The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

“It was too late for Hackworth to change his personality, but it wasn’t too late for Fiona [....] How could he inculcate her with the nobleman’s emotional stance—the pluck to take risks with her life, to found a company, perhaps found several of them even after the first efforts had failed? He had read the biographies of several notable peers and found few common threads between them.”

Hackworth is aware that something about neo-Victorian indoctrination places a limit on how far he can rise through the neo-Victorian power structure, but he still doesn’t challenge the neo-Victorian power structure itself. His longing for Fiona to surpass him is couched in economic terms, reflecting how deeply his identity, including as a father, is victim to neo-Victorian indoctrination.

“When the Coastal Republic arose, a judicial system was built upon the only model the Middle Kingdom had ever known, that being the Confucian. But such a system cannot truly function in a larger society that does not adhere to Confucian precepts. ‘From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.’ Yet how am I to cultivate the persons of the barbarians for whom I have perversely been given responsibility?”

Judge Fang recognizes that governing in Shanghai presents a challenge to rigid separation between the phyles and cultural traditions because Shanghai is a city where boundaries are constantly breached or even broken. In his court, he tries to deal with this problem through the consistent application of Confucian traditions. The question he asks himself is one that no neo-Victorians ask, showing that neo-Victorian culture is so focused on profit and power that they fail to consider the issue of inequality. What Fang is running up against is a contest between two cultures.

“During the Boxer Rebellion, the rumor was spread that the orphanages run by European missionaries were in fact abattoirs where white doctors scooped the eyes out of the heads of Han babies to make medicine for European consumption. That many Han believed these rumors accounts for the extreme violence to which the Europeans were subjected during that rebellion. But it also reflects a regrettable predisposition to racial fear and hatred that is latent within the breasts of all human beings of all tribes.”

Stephenson introduces historical context about the impact of imperialism on relations between Westerners and China during PhyrePhox’s interrogation. Fang highlights, however, that PhyrePhox is in particular danger because he seems to be harming children. This warning is one of the places in which Stephenson implies that there are deep-rooted beliefs and values that transcend national and racial identity.

“I can pick up a brush at any time, Dr. X was saying, and toss off a work of art that can hang on the wall beside the finest calligraphy of the Ming Dynasty. By sending the Judge this scroll, Dr. X was laying claim to all of the heritage that Judge Fang most revered.”

In this passage, Fang offers an analysis of the values embedded in material objects. In this case, the scroll’s reliance on conventions of Chinese culture communicates the power of Dr. X. Handmade, bespoke objects like the scroll are a rarity in the world of The Diamond Age, so only the powerful generally have access to them or have enough leisure time to make such objects rather than having them manufactured from mass-produced nanomaterials.

“In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby.”

Many of the characters in the novel live in “a world of abstractions” such as media, computer code, or even abstract ideals such as honor and discipline. This passage presages how important human connections become over the course of the novel.

“The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.”

Many characters try to puzzle out what it is that makes neo-Victorians so powerful. Finkle-McGraw posits that it is the discipline that comes from restraining natural human impulses that makes a person truly neo-Victorian. He couches this battle in terms of morality, right and wrong, and (possibly) a deity. There are other perfectly fine ways of being, but neo-Victorian chauvinism is such that the other ways of being aren’t just different, they are immoral. This passage is a critique of moral relativism, which Stephenson elsewhere has characters label as the fatal flaw in late 20th-century culture. The character arcs and the resolution of the novel indicate that such black-and-white thinking makes the neo-Victorians too inflexible to respond to rapid change.

“He had not noticed, before, the sheer maddening profusion of the place, each person seemingly an ethnic group of one, each with his or her own costume, dialect, sect, and pedigree. It was as if, sooner or later, every part of the world became India and thus ceased to function in any sense meaningful to straight-arrow Cartesian rationalists like John Percival Hackworth, his family and friends.”

