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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2168 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A passage from Cryptonomicon which had me laughing out loud on the train this morning (no spoilers):

Nevertheless, there are three messages from Kia, Epiphyte's only actual employee, the administrative assistant for the whole company. Kia works in a totally alienated, abstracted office in the Springboard Capital corporate incubator complex in San Mateo. It is some sort of a federal regulation that nascent high-tech companies must not hire pudgy fifty-year-old support staff, the way big established companies do. They must hire topologically enhanced twenty-year-olds with names that sound like new models of cars. Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of a federal equal-opportunity form where Randy would simply check a box labeled ᴄᴀᴜᴄᴀsɪᴀɴ, Kia would have to attach multiple sheets on which her family tree would be ramified backwards through time ten or twelve generations until reaching ancestors who could actually be pegged to one specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic groups would be intimidatingly hip ones — not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps, and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque. Instead of doing this, on her job app for Epiphyte she simply checked "other" and then wrote in ᴛʀᴀɴs-ᴇᴛʜɴɪᴄ. In fact, Kia is trans- just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn't trans- she is post-.

This book came out in 1999. Intellectually, I was aware that what we call wokeness was previously ascendant in the nineties, at which time it was called "political correctness". Still though — if you didn't know better, you would assume that the passage above had been published in the last ten years.

There's also the minor subplot about his woke ex-girlfriend in academia. Including him getting dressed down by her academic friends for his privilege enabling him to learn a technical skill by reading a book and practicing. He made the mistake of trying to explain his technical skills as a result of study and practice rather than unearned privilege.

It is like mockery of tumblrinas, but 15 years early.

It is like mockery of tumblrinas, but 15 years early.

To quote another famous science fiction author, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”. Those lines of theory were percolating within academia for years before they breached out into the body politic.

Those lines of theory were percolating within academia for years before they breached out into the body politic.

An interesting example of this is Mrs. Bridge from 1959, where the author is basing much of the background of the novel on his upbringing in semi-affluent KCMO in the 1920s-30s. There are asides and comments from background characters espousing views that wouldn't explode nationwide until the mid-to-late 60s, or even the 70s, yet they were already circulating in non-academic circles by the 50s (assuming the author heard them in the 50s and had his characters say them even though they didn't really say such things in the 30s, but who knows, maybe he's being fully accurate and those ideas really were the talk of upper middle class white people in the 30s).

Serves him right for trying to mansplain away instead of acknowledging his technical privilege.

That article is right on point and 15 years later on the dot. Neal Stephenson called it, yet again.

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