The terrible prescience of Charlie Stross

[digitaldiscipline]

Full review of "Rule 34" will be forthcoming, but I wanted to give some love to an incredibly prescient passage from the book, which describes what's an entirely likely (okay, maybe hopeful) fallout effect from the Occupy movement:

[Character]'s job is an odd one: catching corporate corruption before it metastasizes and infects society at large. After Enron... the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, accounting regulations for catching corporate malfeasance... accounting irregularities [were] symptoms of maladministration. The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn't admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.

Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shockwave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters... ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector... recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder -- but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.

And then he says something that will land him a cabinet post when I ascend to power:

... If corporations wanted to be legal citizens, the politicians riding the backlash declared, they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted... [consultants] could sound a warning if [a company's] structure rewarded pathological behavior.