Richard Koman has posted a long, wide-ranging interview with me on the O’Reilly Network, mostly about the book, but very wide-ranging, covering the future and past of the recording industry, the history of the Disney corporation, power-law distributions and such.
So there’s this world I’ve written about called the Bitchun Society. And in the Bitchun Society there’s no more scarcity, there’s a kind of Clarke’s Law technology that allows them to reproduce anything at zero incremental cost. And what’s more, they don’t die. You regularly check yourself into a clinic or terminal and make a copy of your brain and if you die they make a new you and pour that back into it. Lucky for me it’s science fiction and not science so I don’t have to explain the workings of this stuff.
I also don’t have to explain the working of the neural interface, which in addition to allowing them to do this suck-your-brains-out-and-drop-it-onto-a-hard-drive thing, also is capable of figuring out how you feel about any given thing anywhere in the world that you have any opinion about–without asking you. And as a consequence of this, you can first of all make some guesses about how you’re going to feel about something. You don’t have to remember whether you’ve been to this restaurant because the system remembers and tells you what other good restaurants are nearby. But the second-order effect is it will figure out who you hold in high esteem, who has an opinion about some restaurant you’ve never been to. And this opinion, and this esteem is called Whuffie.
