Perhaps it wasn't wise to read this futuristic novel of ideas /science fiction during the second year of an endless election cycle - or perhaps it was, because it's about how the world might change the system of government, creating small government units, all sharing a common information system to provide facts and run elections. It suffers from being pretty slow to begin with, but picks up as something goes terribly wrong and the Information crashes in the middle of an election. Who's behind the sabotage, and what is the object? The world building is interesting, but I found the wonkishness ultimately not totally satisfying. One touch that amused me: the national library in Paris has no employees - I guess libraries, even when highly sophisticated, run themselves - but the Information has enormous numbers of workers, kind of the reversal of the common sense that the Internet somehow just runs on servers and algorithms.