Anthony Dean

“And so the nineteen married couples and the eleven single astronauts made a pact and formed the Thirty Families. They agreed on the following simple but critical points: 1. They would never pass their ability to authorize the creation of new life extension treatments (or EXTs, as they called them) to anyone except a single heir, usually their oldest child, upon their deaths. 2. They would not allow the creation of any new AIs that were capable of accepting such authorization from anyone not the head of one of the Thirty Families. 3. They would create a new digital currency and would accept only it and nothing else from buyers wishing to purchase EXTs. 4. They would enforce their monopoly through the sanction of withholding EXTs.”
― Anthony Dean, The Voided Man

“When a person is listening, to music or a radio or whatever, she is receiving only 2% as much data as she is when watching vids. It’s true - look at the size of any files you download from the nets. And then, if a person is reading, he is only taking in 2% as much data as someone who is listening. Text contains hardly any data at all. You can read for 2500 hours and use the same amount of your mind’s processing power as you would use watching vids for a single hour.”
― Anthony Dean, Ascending the Hourglass