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

The Feed and the Seed are two forms of nanotechnology, and they symbolize distinct relations of power between creators and users. The Feed is centralized and controlled by corporate interests. While it provides unlimited and free or nearly free access to material goods, it also gives moneyed interests power over ordinary people. Source Victoria, for example, gives New Atlantis power over where people live, because they need to live in reach of a matter compiler connected to the source. The ubiquity of goods created via the Feed also makes it hard for all but the most highly skilled to find decent work or be anything other than users. Neo-Victorian characters such as Hackworth see the Feed explicitly as a means of social, economic, and political control over people who cannot assert intellectual property claims in the Common Economic Protocol. To creators, the Feed looks like the basis of a well-ordered society.

The Seed is also nanotechnology, but the network upon which it depends (the “wet Net”), assembly instructions, and raw material are all distributed instead of centralized. Anyone can be a creator by interacting with the Seed, and seeds can be used anywhere. In addition, the open-source nature of information about the Seed is in direct contrast to the careful control of such information as intellectual property by Machine Phase Systems and other corporations. Ordinary people are thus able to become creators; they have a direct connection to the material goods they create and can customize material objects to meet their own needs, even when those needs do not coincide with those of moneyed interests. The Seed represents the best-case, utopian idea that information and technology can make people free.

When Nell is still living in Enchantment, her “kids”—Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple—are toys that symbolize her traumatic childhood. While most children in their innocence engage in “pretend” play with toys for the sake of fun and entertainment, Nell mostly engages in imitative play—role-playing that allows children to create scenarios that they observe among adults—to process and make sense of abuse. For example, when one of Tequila’s boyfriends screams abuse at Nell because she is disturbing his leisure, Nell goes to her room and scolds her toys for disturbing Tad. She also sends them to bed early. She’s acting like Tad by scolding the toys, but she is also creating a scenario in which she is the one with power over what must seem like out-of-control, frightening interactions with adults. The Primer models a different scenario—telling the toys a story before bed each night, an act of caring.

The Primer co-opts the toys further by transforming them into walking, talking archetypes who can provide emotional support and nurturing that Nell hasn’t had. The Primer helps Nell parent herself, with the Night Friends assuming several aspects of an adequate parent during successive stages of childhood development. Dinosaur, for example, is a protector and warrior who teaches Nell about establishing her own sense of safety, psychological and physical, through self-defense, while Duck is a mother figure to whom Nell has recourse for nurturing when she can’t appeal to adults to provide that for her.

Hackworth’s hats are material objects that symbolize his neo-Victorian values and identity. When Hackworth is an up-and-coming artifex, he wears the more formal top hat, which is embedded with nanotechnology he can have because of his status as a neo-Victorian. Hackworth assumes the more practical bowler after being disgraced by his time with the Drummers and his theft of the Primer plans. His bowler shows that he still embraces neo-Victorian values but that his experiences have humbled him and provided a limit to his aspirations in New Atlantis. When he exits the narrative, having completed the Seed and ensured the end of foreign control over the coastal republics in China, Hackworth voluntarily descends into the ocean, and his bowler floats away. The loss of the bowler symbolizes his freedom from neo-Victorian values, especially the emphasis on imposing order on others.