Comment by staplung
4 months ago
Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash, describing work in "Fed Land"...
'''
Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
'''
Truly terrifying. I'll admit I was expecting one of the near-15.62 options to be "acceptable". How wrong I was; I should have seen that coming.
As one of the below comments says, you just don't know what level of snooping is going on. If you're reading this $CEO, hi!
If you can meet their goals, that just means there is more they can squeeze out of you. The incentive structure for our corporations means there is literally never enough and they will always demand more.
This. All KPI’s are meant to move the carrot just beyond reach.
Reminds how in USSR - a planned economy - your achievements sweet spot was like 103-105% of the plan. Achievement below plan were punished, financially and by some form of public shaming. Hitting exact 100% looked like you don't have the genuine enthusiasm of a communism builder. Achievements above plan were encouraged, financially and by public recognition. Yet achievements well above plan meant that the plan was set too low.
Wrt. the original article - any META employee should be capable of running some xClaw to imitate reasonable activity satisfying whatever KPIs are established for them including submitting of the off-tracking requests following a reasonable pattern.
I remember how almost 30 years ago at one moment the only guy in our team who filed the status report was the one on vacation - he had a cron-script which didn't take vacation into account.
This dynamic might not even been so bad if there was some honesty and graciousness behind it. Some friggin humanity. It’s not so cold to understand and systematize the natural tension between expectation and reality and effort.
Once again at the end of the day the problem is more likely the profit motive above all else
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I've heard stories of current day federal employee performance reviews where, unofficially, no manager is permitted to give out a perfect 5 out of 5.
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It's the kind of list an LLM might make up.
Stephenson's tokens were expensive, which explains the skipped endings.
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...because it was fucking trained on Neal Stephenson, not the other way around, guy.
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What makes this even more hilarious is that Meta's rebranding was in part inspired by the metaverse concept in Snow Crash. You can bet that Zuckerberg, along with many other tech executives, have read this exact passage while mining the book for ideas. Life imitating art?
Tech corp execs also read the rest of Snowcrash, unfortunately, so besides the metaverse crap we also got Snowcrash's "gig economy" labor hellscape.
See also, Jennifer Government, numerous works of PKD, etc.
It's the torment nexus, which literally came out of a reaction to Facebook's rebrand to Meta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
> occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section
No eye tracking in this dystopia I guess.
Literally the next two sentences describe eye tracking.
> The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading.
I took that to be referencing the occasional page ups in the document he was describing
Not as a new mechanism of tracking, via eye tracking
Could be wrong.
Was going to reply the same. These authours don't spend enough time thinking their fantasies through.
At the time it was published eye tracking would have come across as rather over the top (IMO) despite being a predictable outcome if you gave it some thought. Plus it would have necessitated adding and explaining cheap AI analysis, all the follow on plot impacts that would have, and would have ruined that scene as written. So I'd say that conveniently omitting it was a wise choice.
Can be easily handwaved away if you assume some toothless anti-surveillance legislation outlaws employers from engaging in eye tracking while failing to ban all the other stuff. That's not even an unexpected real world development at this point.
The book is from 1992.
[dead]
This is the reality for many low wage workers today. Amazon drivers are on strict schedules and are watched at all times. This isn't fantasy, this is reality. It just hasn't gotten up the chain to effect the average HN reader yet.
I was reminded of this sequence when one of my required trainings not only had a quiz but also a required minimum time limit. It wasn't enough knowing the material I needed to waste time on it as well.
And then I remembered people in jobs that pay less than mine are already viciously harassed for not acting like identical automatons.
This is sometimes because a rule somewhere is written in the form “employees must do x minutes of training per year” or similar
Yep. I was timed when working at the drive through at a fast food restaurant.
Did everyone like this Stephensen in this thread? I read Cryptonomicon and Seveneves, mostly. They slogged for me a bit. But I love what he writes about, so willing to try another one (even if he doesn't have an editor). It sounds like this could be topical 2027 read. I have a long summer ahead of me.
Stephenson's writing is great if you like lengthy asides that add to the world and to your understanding of the characters, but add nothing to the plot.
If you want to read six pages of detailed musings on how the character learned ballroom dance and their design for a special milk-dispensing spoon for eating cereal without it getting soggy, establishing the character is the kind of person who designs spoons in their mind as they eat breakfast, then Stephenson is for you.
If you want the character to get to the damn ball and get told the secret coordinates so we can get moving with the plot already, Stephenson might not be for you.
I agree except for REAMDE that was very fast paced and barely explained
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I actually think Snow Crash is iconic for what it was conceptually, I don't know how I would actually stack the writing up now that I've gotten older and would probably pick something else.
I can see it feeling tropey now despite being an originator of many of the tropes. It's been a decade(s)+? since I read it last though, still highly recommend.
