Neal Stephenson Explains His Vision of the Digital Afterlife

Stephenson also spends a lot of time examining how the internet and social media, which Dodge and other characters often refer to in Fall as the Miasma, is irrevocably changing society and altering the fabric of reality. The reason that social media systems are architected the way they are, as I mentioned before, is because humans are expensive and you can’t scale that kind of system to serve billions and billions of people. So that means that access to that kind of higher-quality view of the world becomes a class-based situation where people who’ve got the money to pay for or partially pay for human editors and curators are getting higher-quality info, which I think is just a slight kind of magnification or intensification of the way things are now anyway.

Source: www.pcmag.com