SideburnsOfDoom

I picked up "Glasshouse", read the back of the book, thought "Big Brother ... in space. It doesn't sound like much" But I ended up really liking it and recommending it as insightful speculative fiction.

I picked up "The Family Trade", read the back of the book, thought "alternate worlds meets startups, it doesn't sound that good" but I ended up really liking it.

I picked up "The Atrocity Archives", thought "James Bond meets Cthulhu" but ended up really liking it...

... do you make a point of turning unpromising-sounding premises into something really extra-ordinary? Or are the back-of-book blurbs just over-simplifying?

Trivia: Depeche Mode are on Mute Records. "stumm" is German for "mute" or "silent".

So, the impact will be mass surveillance meets open data? Real-time pollution and traffic levels mapped onto your google glasses as you cycle to work (and realtime uploaded video from said google-glass cam) plus that iPhone app that can tell you on a Friday night which club the girls are at by analysing twitter/foursquare/facebook chatter? (plus your boss's version that knows where you are. And maybe something that can track and force Parcelfarce to really deliver when they say they will. )

The radical transparency surveillance state that Brin predicted, open to all? Or data inequality leveraged by the HFT engines of the rich corporations to give them the edge to make a buck of it?

Haha, I can guess at a data visualisation map of the ambient viral density during a flu outbreak. People changing their route to work to avoid infected areas... Of course, like the War On Terror, people's perception of and reaction to the danger is a bigger threat.

... OKCupid offering to find your 99% GeneMatch.

I couldn't imagine making talk at the store. Is it really something people do?

No. In the UK, not so much.