What is the fundamental functions of nightlife? As far as I can tell, a few big ones are: * Meeting friends and maintaining existing social networks * Meeting new people * Exchange of ideas and experiences (whether debate, art, gossip or anything else) * Experiencing community * Looking for potential mates * Relaxation and other pleasures (whether food, music, sex or thrills) Many places combine them of course. The British pub is a "third place" that is not home nor work, where people can 1) relax social norms and interact in ways they cannot otherwise do (there is still a social status system going on, but it is local to the pub world - your boss is no longer your boss), 2) maintain a social community but with some options for encountering new people near the bar. An opera is about gaining experiences and some relaxation but also seeing and being seen - status and some ritual plays an important role. In a world where everybody is a Muse command away I expect the meeting friends role to be less important. Still around, since it is nice to do things with your friends, but having good opportunities to meet entirely new people serendipitously becomes even more important. Same thing with idea exchange: can be done anywhere, more fun together, but what you really look for is the thing you have never even heard of. Expect the New Shanghai nightclubs to be wild as the fashion, media, enhancement and memetics people show off the latest ideas and coolhunters ply their trade. I think community is the big thing. People want to belong. Their social networks were broken in the Fall and the world is still scary, so people will want to feel each other, to know others are there. From the micrograv worker pub up at the axis down to the luxury gentlemen's club in the Consortium district, what people really pay premium for is a sense of belonging. Of course, you do not pay credits or rep for it, you pay by participating in the micropolitics of the place. Of course, this is largely theory. *My* idea of a wild Friday night evening is a cryonics conference at a desert resort where I will undoubtedly spend hours talking shop about brain scanning... hurray for the long tail!

Hello all. First comment. Anyway, Given the nature of the many, many brain upgrades that the Bright inhabitants have - and the documented odds that monkeying around with ones brain too much leads to issues- it would not be unreasonable for more specialized spimes and systems be set up to detect patterns and signs of degrading mental states, especially if this system has had time to set a baseline (before a given upgrade, for instance). After that, perhaps Acumenic would license the technology to the rest of the world. There are already psychology expert systems in the game, which create predictive profiles of individuals with standard spime and surveillance data- a natural extension would be ubiquitous psych monitoring.