"Neal Stephenson - Simoleon Caper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

user-friendly operating systems, each one rife with automatic help systems,
customer-service hot lines and intelligent agents. The theater's subwoofer
causes our silverware to buzz around like sheet-metal hockey players, and
amplified explosions knock swirling nebulas of tiny bubbles loose from the
insides of our champagne glasses. Those low frequencies must penetrate the young
brain somehow, coming in under kids' media-hip radar and injecting the
edfotainucational muchomedia bitstream direct into their cerebral cortices.
"Hauled down a mother of an account today," Joe explains. "We hype cars. We hype
computers. We hype athletic shoes. But as of three hours ago, we are hyping a
currency."
"What?" says his wife Anne.
"Y'know, like dollars or yen. Except this is a new currency."
"From which country?" I ask. This is like offering lox to a dog: I've given Joe
the chance to enlighten his feckless bro. He hammers back half a flute of Dom
Perignon and shifts into full-on Pitch Mode.
"Forget about countries," he says. "We're talking Simoleons - the smart, hip new
currency of the Metaverse."
"Is this like E-money?" Anne asks.
"We've been doing E-money for e-ons, ever since automated-teller machines." Joe
says, with just the right edge of scorn. "Nowadays we can use it to go shopping
in the Metaverse. But it's still in U.S. dollars. Smart people are looking for
something better."
That was for me. I graduated college with a thousand bucks in savings. With
inflation at 10% and rising, that buys a lot fewer Leinenkugels than it did a
year ago.
"The government's never going to get its act together on the budget," Joe says.
"It can't. Inflation will just get worse. People will put their money
elsewhere."
"Inflation would have to get pretty damn high before I'd put my money into some
artificial currency," I say.
"Hell, they're all artificial," Joe says. "If you think about it, we've been
doing this forever. We put our money in stocks, bonds, shares of mutual funds.
Those things represent real assets - factories, ships, bananas, software, gold,
whatever. Simoleons is just a new name for those assets. You carry around a
smart card and spend it just like cash. Or else you go shopping in the Metaverse
and spend the money online, and the goods show up on your doorstep the next
morning."
I say, "Who's going to fall for that?"
"Everyone," he says. "For our big promo, we're going to give Simoleons away to
some average Joes at the Super Bowl. We'll check in with them one, three, six
months later, and people will see that this is a safe and stable place to put
their money."
"It doesn't inspire much confidence," I say, "to hand the stuff out like
Monopoly money."
He's ready for this one. "It's not a handout. It's a sweepstakes." And that's
when he asks me to calculate how many jelly beans will fill Soldier Field.
Two hours later, I'm down at the local galaxy-class grocery store, in Bulk: a
Manhattan of towering Lucite bins filled with steel-cut rolled oats, off-brand
Froot Loops, sun-dried tomatoes, prefabricated s'mores, macadamias, French
roasts and pignolias, all dispensed into your bag or bucket with a jerk at the