This already got covered on Boing-Boing but Kevin O’Donnell, Jr died last week.

He wrote a book which I found particularly formative and frankly until I read Snow Crash I did not encounter a peer for it in terms of writing that resonated with how I thought The Net – which is what we called it back then – would become.

It’s still right up there – he was describing social-media-like networks of communication, peer-to-peer communications, agent-based software and dynamic code, services which answer questions for pay not unlike Amazon Mechanical Turk, greenhouse gases, an sentient AI Google-alike, skinny wispy-bearded hackers who can only sleep in cupboards, an urgent threat to liberty (in this case terror from an invasion of alien big-game hunters) and political reaction trying to lead to censorship of the net… and a happy ending.

All written in 1983. Older, better, and more plausible than Neuromancer cyber-trash.

ORA:CLE – Opinions Research Advice : Computer Linked Experts

#Many thanks, Kevin#