(2005-02-09) Stephenson Reason Interview

Mike Godwin interviews Neal Stephenson for Reason Mag. I dreamed up the SnowCrash world 15 years ago as a thought experiment, and I tweaked it to be as funny and outrageous and Graphic Novel-like as I could make it. Such a world wouldn't be stable unless each little "BurbClave" had the ability to defend itself from all external threats... Speaking as an observer who has many friends with Libertarian instincts, I would point out that Terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political Liberty than Government... So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and Statist-s and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I'm afraid might turn out to be quite stable... We can make a loose analogy to the way that people have addressed the problem of Power disorders. We don't really understand them. We know that there are a couple of tricks that seem to help, such as the Rule Of Law and Separation Of Powers. Beyond that, people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory... Walter Wink takes a general interest in people in various places who are getting the shaft. He develops an empirical science of shaftology, if you will... He looks for connections among all of these situations and in this way develops the idea of Domination System-s. It's not germ theory and modern antibiotics, but it is, at the very least, a kind of epidemiology of power disorders... It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the Technical Class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called Culture War. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture... The initial surprise was that Gottfried Leibniz had done so much computer-related work so early. I got that from George Dyson's DarwinAmongTheMachines. When I began to read about the period, I was surprised by the sophistication of the Amsterdam Stock Market and the complexity of the Lyonnaise financial system. But the greatest single surprise for me was the welter of ideas contained in Robert Hooke's MicroGraphia. Hooke talks about an incredibly wide range of topics in that volume... One could argue that people like Leibniz and the others were able to come up with some good ideas because they weren't afraid to think metaphysically... Seventeenth-century chemistry may have been rudimentary, and of only historical interest today, but 17th-century philosophy is highly developed and still interesting to read... One encounters high-tech geeks, lawyers, ministers, businesspeople, soldiers, and construction workers who have made themselves extremely erudite by reading a lot of history, science, and philosophy. In an earlier era, people like these might have gravitated to the Royal Society Of London, and indeed one of the many remarkable things about the early Royal Society was its ability to gather in such people, combined with its ability to identify and marginalize "enthusiasts" (cranks) while fostering the ones who had something to contribute.