Distraction

Bruce Sterling's well nigh prophetic 1998 political thriller.

This is just some excerpts from Distraction, which I am reading again for what I think is the fifth time. This book is practically prophecy in my eyes. You may peruse my Cyberpunk shelf on BookWyrm, to see what other influences I’ve had over the years.

Attention Conservation Notice:

It’s a good read, but all of Bruce Sterling’s work is. I keep coming back to it because I want to know what happens next … before it happens. Lots of long quotes here, I’m trying to cover the folks that aren’t going to read the whole book.

Excerpts:

Oscar Valparaiso is a genetically engineered campaign manager for a winning Senate candidate and Jules Fontenot is his team’s security person. This paragraph is Oscar musing about the bank swarm attack at the very beginning of the novel.

“Oscar Valparaiso had once imagined politics as a chess game. His kind of chess game. Pawns, knights, and queens, powers and strategies, ranks and files, black squares and white squares. Studying this tape had cured him of that metaphor. Because this phenomenon on the tape was not a chess piece. It was there on the public chessboard all right, but it wasn’t a rook or a bishop. It was a wet squid, a swarm of bees. It was a new entity that pursued its own orthogonal agenda, and vanished into the silent interstices of a deeply networked and increasingly nonlinear society.”

They get hung up at a road block in Louisiana that’s manned by Air Force personnel who are shaking down the drivers of cars with out of state plates. The PR man is a public relations officer from the nearby air base, which persists despite no funding.

“You were saying?” Oscar prompted.

“Battlespace awareness. That’s the key to rapid deployment. We have surveillance drones over the highway, checking car licenses. We input the licenses into this database here, run credit scans and marketing profiles, pick out the people likely to make generous financial contributions without any fuss.…” The officer looked up. “So you might call this an alternative, decentralized, tax-base scheme.”

Oscar glanced at Fontenot. “Can they do that?”

“Sure, it’s doable,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was ex-Secret Service. The USSS had always been very up to speed on these issues.

The PR man laughed bitterly. “That’s what the Governor likes to call it.… Look, this is just a standard infowar operation, the stuff we used to do overseas all the time. Fly in, disrupt vital systems, low or zero casualties, achieve the mission objective. Then we just vanish, all gone, forget about it. Turn the page.”

“Right,” said Fontenot. “Just like Second Panama.”

“Hey,” the officer said proudly, “I was in Second Panama! That was classic netwar! We took down the local regime just by screwing with their bitstreams. No fatalities! Never a shot fired!”

The Air Force doing this was notable, it would be more likely to be a prole mob, such as the Moderators or Regulators.

“The first fringe of the Regulator convoy arrived. Plastic trucks and buses cruising by at maybe thirty miles an hour, sipping fuel and saving wear on their engines. Then came the core of the operation, the nomad technical base. Flatbed trucks and tankers, loaded with harvesting equipment, pillers, crushers, welders, rollers, fermenting pans, pipes, and valves. They lived on grass, they lived off roadside weeds and cultured yeast. Women wearing skirts, shawls, veils. Swarms of young children, their vibrant little bodies saturated with multicolored beads and handmade quillwork.

Oscar was entranced by the spectacle. These weren’t the low-key dropouts of the Northeast, people who managed on cheap food and public assistance. These were people who had rallied in a horde and marched right off the map. They had tired of a system that offered them nothing, so they had simply invented their own.

This was my introduction to the concept murder as a service. Twenty years after Distraction was published, we sorted out who had been steering MAGA bomber Cesar Sayoc. There are far scarier examples, Click Here To Kill is a good read on this phenomenon.

“Oscar, I’ve seen you do some very clever things with nets, you’re a young guy and you grew up using them. But you haven’t seen everything that I’ve seen, so let me spell this out for you nice and careful.”

