Quotes from book
Rule 34

Rule 34 is a near-future science fiction novel by Charles Stross. It is a loose sequel to Halting State, and was released on 5 July 2011 and 7 July 2011 . The title is a reference to the Internet meme Rule 34, which states that "If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions." Rule 34 was nominated for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

“Truly the jaws of irony are agape!”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (p. 157)

“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience…In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 286-287)

“You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 229)

“No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 1, “Liz: Red Pill, Blue Pill” (p. 16)

““Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example…have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 287-288)

“Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 10, “Liz: Snowballing Hell” (p. 116)

“Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 12, “Toymaker: Reality Excursion” (p. 143)

“But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 229)

“I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (p. 279)

“Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 215)

“Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 22, “Toymaker: Happy Families” (p. 251)

“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 16, “Liz: Mote, Eye, Redux” (p. 177)

“You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.
Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 22, “Toymaker: Happy Families” (p. 248)

“The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.
Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 7, “Liz: Black Swans” (pp. 82-83)

“Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 29, “Liz: Project ATHENA” (p. 305)

“Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 31, “Dominoes Fall” (p. 322)

“Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 226)

“You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 12, “Toymaker: Reality Excursion” (p. 143)

“Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (pp. 154-155)

“Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (p. 155)

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