I've started thinking more and more about a short throwaway conversation in Anathem about how the internet in their world is absolutely ruined by AI and the only solution they have left is a user driven reputation system for entities and how one of the characters just earned a lot of "reputons" for recording an event. Mostly I think about how something like that is going to be signed into law by some state and it'll…
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"Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction. Don't even bother trying to parse that. The acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn't been a true asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass - never mind - and another day after that to make sure you aren't just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation."
Fantastic book. I read it twice so far, highly recommended. So many little off-handed conceptual gems everywhere.