[jameshart]

Also Fall, to a more extreme extent. In fact it’s kind of been a theme he hinted at in several of his more cyberpunkish novels - going back to Snow Crash, and even shows up in Anathem - he’s often sort of gestured at usable networks having to be built on top of a substrate of bot-generated untrustable falsehood and lies. The cyber network almost needs the noise as some sort of fuel.

In Fall he talks more about how that kind of layered infosphere arises - and he’s not optimistic about it. The ‘flood the zone with the worst possible bot generated trash’ defense is applied directly on behalf of Maeve in Fall as a response against the post-truth impossibility of publishing the truth in the face of conspiracy narratives. It doesn’t work. The bots - and others like them - destroy the value of the internet as we know it. Everyone retreats to AI-mediated (‘edited’) information bubbles.

I think it’s sort of the current that runs through most Stephenson futurism.