An important element of Hackworth’s character before his descent to the Drummer colony is his overwhelming discomfort with boundary violations like the ones he describes here. To him, a multilingual, multicultural city looks like chaos rather than diversity. This bias is a part of neo-Victorian indoctrination, however, and his subsequent experiences force him to move on from this fear. The comment about India is rooted in imperialist bias that was common during the first Victorian Age.

“‘I mean you’re a veteran girl, just like me and you’ve got scars’—he suddenly ripped his shirt open, buttons flying all over the room, to reveal his particolored torso—‘like I do. The difference is, I know I’m a veteran. You persist in thinking you’re just a little girl, like those bloody Vickys you go to school with.’”

Constable Moore helps Nell begin the processing her early trauma. The constable teaches her this lesson with both words and his body, which bears the markers of real-life experience. Coupled with his insult to the people and education on offer at Miss Matheson’s, his lesson helps Nell understand the importance of informal education such as that which occurs socially or interpersonally. Nell is learning that life can be an important teacher, while purely academic education can sometimes leave out key lessons needed to live a good life.

“[T]he difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.”

Constable Moore further critiques formal education by teaching Nell that ambiguity and the ability to apply knowledge to real-life situations are what will make her intelligent. His comfort with non-academic sources of knowledge and with ambiguity places him in direct conflict with the neo-Victorian values Nell is learning at school. Nell’s later decision not to become a neo-Victorian is thus deeply influenced by the informal education she receives from the constable.

“The difference was (as he realized, watching them more keenly) that Nell always knew where she was going. Elizabeth and Fiona never did. This was a question not of native intelligence (Miss Matheson’s tests and observations proved that much) but of emotional stance. Something in the girl’s past had taught her, most forcefully, the importance of thinking things through.”

This passage is from Finkle-McGraw’s point of view, and it shows his early awareness that a neo-Victorian education alone isn’t sufficient to produce a neo-Victorian woman who is prepared to meet the challenges of a rapidly shifting world. All three girls own Primers and attend school, but Nell is different because she has experienced trauma as a thete, giving her the opportunity to develop grit. The privilege of the other two girls is an impediment to developing grit, meaning the whole process of forming capable neo-Victorians is doomed from the start. Passages like this foreshadow that Nell will reject the neo-Victorian phyle.

“Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can live anywhere. The Common Economic Protocol specifies how this is to be arranged. Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others [...] New Atlantis, like many tribes, propagates itself largely through education.”

Miss Matheson makes explicit what Nell has long suspected—the school is not about teaching knowledge for its own sake but inculcating values that encourage unquestioning acceptance of the status quo—the era of the Common Economic Protocol, which benefits neo-Victorians. While Miss Matheson claims this is not a function of race (or even racist oppression), there is little examination of how a world built around the Feed makes neo-Victorians winners in this system. Instead, she credits discipline and culture for their prosperity. This particular blindness about how the Feed keeps reproducing inequality is what makes neo-Victorians vulnerable to overthrow by the Seed.

“Nell could not bring herself to agree with what Miss Matheson had said; but she found that, after this conversation, everything became easy. She had the neo-Victorians all figured out now. The society had miraculously transmutated into an orderly system, like the simple computers they programmed in the school. Now that Nell knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted.”

Nell’s response to Miss Matheson’s high-sounding discussion of neo-Victorian ethics is pragmatic. What she’s learned in the Primer—that systems are governed by rules that can be discovered or even gamed—keeps her from accepting what authority says. Nell’s education in the Primer and in life serves as a counter to her formal education and indoctrination. She subverts what Miss Matheson hopes to teach her here.

“‘Which path do you intend to take, Nell?’ said the Constable, sounding very interested. ‘Conformity or rebellion?’ ‘Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.’”

The culmination of Nell’s refusal to accept what neo-Victorian culture and thete culture have to offer her is setting out on an adventure. In this pivotal moment, Nell finally leaves behind early childhood by assuming control over her own life.

“Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and peace—to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward—and lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books—that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upon it will be founded a more highly evolved society.”

