Earth (David Brin novel)
In this article I review the novel Earth by David Brin.
Commentary
Context: holding politicians accountable for lies.
David Brin's "Earth" addresses these issues head-on.
Recommended reading,
Caveat — the 1991 "typography implies Internet" style is hard on my eyes — the pages fairly crawling with admixtures of 12 point and 13 point and 14 point and 15 point and Times New Roman and Arial and Courier and &tc, and regular face and italic face and bold face and small caps and subscript and superscript and probably LaTeX, I dunno, I've only read it once so far and it was a lot to take in.
Cut to the SPOILER, wars are fought, the Transparency faction ascends, the Banking faction retreats to server-farm bunkers deep below the Alps where they are nuked, after which a much, much higher level of society-wide transparency emerges, bring a new set of problems for humanity.
It's a good book, optimistic on the whole, with an engaging after-essay in which Brin talks about his mood, his thinking, his hopes for the future and limitations on those hopes; how our technology got us here (1991), how it may destroy us all, but maybe we can boot-strap up to the next energy level (technological, social), solving some of the old problems while bringing new ones