"I imagined a future in which rich people create dozens of scapegoats for themselves, like [...] body doubles, and wondered how some data-mining bot might tell the difference."
reminds me of the "Friends of Privacy" in Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge[1]:
"[T]he web browser was much like the ones he remembered, even though many sites couldn't be displayed properly. Google still worked. He searched for Lena Llewelyn Gu. Of course, there was plenty of information about her. Lena had been a medical doctor and rather well known in a limited, humdrum way. And yes, she had died a couple of years ago. The details were a cloud of contradiction, some agreeing with what Bob told him, some not. It was this damn Friends of Privacy. It was hard to imagine such villains, doing their best to undermine what you could find on the net. A "vandal charity" was what they called themselves."
[1] Incidentally, a must-read for anyone wondering about possible implications of Google-Glass-like VR/AR technology.
It's amazing, reading Vinge, how his writing just keeps getting better and better. Though the "deepness" novels may still be his best, I was surprised by how poetically written, perhaps because a key character was a poet, Rainbow's End was. Vinge really knows where his towel is.
"I imagined a future in which rich people create dozens of scapegoats for themselves, like [...] body doubles, and wondered how some data-mining bot might tell the difference."
reminds me of the "Friends of Privacy" in Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge[1]:
"[T]he web browser was much like the ones he remembered, even though many sites couldn't be displayed properly. Google still worked. He searched for Lena Llewelyn Gu. Of course, there was plenty of information about her. Lena had been a medical doctor and rather well known in a limited, humdrum way. And yes, she had died a couple of years ago. The details were a cloud of contradiction, some agreeing with what Bob told him, some not. It was this damn Friends of Privacy. It was hard to imagine such villains, doing their best to undermine what you could find on the net. A "vandal charity" was what they called themselves."
[1] Incidentally, a must-read for anyone wondering about possible implications of Google-Glass-like VR/AR technology.