CryptNet’s perspective that the “free flow and self-replication” of information will naturally result in liberation for all is another way of saying that “the information wants to be free,” which has variously been used by anarchists, hackers, and people who oppose intellectual property laws that place limits on users who hope to become creators/programmers. Although The Diamond Age is filled with fairy tales and is a bildungsroman about a girl’s coming of age, the conflicts in the novel help Stephenson explore debates about the negative or positive impacts of technology on people and culture. His concern about these issues reflects that his work is a reaction to cyberpunk as a genre.

“Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first [...] But as she settled in closer, she found that it warmed her and satisfied her, and by the time her mind wandered into sleep, she had become dependent upon it and would not consider going back into the cold and dark place where she had been traveling for so many years.”

Nell’s experience with technology underscores that at its best, technology should support people-to-people connections. Because of (or perhaps in spite of) the Primer, Nell has been able to maintain a child-mother relationship that would have been denied her if physical proximity was the only way to have such a relationship. “The cold and dark place” may be what the Primer is without a human personality on the other side of the technology. Nell’s thoughts here are a mature perspective on what technology can do, including some skepticism about utopian idealization of technology.

“John Hackworth, somehow, was better than anyone else at making the transition between the society of Drummers and the Victorian tribe, and each time he crossed the boundary, he seemed to bring something with him, clinging to his garments like traces of scent. These faint echoes of forbidden data entrained in his wake caused tangled and unpredictable repercussions, on both sides of the boundary, that Hackworth himself might not even be aware of.”

Carl Hollywood realizes in this moment that Hackworth is the Alchemist, enabled by his ability to cross boundaries. The irony is that Hollywood knows this about Hackworth, but Hackworth does not know this about himself. This passage shows how Hackworth’s inability to see beyond the orderly, decorous identity the neo-Victorians have given him makes him less powerful than he could be. Up until the moment Hackworth interacts with the Dramatis Personae, Hackworth finds his life subject to the whims of powerful people. Hollywood’s recognition of what Hackworth is foreshadows what Hackworth can become—a person who creates the Seed—once he gains this self-knowledge about his capabilities.

“For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society. The result has been centuries of chaos. We ask you to end that by giving us the Seed.”

Dr. X sees the struggle between the Feed and the Seed as a struggle between cultures, one that specifically arises out the imperialist dominance of Western powers over countries like China. While Hackworth has assumed that neo-Victorians, the inheritors of British dominance, have been a force for order, Dr. X offers an alternate perspective that undercuts the sense of moral authority neo-Victorians derive from imposing order on others. Although Hackworth initially rejects Dr. X’s entreaty, he later creates the Seed, showing that he likely agrees with Dr. X. This conversation marks the beginning of a shift in Hackworth’s understanding of himself and his culture. 

“Nell had gone into the world to seek her fortune and this was what she had found. She understood more forcibly than ever the wisdom of Miss Matheson’s remarks about the hostility of the world and the importance of belonging to a powerful tribe; all of Nell’s intellect, her vast knowledge and skills, accumulated over a lifetime of intensive training, meant nothing at all when she was confronted with a handful of organized peasants.”

Nell is at her lowest point when she is imprisoned and tortured after the Fists take Pudong. She learns in a hard way that the lessons Miss Matheson taught her about power and phyle are not just rooted in rules that can be subverted to game the system. This moment marks when Nell truly leaves childhood and becomes a woman. The use of the word “peasants” also communicates something about how she conceives the relationship between herself and the Fists. If the Fists are peasants, Nell must represent civilization, power, and authority. On one hand, this may be neo-Victorian arrogance, but given her abject situation, the other lesson here may be that intellect and education are not sufficient to gain power.

“Nell was outraged in the manner she had long suspected was inevitable. She closed her eyes during the commission of these atrocities, knowing that whatever might be done to the mere vessel of her soul by the likes of these, her soul itself was as serene, as remote from their grasp, as is the full moon from the furious incantations of an aboriginal shaman. She tried to think about the machine that she was designing in her head.”