Give Fall: Dodge In Hell a try. It has a few characters from Reamde but nothing to do with it so you don't need to read that one. Its an amazing idea about realistically what building the singularity could look like. Starting with one digitized mind.
Thanks. I've added
Big fan of Snow Crash. For background I liked Cryptonomicon a lot but also found Seveneves to be a bit of a slog.
I would check out The Diamond Age as well if you’re generally taking Stephenson book recommendations.
I much preferred Diamond Age to Snow Crash. It's been a while though, so can't fully remember why - but I think Snow Crash tried to be too cute or something and kinda seemed disjointed.
I loved Cryptonomicon and most of his early work. I didn't care too much for his Baroque Cycle.
Makes me wonder what it’s like to identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea! Or Thanos wasn’t so bad. Those rebel scum had it coming. Homelander is the good guy!
>identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea!
Are there many stories where the bad guys create the metaverse? AFAIK, Stephenson coined the term in Snow Crash and there it was built by the main character and his buds.
The Matrix, I suppose? Though I think Zuck's (immediate) vision and who he identifies as is way more Hiro Protagonist or James Halliday.
You might be right. It’s been a while since I read snow crash. I just remember the metaverse as a sort sad state of society, but I don’t remember if the evil corp stuff was in there or just in the world at large
Zuck was gushing about Ready Player One. It's as if the villain was written for him.
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Ready Player One
Every story, even ours, needs a bad guy. Best villains don't think they are villains. They just do what they must/should/want (in that order, depending on their intensity), because they can.
Funnily enough, Snow Crash was the origin of the metaverse as a term.
or you know, naming your company PALANTIR
I had no idea it was a lord of the rings reference. Here’s an apt quote from wikipedia: “The [palantir] stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented.”
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Well they weren't necessarily bad. I think the Numenor (?) Kings of Westernesse (?), I dunno whatever the old Gondor kings were called, used them effectively. It was just Sauron that took over and made them dangerous. So, effective but dangerous in the wrong hand. Yeah, I guess, even that is pretty prophetic, heh.
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Just a regular reminder Peter Thiel thinks that Greta Thunberg is the antichrist and hesitated when asked if humanity should survive because the question is "layered". This is not a person that should be powerful.
Or, Anduril.
All the techbros love them some Lord of the Rings.
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Always thought it was weird for the omniscient narrator to refer to her as “YT’s mom”
I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!
Have to agree with you on this. Neal Stephenson is not a writer's writer by any means. But even by his standards I found the prose in Snowcrash to be plodding and amateur. I still love the book for its campy nature and for all the amazing ideas it birthed but it would have definitely benefited from a round of aggressive editing. Also the ending quite frankly was horrible, but I hear this is a general issue with Stephenson's works.
In general if you are new to Stephenson I would recommend reading Snow Crash first otherwise the transition from his other better written books will be jarring.
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Fun fact, Snow Crash was originally written as a video game script (and it shows.)
Was visiting a university bookstore few months ago and came across it used in paperback. Never read it but know it has modern/tech significance. Read some of it and went "well, naah" and passed. Ironically the book I ended up purchasing instead was really bad and I couldn't finish it (something by Maureen Down the NYT columnist, I love her opinion work but the book was horrible)
There's something you'll start to notice in Stephenson's books, where a passage will be almost entirely standalone and you think, he wrote this some other time and just barely massaged it to fit into this text. See also "Part 3" of *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell* which is pretty much entirely disconnected from the rest of the story but god damn it Trump just got elected (for the first time) and I've gotta write this.
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Isn't that Stephenson driving home the faceless drone, cog-in-the-machine characterisation of YT's mom?
I mean, literally not giving the character a name fits right in with the alienating working conditions of the quote above, and the fact YT's mom is working on a software cog with no understanding of the machine it fits into.
But she did have a name in the story.
I haven't read it, but if it's written in the first person with the narrator referring to themself as 'YT', then it's at least consistent? If yours truly suddenly referred to my mother, or indeed if I referred to yours truly's mother, that would be more jarring I think?
That’s not what’s happening. Snow Crash has an omniscient 3rd person narrator.
A protagonist (but not THAT Protagonist!) is named Y.T. (street nickname for Yours Truly) and her mom doesn’t matter. She’s environmental set dressing.
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WTF, why chime in without any additional research if you haven’t read it in the first place?
No, it’s an omniscient third person narrator. Yeah, YT is probably the “true” viewpoint, esp if you take diamond age into account. “Chiseled spam” and all that.
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Weirder than having a character just named Y.T. ?
'Yours Truly' seems banal when the main character is Hiro Protagonist.
Self-debasing levity is one of the many reasons Snow Crash (1992) is a great reaction to Neuromancer (1984).
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I loved this book, especially the release of tension at the end.
so many cyberpunk tropes are coming true...
Neil Stephenson is weirdly prescient in some of his novels. The people getting beamed the worst kind of slop on Fall has also been on my mind a lot recently.