilating new tech [...]

Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia.

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The Salon Interview

Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson

The fundamentalist churches nowadays do a much better job of promulgating their views and are much more vocal and outspoken, and if you’re a secular person who doesn’t have much interaction with organized religion, then the only time you ever see a Christian, it’s someone saying that evolution is a lie and the world is only 6,000 years old. It’s very easy to miss the fact that the Catholic Church and all the mainline Protestant denominations long ago accepted evolution and have no problem with it at all. [...] That accounts for a certain amount of the militancy of secular types in public discourse. They just can’t believe people believe this stuff.

Topic:

Religion

People get kidney stones still, but they don’t seem to get bladder stones anymore. I asked a couple of people why, and you get a vague answer like “changes in diet” or what have you. I think they rarely drank water. They were just drinking alcoholic beverages all the time. Nobody in the world drank water, except maybe Indians and people who lived in really pristine places. That’s kind of my pet theory: Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it’s tea. In Africa it’s milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.

Topic:

Drink

You can write a minimalist short story that’s set in a trailer park or a Connecticut suburb that might be considered a literary masterpiece or well-regarded by literary types, but science fiction people wouldn’t find it very interesting unless it had somewhere in it a cool idea that would make them say, “That’s interesting. I never thought of that before.” If it’s got that, then science fiction people will embrace it and bring it into the big-tent view of science fiction. That’s really the role that science fiction has come to play in literature right now. In arty lit, it’s become uncool to try to come to grips with ideas per se.

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Blind Secularism

Copyright © 1993 by Neal Stephenson

Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield that they have passed through the apocalypse while the rest of us are watching it on TV.

The smorgasbord of new cultures is probably a good thing, and for every person it makes crazy, there are probably a hundred it keeps sane. But new cultures lead to new forms of culture shock, and new ways for us to misunderstand each other.

Topic:

Culture

For many, the heavy eschatological issues that lie just below the surface of religion are simply too icky and troublesome to think about. But in a society where multiculturalism has become a new creed, it would not hurt for some of us to spend some time trying to see things from the standpoint of a sincerely religious person, just as we would for a differently abled sexual minority.

[...] One does not have to believe David Koresh was the Messiah to understand that he wasn’t kidding. Next time the organs of secular society find themselves pointing their cameras and gun barrels into a compound full of Scripture-toting survivalists, a perusal of the lives of saints or the story of Masada might be illuminating.

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Time Magazine Article About Anathem

Copyright © 2012 by Neal Stephenson

A few years ago I began thinking that the bookish people of the world were becoming a little bit like medieval monks, living austere but intellectually complex lives in voluntary seclusion from a gaudy and action-packed secular world. I’ve written a novel, Anathem, based on that premise.

It’s paradoxical, I suppose, to write a long book about how no one reads long books any more: an ambiguity I’ll have a hard time explaining on talk shows.

If bookishness were just a niche pastime, like stamp collecting or waveboarding, none of this would really matter. But it’s more than that. It is the collective memory and the accumulated wisdom of our species.

The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them. When all things bookish are edited out of public discourse, strange things happen, or seem to. When our societal attention span becomes shorter than the lifetime of a steel bridge over a river, what appears to be a solid strip of highway can suddenly fall out from under us. Like a portent from the medieval world.

Topic:

Books (general)

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Innovation Starvation

Copyright © 2011 by Neal Stephenson

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems, climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, occasionally eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains, tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

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