Stealing Worlds

Contextual Quote

"Among the entities in these threads are machine-learning systems who post on behalf of ecosystems, speaking for trees and bacteria and soil and rivers, turning sensor data and historical trends into narratives and points of view that are part of the debate. It's an idea that's been posited for real-world ecosystem management, and that has appeared in other sf, like Karl Schroeder's Stealing Worlds": https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/18/karl-schroeders-stealing-worlds-visionary-science-fiction-of-a-way-through-the-climate-and-inequality-crises/

- Cory Doctorow [1]

Description

Cory Doctorow:

"Karl Schroeder (previously) is literally the most visionary person I know (and I've known him since 1986!): he was the first person to every mention "fractals" to me, then "the internet" and then "the web" — there is no one, no one in my circle more ahead of more curves, and it shows in his novels and none more so than Stealing Worlds, his latest, which is a futuristic roadmap to how our present-day politics, economics, technology and society might evolve.

Stealing Worlds is a near-future novel of ecological and economic catastrophe, in which an ever-larger pool of people have been replaced by automation and an ever-expanding proportion of our planet is becoming uninhabitable due to climate change. Mass surveillance has spread to the internet of things, and every corner of the world is now studded with sensors that monitor things like compliance with a too-late ban on fossil fuels (while simultaneously feeding into a tight mesh of surveillance of every living thing, including humans), and ubiquitous blockchain technology is used to create transparency for the powerless masses, revealing their debts and locations to bounty hunters.

...

It's simultaneously the weirdest and most plausible futuristic vision I've encountered in years, building on the world of Bruce Sterling's classic "Maneki Neko," Madeline Ashby's "Company Town," Charlie Stross's "Neptune's Brood," and my own novels like "Eastern Standard Tribe, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and "Walkaway" (attentive readers will find the book full of sly references to a wide range of novels that influenced Schroeder's thinking — and of course, it's mutual, as I've been writing with Karl since I was a teenager).

Schroeder is also engaging with cutting-edge ideas from technology and economics: smart contracts and post-market allocation, making stunning new contributions to vital debates that have raged for more than a century." (https://boingboing.net/2019/06/18/computing-the-climate.html?)

Discussion

Tim Morgan:

"if you haven't read Karl Schroeder's novel STEALING WORLDS, you should). He pointed out how there is a rising restoration of the idea of location being important. Where you see this happening, you see commons forming. I've spent a bit of time thinking about why. Karl pointed out that our current era since the Enlightenment has increasingly applied the principle of "nowhere" to try to reduce things to abstract principles, rules, laws, facts, etc. It was powerful and much needed to push us along the way. However, it removes necessary context and dynamics both within and between systems. Localism counters that by restoring context and recognizing that the observers can't be disentangled from the system. Culture is a key part of a working commons, since culture is one of the key ways we store accumulated community knowledge and changing culture means that new knowledge is being stored, or at the very least a recognition that the system is changing and parts of the old culture don't fit. Commons & culture aren't "nowhere". They require place. A truly global commons isn't one thing. It is a billions interlocking, intersecting, and scaled commons all working together as an environment. A commons is a holon. Each holonarchic level of a global commons has a sense of place. People + Place = Community & shared culture. "

(https://www.facebook.com/groups/p2p.open/permalink/3901404399903710/?)