(2023-02-17) The Techno Optimist Up Wing Lesson That William Gibsons The Peripheral Inadvertently Teaches

James Pethokoukis: The techno-optimist Up Wing lesson that William Gibson's 'The Peripheral' (Jackpot series) inadvertently teaches. Dystopian? Eight episodes in and I think that’s a reasonable description

from that cluster of catastrophes, which killed off 80 percent of humanity, emerged a world that has taken a technological leap forward

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap

but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

“Essentially feudal,” as one book character puts it.