Oscar Valparaiso had once imagined politics as a chess
game.
His kind of chess game. Pawns, knights, and queens, powers
and strategies,
ranks and files, black squares and white squares. Studying
this tape
had cured him of that metaphor. Because this phenomenon
on the tape was not
a chess piece. It was there on the public chessboard
all right,
but it wasn't a rook or a bishop. It was a wet squid,
a swarm of bees.
It was a new entity that pursued its own orthogonal agenda,
and vanished into the silent interstices of a deeply
networked
and increasingly nonlinear society.
Bruce Sterling, Distraction