In 'The Diamond Age', what is made clear is that the advance of technology, even to ends that appear miraculous, matters of culture still matter. Everything remains earthbound and there is not a post-scarcity scenario in action. Contrast this with Banks' Culture. At the human scale, entire solar systems may be post-scarcity and the only limits lie in the realm of the laws of physics at the galactic level - computability speed, mass and energy conversion are supreme but the human body does not bear any of those burdens, thus human culture needs few restraints on behavior. The conflict between civilizations at the planetary scale in Banks' Culture may be dramatic, but only for their impact on the galaxy. With Stephenson, they are everything and so culturally specific transcendent values take center stage.
In a key passage, the great Confucian mandarin in the book sums up China's encounter with the West. It resonates with certain things Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in one of his books about the nature of Chinese self-dependency in the culture of rice. The Mandarin says that technology is *yong*, an outer manifestation of an inner force, the *ti*. Chinese adaptation of Western technology never worked - it sowed chaos - because Western technology was an expression of a cultural property, cleverness for its own sake, that was alien to the Chinese way. The value of planting rice and working hard and reaping those rewards were so deeply ingrained, that when the technology arrived (in Stephenson's future) of what essentially was a Star Trek replicator for rice, it destroyed the Chinese balance. What they call Filial Piety became threatened, thus the need for the Confucian to seek The Seed.
The Western technology established that which we today essentially call The Grid. It is an infrastructure of service, hierarchically organized and controlled that distributes the stuff of life. You could get most everything, but so long as you were hooked up to The Feed, the authorities knew what you were getting. In this world, only the elite few had access to the resources of The Feed without oversight. The implication in such a hierarchy is as we expect, an aristocracy of merit. Nobody with enough money and brains to build something like an aircraft carrier would do so to the detriment of society - it wouldn't be in their interest to subvert.
The unfulfilled possibility of The Seed in such a world is that any individual would be able, independently of The Feed, be able to grow whatever it was they wanted instead of depending upon the metered and monitored energy from society's grid. This would be a technology matching the Chinese *ti* of growing rice. Any peasant could build nukes if they wanted. Such an idea threatens the Western Feed idea because there is not perceived a benefit of doing things the old-fashioned way if there is a more clever and easy way of accomplishing the same end. With value attached to the hierarchy of society, the Western individual is radically 'free' at the lower socioeconomic level with relatively little diminishment. That freedom comes at a price, he needn't conform his behavior to those of the elite, and therefore must balance his freedom against the conforming aspects of power. Even individuals who bring their own regimes into power ebb and flow taking the entire society in different directions. The Chinese in contrast must bear his full dignity independent of his standing in society. He grows his rice, he is a full man. Society doesn't change from the bottom up, because there is relatively little power inheritable to the common man. A newer way to grow rice is not a potential revolution in China as it would be here. They are not all seeking to be clever, but to measure themselves to the discipline. Don't show off your Kung Fu.
This vein is rich.
As the Subrealist often intones like John the Baptist, American society is threatened by any number of catastrophic scenarios that portend to leave us in that well-understood trope of Zombieland. If the electric grid fails, if the oil stops flowing, if the unemployment rate goes about 20%, Americans will lose what little civility they have and Bedlam erupts. I sense something different within my extended association with a different sort of American, in spirit if not in person, which has its analog in the Chinese *ti*. I've called that aspect of my own character many different things, primarily 'organic', and it remains expressed in the Gadsden Flag on my blog. It is that value I place in a kind of yeoman farmer, hunting lodge by the lake, 'howdy' speaking on the John Muir Trail sensibility. It's what I feel like when I put on my red plaid, my Keens and carry a cigar torch, LED flashlite and CRKT M16-13Z in my cargo shorts. It is also expressed in my philosophical explorations here, as I have never been content to be a mere political consumer but have sought to reconcile public debate with first principles. I want a perspective on the world that survives off the grid, it is part of my true education, not just that which conforms me to What's Happening Now. This is one of the reasons I get so aggravated when I am accused of attempting to fit in with bohunkery when I defend the autonomy of the Tea Party (now the latest craze of the con-Cobbian). You may need to recall that my family holds property in South Dakota, where my mother now lives. That's about the establishment of my blood in American soil, not kissing Palin's ring.
I appreciate the possibilities enabled by Dyson's Utopia, and I would like very much to see some decentralization of power, especially away from the American government, lest it become too much like France - with an implacable Feed of union graft and entitlement. My dreams tend towards the outline of making software millions and taking it to buy land and learning to live off that land without abandoning the sophistication of Western *ti*, the inheritance of my cosmopolitan roots. So my generation and that of my children is aimed at the transition from urban peasantry and the semiotic swamp to the undeniable reality of exurban self-sufficiency, or at least some shabby form of gentry.
Part and parcel of this growth is a continuous sort of hacking, of getting behind the curtains of that which is presented for the empty vessel of the urban peasant. Making my mind immune to the seductions of mass marketing, mass politics, mass spirituality, mass morality and the economic enticements made to the proletariat. This is about determining the costs of independence and weighing the value of being king of a small hill to being a prince at a higher elevation of a mountain on which you have no claim.
I expect history to be my guide with the explicit understanding that by way of merit, I might inherit, and that by way of skill, I might find fellows of like mind. That somewhere in history is a model I may better appreciate. What is clear to me is that agitation by the masses to secure an ever higher quality of Feed is, in the end, voluntary slavery. It is in this way of thinking that I am convinced that there are few differences between a safety net and a fishing net.
And so I have come around to this.
If the politics of the American future are of the same basic principles of the current neo-liberal social democracy, than it will be for the permanent establishment of The Feed. And in that are dangerous aspects of a command economy. The Seed, that which provides for its own organic development, will always constitute a threat and while my bearing finds subversion a threat, perhaps the greater threat to liberty is The Feed. I hope and expect that the true lessons of the American Revolution will suffice to remind us of a better way.
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