Neal Stephenson Quote
The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip,videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. Itcan even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly the Library ofCongress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clearon what the word congress means.And even the word library is getting hazy. It used to be a place full ofbooks, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, andmagazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readableform, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, thematerial became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Librarybecame more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was nosubstantive difference between the Library of Congress and the CentralIntelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government wasfalling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip,videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. Itcan even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly the Library ofCongress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clearon what the word congress means.And even the word library is getting hazy. It used to be a place full ofbooks, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, andmagazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readableform, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, thematerial became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Librarybecame more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was nosubstantive difference between the Library of Congress and the CentralIntelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government wasfalling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
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