Hacker in Acceler Ando

Manfred Macx sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't [IJ], watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his [Head Up Display], throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him (Universal Inbox). They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks - maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar - are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problems.

He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed. He wonders who it's going to be.

He's dealt with old-time commie weak-[AIs] before, minds raised on [MarxIst] dialectic and Austrian School economics: They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global Capital Ism that they can't surf the new Para Digm, look to the longer term. Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he's going to PatEnt next.

Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee's travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he's never met. Law firms handle his PatEnt applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot - although he always signs the rights over to the [Free Intellect Foundation], as contributions to their obligation-free Infra Structure project. (WhuffIe)

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice (Business Method Patent) of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack Intellectual Property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using Genetic Algorithm-s to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of Capital Ism, and there are [Commun Ist]-s in Prague who think he's the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; MonEy is a symptom of PoverTy, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state Central Planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external MarKet systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the [Monte Carlo] free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the [Chicago School]... Manfred scratches his head. "It seems to me that there's nothing human about the Economics Of Scarcity," he says. "Anyway, humans will be obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody rich beyond their wildest dreams before that happens.".. Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. "Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a Command Economy must be Coerc Ive - it does, after all, command.".. Realization dawns. "You want to abolish Scarc Ity, not just MonEy!" "Indeed." Gianni grins. "There's more to that than mere economic performance; you have to consider abundance as a factor. Don't plan the economy; take things out of the economy... Information doesn't work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music - instead of a Soviet central planning system, I've turned the network into a firewall to protect freed Intellectual Property. It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats.

There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner - Manfred - has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it already. (LifeBox)

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