Just finished The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner.

Eerie and impressive how, in 1975, he anticipated the social effects of the internet (privacy, fomo), the technical abilities (worms, hacking, digital money, freedom of movement) and the role governments+giant corps play in all this: as information monopolies.

A great cypherpunk novel, that is far older than the internet, but gets it right far more often than many recent books I've read on internet, privacy, and tech.

goodreads.com/book/show/41070.

@berkes I remember reading Shockwave Rider a long time ago after it was often listed as a classic, and it's fascinating how he got a lot of the tech quite wrong but the social stuff is prescient.

@airgoa the tech is wrong on one premise, mostly: wireless. He did not anticipate wireless transfer nor battery powered devices. So all tech is very place-bound.

Luckily that matters little in the larger picture (but it does for the plot). And indeed the social parts remain very apt.

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@berkes They also use actual telephones to communicate with server computers, right? Using touch tones? That's the big one I remember.

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