The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0
—Accelerando, a post-cyberpunk novel by Charles Stross
A good read, and Creative-Commons-Released-For-Free-Download. Aside from a too-explicit-for-my-puritan-tastes S&M scene near the beginning, I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent in this book. It’s only 160 short pages, but the prose is so thick and packed with ideas that I spent more time reading than with most books 3 times its length. Stross is refreshingly technologically literate (you’ll find no refrains of Gibson writing Neuromancer on an old typewriter here), and the book is packed with ideas of both near-future and post-singularity-future life. And it’s brimming over with good-natured satire directed towards this current era (awkward adolescence of human culture that it is). I love the quote at the top of this entry. “Economics 2.0”, I’m still chuckling…