Double-Joint

I'm a sucker for cyberpunk, plain and simple. I'm definitely no expert on the genre, but I've had enough Neal Stephenson and William Gibson mixed into my blood recently to know that I have a thirst for average writing slathered in technical jargon and futurism.

Accelerando is the latest book I've read on the topic of futuristic madness, and madness it indeed was. I don't intend to do any official review type business here, but I just want to share some of my thoughts on the central issues put forth in the book. If you plan to read it, I wouldn't recommend reading on, but if you're just interested in the ideas, feel free. Note that the author, Charles Stross, has been kind enough to make the entire book free to the public and available on his site. Of course, if you can't stand reading on a screen, that's too bad, but it's one of the coolest gestures I've seen an author make.

As the name suggests, the meat of this story centers around the so-called singularity, the explosive increase in growth of computing power after a certain point in technological advancement. Stross's treatment of this concept is interesting, as the characters discuss when the singularity actually 'happened,' one character arguing that the singularity actually occurred with the first exchange of data packets via a computer network. The singularity is a term that is in vogue with many of the futurist crowd, and I've actually gotten rather sick of all the buzz going on about it. It all just seems akin to a religious claim about some impending apocalypse, about which nobody actually has any real information.

This book, however, paints a rather believable picture of a rapidly developing earth faced with real dilemmas. The root of all of this comes from the growing interconnection of the human mind with external computer enhancements. Starting from a basic cyberbrain conception similar to that of Ghost in the Shell where many people have continual mental connection to an internet equivalent, Stross explores the consequences of externalized memory, thought and consciousness.

For instance, once humans are able to completely map and upload their entire brains and run them on computers, of course you can make and destroy copies. As a result of this, people start killing themselves to dodge bankruptcy and debt, because they know that they can just be started up once again. This requires a whole new legal conception of what an individual is. Is a copy that's been running in a completely different environment and evolved differently from the original still the same person? How many people can that count as? Is one responsible for the crimes of the others? The entire multiplicity of consciousness issue is really quite compelling for me, and I can't help but think that perhaps we might actually have to deal with that problem ourselves.

On a related note, the basic idea of externalizing certain mental processes and memories has always been interesting to me. To get to the point where one's consciousness is actually affected when you no longer have access to those resources may still be a ways off, but the basic idea of storing and accessing information outside of our brains is a fundamentally huge concept, in my mind. The volume of data that I've generated and have left sitting on hard disks may not exceed a couple dozen megabytes at this point, but it still is intriguing to consider how much of what a person is like you can extract from just the things they leave behind. It really goes all the way back to writing, and it just makes me realize what a huge advancement that was.

Up till here I suppose there haven't been very specific spoilers, but this next bit is definitely a no-go if you want to read the book. You've been warned.

In the final portion of the book, humanity has grown aware of the presence of intergalactic super-intelligences in the next supercluster over. What is interesting about this, is that what they observe these super-intelligences doing appears to be massive physics experiments. Experiments with the intention of crashing the server running the universe.

There are innumerable different takes on this theme of 'is reality reality,' and I'm sure many people could say that Accelerando's version is not unique, but I found it amusing to imagine how intelligence could get to the point of making direct attempts at breaking the universe. With all of the uploaded minds there is all sorts of talk of manipulating one's own simulated world, and to think of the real world as being simply a simulation for which we don't have modification privileges. Again, could be said this is all old hat stuff, but it was entertaining for me.

In all, while the characters were perhaps not the most compelling, I found Accelerando to be a pleasurable cyberpunk read, with relatively little utter pseudoscience.

-Steinkamp