Post #1169004
2026-04-15 20:14 UTC
Replies (3)
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@cstross@wandering.shop 2026-04-15 20:26
@gerikson@awful.systems I hung out with Neal a few times and he struck me as the kind of twisty-minded guy who's unlikely to fall for the simplistic nostrums that typify authoritarian thinkers. Conservative (with some libertarian in his background, I suspect) but not hammer-make-square-peg-fit-in-round-hole stupid. (Disclaimer: I last saw him about a decade ago.)
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@it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 2026-04-16 14:38
At this point, especially with *Fall,* I think he just has a tendency to pick up and run with whatever cool idea techbros are into at the moment without any real regard for how seriously people take it as a belief, resulting in a bunch of conveniently packaged, reader-gratifying ideological vignettes for said techbros to latch onto as a coherent vision and complete the cycle. I don't think he ever meant to genuinely promote the metaverse or digital money laundering or acausal brain hell or space eugenics, but he seems chronically incapable of mounting a systemic critique of any of his subjects in a style that demands a good guy crypto billionaire, likably clueless cultist, or badass geneticist to outsmart the Islamic terrorists, alien special forces, and conniving cosmonauts and save the day. I do still find it somewhat concerning how many of his plots come down to "80% of everyone are mindless sheeple enthralled by a higher power," though.
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@hypostase@bsd.network 2026-04-15 20:40
[@gerikson](https://awful.systems/u/gerikson) [@it\_wasnt\_arson](https://awful.systems/u/it_wasnt_arson) I’ve met him once or twice through people I know, who strongly campaign in the other direction. They were never people to let fascists play. To be fair, I’ve not been to that part of the world since the before times, and things can change, but were he to turn out to be one of the bad ones it would surprise me in a way others have not.