The unexplored part of the Diamond Age, what if the A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer servers are shut down.
E: Btw, you yourself will need to imagine a rant here about this kind of tech comes for the vulnerable first, and then is often removed from them when they could be depending on it without much fanfare as well. See also the people with eye implants who are no longer supported by the people behind them.
Diamond Age is an interesting idea, the original Primer was for the elite and used distributed encryption to farm out the qualified work to skilled artisans. In the end though, a cut-down primer (using some sort of AI? it’s been a long time since I read it) is used to educate and train the girl army used by one of the faction in the final battle.
It’s not really explained but I suspect the OG Primer had a robust payment model that ensured that the service oculd be kept solvent.
You are right, the OG Primer was a bit bespoke yes. So I doubt that could have failed without large parts of the whole financial system falling down. It was more a reference than a real 1 to 1 comparison, and it certainly doesn’t fit neatly. Prob should have just made it a reference to the girl army thing, but I coudln’t recall enough of that.
At best you end up with the Gunther Hermann story from Deus Ex, forced into retirement and made disposable when last generation’s top-of-the-line becomes this generation’s unusable trash.