I’ll tell you what the Daemon is: the Daemon is a remorseless system for building a distributed civilization. A civilization that perpetually regenerates. One with no central authority. Your only option is what form that civilization takes. And that depends on the actions of people like you."

This was the very essence of capitalism: thriving on chaos. True, there would be a temporary economic meltdown, but like pruning a tree, it would grow back fuller and healthier than before. But thoroughly under their control.

victims. " . . .and parasitism evolves and moves through any system—not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it . . .." The screen showed food-borne illness outbreaks—images of fast-food restaurants. The camera panned to reveal identical restaurants running down the sides of

Nothing changed because these alternate belief systems flew in the face of human nature. Of even common sense. Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers

In general, Sebeck viewed computers as a necessary fact of modern life. His chief complaint was that they gave a false sense of precision to poor thinking. But then, technology was like religion—you either had the faith or you didn’t.

In March 2008, Stewart Brand, the famous Merry Prankster and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, stepped out of the Hawaiian jungle and gave me a cryptic recommendation before fading back into the shadows:

Stewart knows something about how vision and storytelling can be used to go beyond simply imagining the future into actually creating it. I would like to invite you to reconsider the nature of the book you are holding. While it is billed as a techno-thriller, I believe that Daemon is better understood as a manifesto. And, if you want to go really

daemon (dēm n)—A computer program that runs continuously in the background and performs specified operations at predefined times or in response to certain events. Condensed from "Disk and Execution MONitor"

horizon. "Here is your new thread. Only you