The Feed

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Stephensonia

It was apparent to Hackworth that Dr. X posessed his own Feed, independent of that supplied by Source Victoria.

Community Entry

The Feed is a term of art to describe a cluster of matter pipelines which transmits isotopically isolated raw materials to Matter Compilers connected to the Feed network, much as packets on a network are delivered to individual computers, though differently. Each isotope in the periodic chart has its own pipeline in The Feed, like a bundle of optical fibers, each of which only transmits one frequency of light.

The matter transmitted via The Feed is refined and isotopically isolated at a facility called a Source. The primary source we are concerned with is Source Victoria, which is the primary source of the economic wealth of the Victorian/Atlantean society, outside of intellectual property in the designs of products that can be manufactured by Matter Compilers, and Energy.

Feedonomics

These three things: refined matter, energy, and IP, form the triad of Diamond Age economics. Whoever controls these maintains the ability to enforce some form of classical economic scarcity. The Phyles of this new age saw how the nation-states of the previous era disintegrated when they lost control of their revenue base, and so utilize the Common Economic Protocol, through Protocol Enforcement, to enforce a form of stability and stagnation in the exponential growth of technology and liberty which occurred in the Snow Crash period which threatened to bring on a technological/social/economic Singularity.

Cryptnet, a phyle of highly libertarian extropic hackers, intends to break this vise of control by engineering a very libertarian form of nanotechnology, The Seed. The Seed will allow individual landholders/tenants the ability to grow whatever goods they need on their own land. Oddly enough, the Confucians of the Celestial Kingdom want the same thing, but seem to believe that their society, based on Confucianism, can operate stably once they have obtained The Seed.

One is left thinking of ancient chinese proverbs, like "be careful what you wish for, you might get it", "no good deed goes unpunished", and the chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times"....