Sublime

apophenia,

Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-mail address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here’s how he once explained the omission: “If I organize my life in such a way that

They were almost the only people on the street, certainly the only ones moving purposefully, and so, as they ran, the messages on the billboards pursued them like starving wolves, making sure they understood that if they used certain ractives or took certain drugs, they could rely on being able to have sex with certain unrealistically perfect young

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of messag

He

This was an engine undergoing continuous transformation, indeed modifying itself as part of its operation. The lattice was not so much a machine as it was a page on which the machine was written, and on which the machine itself ceaselessly wrote.

“Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs—an analogy that I cannot interpret.” “The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips,” Hiro says. “When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chip

All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.