Yeah -- that's why I cited Stephenson in the essay I wrote about Avatar: http://jseliger.com/2009/12/27/thoughts-on-james-camerons-av... , which got upvoted on HN yesterday. I assume whoever submitted this link thought, "Stephenson ought to get a place of his own here."

Yeah, that's when I first read the piece, after reading yours which linked to it.

It's a fantastic point, that we have an idealized view of how the critical elements of our infrastructure are created, so we make movie geeks with super powers... I guess we do the same with firemen and police and other parts of society that we rely upon and we have all those lame TV dramas.