Book download page: https://craphound.com/news/2012/09/17/free-creative-commons-licensed-downloads-of-rapture-of-the-nerds/
It's the late 21st century, and the Singularity has already happened. Huge numbers of people have abandoned biological bodies and uploaded themselves into vast posthuman computational civilizations spread throughout the solar system. About a billion stubborn old-fashioned humans remain on Earth.
Unfortunately, the uploaded superintelligences keep sending Earth technological ideas. Potentially civilization-destroying inventions capable of wrecking industries, cultures or society itself.
So Earth has created Tech Jury Service. Ordinary people get drafted to examine these technologies and decide whether humanity should actually be allowed to use them.
Our protagonist, Huw Jones, is hilariously inappropriate for the job. He's a cranky Welsh potter and something of a technophobe living in a world overflowing with posthuman technology. Then he gets selected for jury duty.
We're talking about uploaded humans, molecular machinery, artificial superintelligences, intelligent anarchist ants, body modification, gender changes, bizarre religions, courtroom insanity, conspiracies, technological viruses, simulated realities and eventually contact with something much larger than humanity's own posthuman civilization.
Everything is satirical, vulgar, extremely geeky and intentionally absurd. Doctorow himself described it as a comic novel about the Singularity that was partly a celebration of technophilia and partly an indictment of it.
