From: Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 09:50:50 +0800
To: perry@piermont.com
Subject: Re: No matter where you go, there they are.
In-Reply-To: <199604131757.NAA28090@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <199604140011.TAA13006@homeport.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


Perry E. Metzger wrote:

| Adam Shostack writes:
| > 	Snow Crash is a book about a future in which governments are
| > ineffective.  Companies run things, and have complete local control.
| > The world has gone to hell, and as a result, life is nasty, poor,
| > brutish and short.  Many people do not look forward to this world.
| 
| Snow Crash is hardly scary. You have characterized it as a
| story where life is nasty brutish and short but that isn't the same
| book that I read. at all.

	The CIA privatized & selling data to all comers?  An
unstoppable wave of illegal immigration coming to California?  Sounds
pretty scary to many people.  There are other readings, but that one
is there.

| In any case, however, the future is pretty much not stoppable. There
| was a time where the nobility tried to stop the crossbow, and then
| firearms; there have been those who tried to stop the translation of
| the bible, and to stop factories, and to stop genetic
| engineering. Ideas aren't amenable to restraint. Nothing is as
| inevitable as an idea who's time has come. The key to a liveable
| future is learning how to adapt to the changes, not how to try to
| prevent them.

	I said as much.  I'm not purporting this as my opinions, just
my understanding of Dr. Denning.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume