Val’s Reviews > The Unraveling > Status Update

wild:

Near vs. Far Technology: though the planet is heir to—and reliant on—hundreds of thousands of years of human development, most of the cultural context of that ancient technology is lost to its current inhabitants. Thus, from habitation architecture to social nuance agents to the nutrient flow, everyday life is enmeshed in Far Technological systems which no one alive fully understands, and which sometimes behave in unpredictable ways. Near Technology, by contrast, is developed and understood locally: while more modest in scope, it has the advantage of predictability.

Long Conversation: composed over millennia and consisting of tens of millions of stanzas, the Long Conversation is both the collected repository of staidish wisdom and the ritualized communal act of reciting, referencing, juxtaposing, commenting upon, and extending that repository. The degree to which Vail knowledge of and involvement in this project is taboo has varied over the centuries. The project itself predates the formalization of Staids as a “gender,” and is core to Staid identity and practice.

Groon: one of the planet’s religions, focused on a theurgic entity, Groon, whom devotees are encouraged to scorn and blame, and whose mourning and remorse are redemptive.

Idyll: a facility for those undergoing ontological collapse, allowing a greater degree of behavioral freedom than would be possible in the wider world without damaging ratings, and providing emotional support from professional specialists (who are often themselves undergoing ontological collapse)

Groon: one of the planet’s religions, focused on a theurgic entity, Groon, whom devotees are encouraged to scorn and blame, and whose mourning and remorse are redemptive.

banker-historian: a professional responsible for emotional accounting, formalizing the story of a person or institution’s emotional states so as to optimally influence their ratings.

consensus: the aggregation of ratings and global opinion, synthesized by Far Technological agents, which allocates most rights to resources, goods and services, feed access privileges, and social status. In addition to global consensus, decisions within a family or enterprise are often made via a consensus moderation framework.

Agents’ sentience and autonomy is constrained by design. Still, it is a matter of extreme good fortune that they have tended to enthusiastically embrace the project of a joint co-culture with the planet’s human inhabitants. People tend to assign my few contributions to maintaining this alliance much more credit than they deserve.