[femto113]

The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson, 1995) had many eerily prescient visions but I've always liked some of the more subtle ones: the "Neo-Victorians" who put extra value on handmade goods in a world where anything can be printed foreshadowed Etsy and the modern "artisanal" everything, the use of pictogram based language foreshadowed rising use of emojis, the Primer as a source of education accessible to anyone foreshadowed Khan Academy (and maybe YouTube's how-to-anything more generally).

[bertr4nd]

I was recently re-reading The Diamond Age and was dumbstruck by the prescience of this quote: “One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning.”

[bigger_cheese]

Another of his books Snow Crash, which is kind of precursor to Diamond Age had some pretty interesting predictions.

I read somewhere stuff like Second Life, Google Earth etc were directly inspired by Snow Crash.

There's some other themes in Snow Crash we are just starting to see as well:

-Government difficulties with taxation of digital goods and currency

-Companies competing to attract drivers/messengers etc (basically the uber/gig ecconomy)

-For profit surveillance and commercialization of intelligence data

[pavel_lishin]

> -Government difficulties with taxation of digital goods and currency

Cryptonomicon covers this, too. Arguably so does REAMDE.

[ninefoxgambit]

Snowcrash is probably the best example of a near future anarcho-capitalist society. Particulary showing it in a light which is far from utopian, perhaps more of a realistic devolution.

[eismcc]

I was at a book signing at Microsoft after 9/11 and N.S. seemed to believe that The Diamond Age was no longer relevant and seemed to regret even writing it. I wonder how he feels now.

[yesenadam]

>the "Neo-Victorians" who put extra value on handmade goods in a world where anything can be printed

From Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899):

...the cheap, and therefore indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterisation here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper. - p162

[rcarmo]

That book is simply sublime, and were it not for the class differences, I would welcome that future.

[femto113]

Welcome it or not we're probably on our way to living it...

http://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/