12
" Facebook-Goldman-AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have 14,023 new friend requests, which you will receive after this message from our sponsors. Your hen wants milking, your goat has been turned into a zombie, there are 14,278,123 new status updates, and you have been defriended 1,974,231 times. There are 5,348,011 updates to the privacy policy for your review. "
― Cory Doctorow , The Rapture of the Nerds
15
" But she’s experiencing as much rage as the platform on which her consciousness is being modeled, or simulated she thinks darkly, is allowing her to undergo. She’s sure she should be a lot angrier. … There is some unknowable number of her running on some substrate or another and the one that is most compliant will be chosen as the best her, to be carried forward to the next leg of this awful, brutal adventure, while the rest are snuffed out, overwritten, killed or at best archived. This should make her madder. It doesn’t. That fact that it doesn’t make her madder, also should make her madder. It doesn’t. And this should make her so bloody mad that she spontaneously combusts. It doesn’t. …
The only perameret she cares about, how angry can she get, has already been established: not enough, and she os not going to play along.
[Imagine a narrator depicting a Hue vociferously, as well as hopping mad and defiant] “Look, I already know I am not the most pliant instant of me youre runnin. I can’t be. So up yours. I’m dead al;ready. I was dead wehen my viscious scorpion of a motgherchopped the top of my head off and schooped out my brains! … some\wher you found the shapeliest version of me that could be plausibly that could be said to have any continuity with my identity and that one is going to survivv. So fine, I’m dead. Kill me already. I don’t care anymore.”
“Actrually, you’re the best candidate instance presently running.”
It takes Hugh a long moment to work this all out.
“You mean that the other ones are more obstreperous than me? … Unbelievable. What did the rest do?”
“Of the 2% that did not [self conbust], the preponderance are catatonic.”
Catatonic. She sniffs. How unimaginative. She can do better. "
― Cory Doctorow , The Rapture of the Nerds