The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Perhaps this is a matter that Stephenson is a programmer, but despite the amazing awesomeness of his expansion, the concept of creating a whole only from formalistically aligned agents is the only apparent limitation of this book.
What is the most futuristic about this book is what’s most interesting: beyond consciousness is material agency. Beyond technology is the conflation of agency and consciousness. Here we get a primer that reflects back the sum total of various social memes, presented as a subversive text that aligns to a developing consciousness. In a sense, primers have existed, but always under master guidance: tarot cards, for example. Or gnostic religious texts. Such high level manipulation of form is today, only given within a technical division. What is necessary for a developing consciousness though, is the ability to abstract patterns and then run their consistency forwards and backwards. From there, the partial worlds aligned by agency and ideology are at a loss as to the next direction.
This is where Stephenson turns to the mysterious seed, which is little more than a view espoused by a nanotech engineer. This view is the necessary meld of programmable reality, a belief in the completeness of human conception to manage material universes ideologically.
Where Stephenson ends mysteriously is in Nell’s subversion of the primer’s creator’s view, to reject a totalized agency of human consciousness/sexuality — where humans are little more than computational components. She releases from that mix individuality, and in that sense, subverts the primer completely.
Diamond Age is a view of human consciousness; whats at stake is our very freedom, to be ruled completely by managed eusociality (through the Victorians, or otherwise). Stephenson subverts the logic of his text in this ending, by choosing human freedom. In that sense, this utopic vision is dystopic because he shows us how it is limited, how it collapses, and is hypocritical to those who grew under its auspices but do not understand that the world they grew up in is an answer to a past problem, on that may no longer be relevant for today.
In that sense, as the little sisters show us, those of us raised by a system become formalized — indoctrinated within that system. This is not the answer to human consciousness as it is not a solution for adaptability. What we want is for people to grow up able to choose for themselves. To this end, Stephenson shows us that the primer used mechanistically as a mass solution shows its formalistic weakness. Like stock market strategies that profit only in the hands of the few so truly subversive systems only work when they are hidden.
