5/19/2023 0 Comments Halting state by charles stross![]() Stross has never been a writer who goes easy on readers whose eyes glaze over at the liberal application of techie jargon. Charlie's stroke of genius here is in his story's use of massively multiplayer online games (MMORPGs) as a tool by which governments and their shadowy intelligence apparatuses recruit "useful idiots," unwary meat-puppet operatives who do the dirty work of infiltrating networks while under the belief they're just running around hacking up goblins in a virtual gaming environment, thereby allowing the Powers That Be whatever plausible deniability they wish. And not only is this a situation that people have come to accept, it's one in which they are active participants and enablers. For one thing, it's actually about what it would (will?) be like to live in a true spook country, where nearly every vestige of privacy you thought you might have had is nothing but vapor. ![]() Halting State is the book William Gibson's Spook Country should have been. ![]()
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