Shenzen spins around me, wowing sporadically.

December 23, 2013 8:37 PM

In the Kingdom of Mao Bell Neal Stephenson for WIRED, Feb 1994. via
posted by the man of twists and turns (10 comments total)

The early journalist hacker articles by Stephenson were amazing.

Mother Earth, Mother Board, was, at the time, one of the best nonfiction essays I had ever read. It is still good, though I think some of the themes are a little 1990s.

Also good, In the Beginning Was the Command Line, a history of operating systems.

You can see how his best fiction (Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, Anathem(!)) all built off of this style.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:46 PM on December 23, 2013 [6 favorites]

Stephenson also wrote a short story for issue 2.10, Spew.

The guy predicted social media memes 20 years ago. Amazing stuff.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:23 PM on December 23, 2013 [3 favorites]

Fuck yes. The Hee Haw story. I still remember that two decades later.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:30 PM on December 23, 2013

I spent 2 years in Shenzhen 2010-12 and it's still recognizable from the article. The more things change...

I don't imagine we'll see anything as dramatic as the Taiping Rebellion or the Cultural Revolution again; I suppose it will be something like what's happening in the States right now: an abandonment of the value system that has traditionally made the society work. This probably won't improve matters in China, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a violent backlash.

This struck me as something that still holds water.
posted by arcticseal at 10:25 PM on December 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

I am officially past it to see these cutting edge articles from NS presented as nostalgia!
posted by bystander at 3:39 AM on December 24, 2013

Thanks for this! I can't believe I've never heard of it! I've had the Mother Earth, Mother Board and the Spew issues on my shelf since the day they came out.
posted by sourwookie at 6:22 AM on December 24, 2013

I kept the Wired issue with Stephenson's FLAG (Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe) article for many years. At the time I was a coder but hadn't given serious thought to the physical global network. I started paying a different kind of attention to the politics of data networks and information freedom because of Stephenson.
posted by workerant at 6:29 AM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

Life imitates Snow Crash.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:46 AM on December 24, 2013

One of my favorite things about Neal Stephenson's career is that he can more or less reuse material from his early books at will, since they're in a different genre now. REAMDE has much the same plot as Snow Crash, but by dint of being written two decades later, it's a contemporary action thriller instead of a science fiction novel.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:23 AM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

this is quite the article, thanks for posting
posted by rebent at 8:02 AM on December 26, 2013