Neal’s Feed and Seed

people never talk about the technogimmick in The Diamond Age

The Diamond Age, like all Neal Stephenson novels, is about revolutionary shifts in the means of production of something – in this case the transition from “The Feed”, a futuristic centralised hub-and-spoke nanoassembly infrastructure to a different archeofuturistic mode “The Seed” where everything is grown by Vegetables that have been Invented by a Society, to produce commodities

the implication is that this solves the alienation problem which the various polities of the world, all more or less self-consciously Trad as Fuarq, have been butting their heads against throughout the novel, because it pleases quite hardcore anarcho-commies very much to be alienated from production of commodities when it is performed in mysterious ways by a vegetable in the field next to your cottage.

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