#30 Spew- Neal Stephenson
I’ve only just stated reading Neal Stephenson this year,
having just finished his impressive Speculative Fiction (SF) novel, Anathem. I
found Spew in a collection of his notes, speeches, and short writings called
Some Remarks.
The Spew is some version of the internet. Like many SF
pieces, this deals with human interaction with machines and privacy in some
undetermined future reality, or in an alternative current reality (current at
least for 1994 when this story was written). In this world our protagonist is a
rookie Profile Auditor 1, monitoring people’s lives through their consumptions,
trying to win a promotion to Profile Auditor 2.
He ends up profiling a woman who appears to be too normal
and follows her to the Hotel where she works. It appears her “normalcy” is as he expects fabricated, as she turns out to be some kind of mid-nineties hacker.
Its reads like one of those Kurt Vonnegut sketches where he
delves into human’s meta-relationship with technology. Just by talking about what we watch on TV, we
are in a way studying our own psyche. There
is a fun moment when he is monitoring the front desk clerk monitoring his
minibar activity.
This doesn’t really break any ground in the genre, but its
still a decent read. Like a lot of Sci-Fi conceptual pieces, once real
technology catches up to where the story is, half of the story is lost. The questions over internet privacy, and some
nebulous entity knowing our entertainment, and consumer trends is, of course
still very much relevant…and in fact for 1994 is pretty ahead of its time (at
least for the non SF community).
The story has no conclusion and doesn’t really feel
completed. Like I stated earlier it feels like something from a Kurt Vonnegut
notebook, which is praise enough.
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