The open internet will be a dark forest, beautiful but mostly populated by metal-brains, meatb-brains will retreat to their human only spaces, local Facebook or Instagram where you know everyone in person or WhatsApp chat groups.
Btw, the chants from the book are real (and part of the interludes if you get the audiobook - which I recommend since the initially boring but ultimately important parts it aren't skippable without effort).
> In Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem, the Decanarian Erasmus’ daily chore is to ring the Clock bells in his “Math” in a special sequence each day as he chants out the sequence. Those sequences and chants are all based on mathematical formulae that composer and coder David Stutz has put together into an album called Iolet.
I like the thousander chant but I only have regular laptop speakers. What do you recommend to really "get" the song? What would I hear beyond those super low basses?
A good pair of headphones would be my next choice.
It's not much "under" it - but rather the fill your senses with what it would be like to be in the Mynster as each nave did their chats in the great octagonal hall. And while its a passage about the Hundreders...
> We sauntered across the meadow to the Mynster. Even so, we got there in plenty of time, and ended up in the front row, closest to the screen. Voco continued ringing for some minutes after we arrived. Then the eight ringers filed down from their balcony and found places farther back. A choir of Hundreders came out into the chancel and began a monophonic chant.
Or the description of a Thousander chat
> ... As I walked toward it my perceptions cleared suddenly and I shook my head in amazement at my own silliness in having imagined it was an amphibian or a truck. It was plainly a human voice. Singing. Or rather droning, for he had been stuck on the same note the whole time I’d been awake.
> The note changed slightly. Okay, so it wasn’t a drone. It was a chant. A very, very slow one.
> I could have stood there watching and listening for hours. I got the idea—which might have been just my imagination—that {spoilers} was singing a cosmographical chant: a requiem for the stars that were being swallowed up in the dawn. Certainly it was music of cosmographical slowness. Some of the notes went on for longer than I could hold my breath. He must have some trick of breathing and singing at the same time.
Also in Reamde and later Fall. I forget exactly, but i think in Reamde they flood the internet with shit, and then some years later in Fall everyone has curated echo chambers of content, such that people signed up to different streams are basically living in different realities. Which i guess is just the logical conclusion of what we have now.
The open internet will be a dark forest, beautiful but mostly populated by metal-brains, meatb-brains will retreat to their human only spaces, local Facebook or Instagram where you know everyone in person or WhatsApp chat groups.