>>10889685>I guess the Rifters series?Correct.
Not a recommendation as such, I disliked the whole series, but kept reading.
The only thing from Watts I enjoyed 100% and would recommend was The Island (short story, give it a go right now, it's on his website)
https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf>The daemon novels had a lot of different very imperfect people in it. Like criminals, blackhat hackers, CEOs, gamers, ordinary people and so on.That's right. I just found them awfully unconvincing.
Unless I am misremembering the book, the idea was that society could benefit by a persistent decentralised reputation based on, basically, gamified upvoting. I don't remember the details, but this rating system was directly used to determine if the person can invoke some daemonic resource in real life.
This immediately strikes me as a horrible idea. The concept of social rating is bad enough when the self serving state is in control of it, buy putting the mob in charge makes thing exponentially worse. Consider - to survive in the domain of a tyrant, you need only avoid drawing the ire of one man. To survive in the land of a billion small (but connected) tyrants however, you must please all of them, at the same time.
Imagine a witch hunt in that universe.
Imagine the ideological purges happening in recent years if people could, with no repercussions, send murder robot bikes to punish naysayers for voicing an unpopular opinion. Imagine the ability to send these murderbots being a direct result from getting likes on social media. There has never been a regime so totalitarian, so opposed to freedom and opportunity.
Imagine the religions that would spread around as the generations roll around, each more oppressive and collectivist than the last.
Imagine if there was a law of nature (that Daemon in the books) showering evolutionary fitness over social structures in direct proportion to how aggressively collectivist they are.
1/2
