Week 1 Chapter Post

The case for Case

Case is, by first appearances a very bleak character in his outlook. He used to infiltrate networks for shadowy organizations and steal data and money for profit. He was one of the best hackers, however; he was also greedy. This came back some time later to bite him and resulted in his sympathetic nervous system being chemically crippled and rendering him unable to jack into cyberspace through a neural link. He dulls the pain with alcohol and amphetamines, he lays about in a cesspit of a city and does not care for anyone to like him, he chases death in a coy, roundabout way, he intentionally makes himself a target and hopes, in part that maybe someone else can put him out of his misery. You end up kind of feeling sorry for him; yes, he wasn't doing legal things, yes, he's rude, yes he is greedy. The thing is though, reading the book through his eyes, he is more than anything lonely, you see it in his interactions with females throughout the novel, his longing, his need for interaction, for touch, and that, to me is projected onto his obsession with getting back into cyberspace.

The setting for this novel, Chiba, is a dreary place indeed, it is both a reflection of the social underpinnings of our current modern life, and also a fantastical (maybe not too far off with Elon's Neura-link tech) dystopian future. And what does dystopian even mean? Many throw that word out but do not give credit to weight of it's literary meaning. It's acceptance of suffering and injustice. The actual words in the dictionary is " relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice" “Dystopian.” '' (Merriam-Webster, 2003). It states an imaginary world is implied, however dystopia is all around you (in a literal sense), but perseverance of human spirit, a little blissful ignorance and government washing all give way to a deceptively bright outlook for many.

Now, this is not to say it's all bad. After all, in a truly democratic world, the government and corporations really only do what's in the best interest of people and money respectively. People vote for legislation, any laws and bills you see passed and directly or indirectly due to a majority vote of every person that votes, and every creepy piece of data analytics that big tech giants make is people people asked for more personal ads, they want a virtual assistant to be able to help them, but then backlash when it needs to see their contacts or know where they are to work well. And as much as it pains me to say it, people want things, but they do not want to incur the costs of the things they want. Instant gratification is not possible without an immediate or prolonged cost, as with drugs, fast food, cheating, and taking risks. We are hamsters on a wheel, pushing it forward with our own paws but at the same time complaining about how tired we are of the wheel making us run...

V/R,

Peter J Stefanov Student, CIAT