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things by hand, but the only purchasers of their goods are the wealthy Neo-Victorians
who value such things in a way that is both moral and aesthetic. One of the central
confl icts of the topic is around the covert development of a competing version of
nanotechnology, “the Seed,” which decentralizes the Feed system, providing more
anarchic access and creating economic disruption.
The ability to easily fabricate anything one can imagine reconfi gures how wealth
and social status are construed in this world. In an early chapter, a character is
traveling by “airship” to a birthday party for the granddaughter of one of the Neo-
Victorian “Equity Lords.”
The hierarchy of staterooms on
Æther
matched the status of its passengers perfectly, as
these parts of the ship could be decompiled and remade between voyages. For Lord Finkle-
McGraw, his three children and their spouses, and Elizabeth (his fi rst and only grandchild
so far), the airship lowered a private escalator that carried them up into the suite at the very
prow, with its nearly 180-degree forward view.
Aft of the Finkle McGraws were a dozen or so other Equity Lords, merely earl- or
baron-level, mostly ushering grandchildren rather than children into the class B suites. Then
it was executives, whose gold watch chains, adangle with tiny email-boxes, phones, torches,
snuffboxes, and other fetishes, curved round the dark waistcoats they wore to deemphasize
their bellies…
…John Percival Hackworth was an engineer. Most engineers were assigned to tiny
rooms with fold-down beds, but Hackworth bore the loftier title of Artifex and had been a
team leader on this very project, so he rate a second-class stateroom with one double bed
and a fold-out for Fiona (Stephenson
1995
, p. 13).
Where Star Trek imagines a world where fabrication and freedom-from-want
result in a reduction in the trappings of status and wealth, The Diamond Age instead
suggests how such technologies could reify social hierarchies. The Neo-Victorians
appear to have combined corporate structures with the notions of “Peerage” that
dominated British society in the nineteenth century. There is, however, evidence of
some meritocratic systems in place: the society also values design suffi ciently to
reward those with talent and skill, such as Hackworth. On the airship
Æ
ther
, the
most valuable commodity is space, and so the subdivision of space becomes far
more signifi cant as a status representation than other elements such as the materials
for the construction of the staterooms or other aspects of ornamentation that might
have previously represented affl uence.
Time
and
effort
are also things to be valued,
as seen in the previous example, where the use of handwoven cloth is preferred by
the Neo-Victorians over a nanotechnologically fabricated material. Affl uence and
wealth aren't about access to rare materials (such as gold or diamond, both of which
can be fabricated as cheaply as any other object), but instead about access to other
things that are in short supply: particular skills and expertise.
11.3.4
Makers:
The Ride and “Disney in a Box”
Our last example is set in the much more immediate future and deals with the impli-
cations of today's home fabrication technologies and of the explosion of electronic