The trope of rape as a rite of passage frequently appears in literature in which the protagonists are women—especially in science fiction/fantasy genres—so its appearance here is no surprise in a novel centered around a girl coming of age, particularly one written in the 1990s by a male author. Note how Stephenson uses euphemism and indirection to describe the actual violence. This approach reflects the influence of Victorian literature, which frequently uses euphemism to describe brutal violence, especially sexual violence. Also of note is that when confronted with violence, Nell does what she has learned to do in the Primer—recast violence using storytelling and fairy-tale conventions: Her soul is a “moon” staying out of the grasp of an “aboriginal shaman.” Nell is the moon, and the men raping her are unsophisticated primitives. Again, Nell’s self-identity here reflects the impact of neo-Victorianism on her. Stephenson doesn’t really show her emotional response to this violence, but in the next scene, she kills Fists on her way to connecting with the Mouse Army. This passage is thus a key turning point in her identity formation.

“She recalled Harv and his buds elevator-surfing in their old building and reckoned that this would be a good time to take up the practice. As the car rose toward her, she jumped off the ladder, trying to give herself enough upward thrust to match its velocity. She landed hard on the roof, for it was moving far more rapidly than she could jump. The roof knocked her feet out from under her, and she fell backward, slamming her arms as Dojo had taught her.”

Nell’s escape is achieved when she manages to apply life experience gained as a thete, training she first encounters in a book via the Primer. It takes both parts of her life and both forms of education for her to survive. Moments in which she is flexible enough to draw on multiple experiences are ones when she gains power.

“She was not entirely sure why she did it, but some intuition told her that it might be useful; or perhaps it was an artistic urge to make something that would live longer than she would, even if only by a few minutes. She [...] sketched out a simple line drawing in primary colors: an escutcheon in blue, and within it, a crest depicting a book drawn in red and white; crossed keys in gold; and a seed in brown. She caused this image to be displayed on all sides of the skyscraper, between the hundredth and two-hundredth floors.”

Nell doesn’t just rely on education and experience. Here, she relies on intuition, which is generally not something that can be taught, although it can be honed. Her intuitive, artistic choice ends up saving her and counters the neo-Victorian ideal that people are at their best when they rely on rationality. In addition, the crest, a combination of the competing cultures that have influenced Nell, symbolizes her power, which comes from flexible thinking influenced by these multiple cultures.

“[A]ll of them bow[ed] to Nell, not with a Chinese bow or a Victorian one but something they’d come up with that was in between [...] One moment, her life had been a meaningless abortion, and the next it all made glorious sense. She began to speak, the words rushing from her mouth as easily as if she had been reading them from the pages of the Primer. She accepted the allegiance of the Mouse Army [...] and swept her arm across the plaza, over the heads of her little sisters, toward the thousands upon thousands of stranded sojourners from New Atlantis, Nippon, Israel, and all of the other Outer Tribes. ‘Our first duty is to protect these,’ she said.”

Like Nell, the Mouse Army explicitly rejects choosing one side or the other in the contest of cultures that unfolds in the novel. Their comfort with ambiguity and flexible thinking is the defining trait of their new phyle. Unlike the neo-Victorians and the Celestial Kingdom, they do not see blending cultures and values as contamination. This passage paints Nell as the perfect figure for embodying these values. In Nell’s hands and those of the Mouse Army, a more equitable and kinder world than any of those on offer from the dominant phyles can emerge.

“By the time the last girl's foot broke contact with the sandy ocean bottom, the end of the land had already been claimed by a man with a scarlet girdle round his waist, who stood on the shore laughing to think that now the Middle Kingdom was at last a whole country once more. The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head.”

In this scene, Hackworth ends the hold Westerners have asserted over China by continuing to work on the Seed and leaving China. The contest of cultures is apparently over, and the neo-Victorians have lost. The loss of the bowler hat, a symbol of Hackworth’s neo-Victorian identity, indicates that Hackworth has let go of being a proper neo-Victorian.