They turned around a riotous bougainvillea. Fontenot assembled his thoughts. “Okay. Let’s imagine you’re a net-based bad guy, netwar militia maybe. And you have a search engine, and it keeps track of all the public mentions of your idol, Governor Etienne-Gaspard Huguelet. Every once in a while, someone appears in public life who cramps the style of your boy. So the offender’s name is noticed, and it’s logged, and it’s assigned a cumulative rating. After someone’s name reaches a certain level of annoyance, your program triggers automatic responses.” Fontenot adjusted his straw hat. “The response is to send out automatic messages, urging people to kill this guy.”

Oscar laughed. “That’s a new one. That’s really crazy.”

“Well, yeah. Craziness is the linchpin of the whole deal. You see, there have always been a lot of extremists, paranoiacs, and antisocial losers, all very active on the nets.… In the Secret Service, we found out a long time ago[…]”

Foreshadowing DOGE …

“Oscar had his own private reservations about certain policies of the Federal Democrats, but he felt that his party’s programs were basically sound. First, the Emergency committees had to be reined in and dismantled. They had no real constitutional legitimacy; they had no direct mandate from the voters; they violated basic principles of separation of powers; they were not properly accountable; and worst of all, they had all been swiftly riddled with corruption. The Emergency committees were simply failing to govern successfully. They were sometimes rather popular, thanks to their assiduous cultivation of single-issue groups, but the longer the Emergency lasted, the closer they came to a slow-motion coup and outright usurpation of the Republic.”

Heavy Duty Netfriend is my job title, basically … we play this very scene at least a couple times a year. Jimmy the driver was a prole mob member, I think this is the one instance where he and Oscar interact.

“Oscar made his way up the aisle to the front of the bus, where he could lower his voice. “I meant the nomads, Jimmy. I know you’ve had experience with them. I just wondered what you make of this development. Regulator guerrillas, strangling a U.S. Air Force base.”

“Everyone else is asleep, so now you have to talk to me, huh?”

“You know I always value your input. You have a unique perspective.”

Jimmy sighed. “Look, man, I don’t do ‘input.’ I just drive the bus. I’m your bus driver. Lemme drive.”

“Go ahead, drive! I just wondered if … if you thought they were a serious threat.”

“Some are serious.… Sure. I mean, just because you’re a nomad, and you’re on a reputation server with a big trust-rating, and you’re eating grass and home-brewing all kinds of weird bio-stuff.… Look, that doesn’t make you anything special.”

“No.”

“No, but some of ’em are pretty serious guys, because, well, you might bust some homeless loser someday who looks shabby and acts nuts, but it turns out he has heavy-duty netfriends from all over, and bad weird stuff starts happening to you out of thin air.… But[…]”

Here Oscar is talking to Greta Penninger, a neuroscientist from the “Collabratory” facility Oscar had been sent to take over. Green Huey, the governor of nearby Louisiana, had been modifying humans so both hemispheres of their brains were independent. Neuralink, anyone?

“No, I love bicamerality. That’s what I really like about our little gift and affliction. All those other troubles, humanity’s stinking little prejudices, the race thing, the ethnic thing.… It’s not that they disappear, you know. That’s too much to hope for. They never disappear, but the new problems screw them up so much that the old problems lose center stage. Besides, now I can multitask. I really can do two things at once. I’m much more effective. I can run a business full-time while I work full-time for legalization.”

This is the paragraph that immediately follow the preceding one - here we see a prediction of something like Musk’s xAI.

“So you’re making money again.”

“Yes, it’s a thing I tend to do.” Oscar sighed. “It’s the basic American way. It’s my only real path to legitimacy. With serious money, I can finance candidates, run court challenges, set up foundations. It’s no use wandering around the margins with our bears and tambourines, dancing for pennies. Cognition will become an industry soon. A massive, earthshaking, new American industry. Someday, the biggest ever.”

Conclusion:

There is much more that could be said about Sterling’s vision, but this should give you a sense of the overall framework. Turn off the news about AI job and tariffs, get a copy of Distraction, and see for yourself what things will look like once the dust settles.