Joiler Veppers Has a Rocket Company
This essay is a standalone piece. It connects thematically to The Default is Contribution series, which explored what technology owes to the society that produces it. In 2010, three years before his death from cancer, the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks published Surface Detail. It is, among other things, a book about virtual hells — digital afterlives designed to torment the dead, run on vast server farms and funded by the wealthy.