> And, it's significant that the United States' first black president is
> so perfect a vessel for channeling the goals of the most sophisticated
> elements of the capitalist class (the supercomputer wielding financial
> sector...one day, they'll have their Wintermute) that they could scarcely
> have hoped for better if he was grown in a vat.
Oh, they've got their Wintermute -- it's called the Eurostate, but it isn't taking orders from the US anymore. Which brings us to Neuromancer, the other AI. Gibson's text described its cyberspace avatar as a young boy from... [drum roll]... Rio de Janeiro.
Come to think of it, several of the characters in that amazing, unnerving, and indispensable book are virtual anagrams of the future BRIC powers -- with some pardonable geographic slippages: Turkey and Eastern Europe are proxies for Russia, China is there as the Kuang, etc. Only India is missing, interestingly.
-- DRR