Dwapara Yuga - Freedom Book

This month saw the release of the book Freedom, the successor to Daemon by LA's Daniel Suarez.

The allure of Suarez's work is the combination of page-turning thriller and the potential pros and cons of 24x7x365 access to all personal, social, business and government data everywhere. The intertwining material themes of Freedom, Democracy and Technology are those of Dwapara Yuga, although there is no explicit spiritual message in the books. The discussions of holons and neufeudalism are particularly relevant to our times.

Fifty years ago, such data was accessible only to first world governments, militaries, intelligence services and giant corporations but as the ARPANET and MILNET gave way to the Internet and mainframes shrank from minicomputers to microcomputers to laptops and PDAs such as the iPhone or NexusOne, the data sunglasses of the book are just a short step away for ordinary citizens.

Other aspects of the book from robotized weapons to drones are no longer the realm of science fiction but very much part of the modern battlefield, as detailed in a recent WSJ article - Israeli Robots Remake Battlefield - and the limits of power between nation states, private armies and nationless corporations and groups are likely to define the twenty first century.