tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66364224476543522492024-02-18T21:21:22.551-06:00Welcome to Science FictionA continuing examination of Science Fiction: its place and purpose today.Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.comBlogger63125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-34293335154213243242020-12-11T01:47:00.003-06:002020-12-11T01:47:35.890-06:00Charity in an Overmarketed Network Culture<div>I tried to write this in a simple, unpretentious way, but I'm not good enough to do that. I know these words are too much for the simple idea: charity needs a comeback, at least for humans interested in doing things. I mean this primarily in a rhetorical sense: because all of our interactions with each other are fundamentally the meetings of minds who cannot know each other's inner reality, they are all tricky negotiations in which we don't hold all the cards and we have to make guesses. Making charitable guesses about the cards you don't hold in these interactions can be a weakness, because of course people can use naivete to deceive you. Everyone seems to understand that these days. What maybe they don't understand is the strength of the position it can leave you in.</div><div><br /></div><div>Postmodernism and the recursive practice of History has effectively poisoned the old cultural identity of the West. Whether this was necessary or not - whether it was even intentional or not - is left to the reader. Here, I only have to acknowledge that it happened to set up my point. People either still cling to it, full of rage and nostalgia for a version of it that never really was, or else - more commonly - they try to make something new out of the ashes, picking up scraps of historical racial, cultural, religious, philosophical, or commercial identity which can be salvaged in isolation. Isolated, and echoing: in the absence of the contexts which often soundly mediated these pure quanta of identity, they amplify their own importance in the minds of their adherents, soon seeming all-consuming. </div><div><br /></div><div>This must have been escaped before - possibly many times. Wherever isolated groups of us came willingly, or were forced together by circumstance, people with different backgrounds must have come into close proximity with each other, and sometimes - maybe very rarely - they must have <i>not</i> killed and subjugated each other, but rather formed more or less unified societies. There must, at times, arise the conditions and sentiments which lead people to put aside differences and brook misunderstanding and misperception for the sake of the benefits which accrue to groups that can work together. There must, because groups do exist and do not constantly splinter.</div><div><br /></div><div>Or at least, that is one perception. A popular alternative can't see any unification of groups without hierarchy. How, they ask, could there ever really be equality between two different groups? Equality is the rarest outcome of any comparison; how much more likely that we could find some way in which to see that even when two groups unified amicably, there was implicit threat or careful deceit which greased the dovetail path. Perceived like this, there is no unity without coercion, no harmony without dominion. </div><div><br /></div><div>In either event, the structure of communal unity is obviously tenuous and shifting. Whether the West existed occasionally in a state of relative harmony or forever and always in a system of deceptive hierarchical control prior, we now do not have those bonds or chains which kept us together. We do not even seem to know what they are.</div><div><br /></div><div>Charity is one. Not charity like the alms-house variety, and not even charity of the Christian kind - though perhaps these are other social glues worth consideration. The kind of charity I want to talk about here is on display when your opponent - a real enemy to you, based on past interactions - says something you find vague. Its meaning isn't perhaps all that clear to you, and nothing is ever perfectly clear in human communication, so you'll need to interpret it. Charity is when you choose to interpret it the way which reflects best - in your estimation - on the character of the speaker. </div><div><br /></div><div>Since it's your enemy, they've probably said something which will reflect on them poorly regardless of whether you interpret it charitably or not, and there's no point in trying to make things be what they really aren't. But if what they've said was really vague - if there really is the possibility that you could understand the statement differently if it came from someone else, or under different circumstances - then charity becomes your friend. There is no enemy like a friend you made hate you, and no friend like an enemy you showed genuine mercy on. Charity avoids the first and provides the latter. Charitable understanding does not come easily; the gut reaction is to see the worst in your enemy - it forces you to consider the situation carefully, warding against premature decisions. Charity makes you look reasonable. By showing that you want to agree, charity invites an enemy to switch sides without fear of being left without a new ally.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Interpreting what others say in the worst way possible - pessimistically, often against their protests to the contrary - only assures everyone that agreement and friendship are not high on the list of priorities. If someone is in favor of banning abortion and you accuse them of being an anti-feminist, even though they claim their views on abortion have nothing to do with feminism and indeed they very much feel that they are feminist! - then you have not interpreted them charitably, but rather reached in order to vilify them with a conclusion that is only hinted at rather than made plain. Far better it were to take their claim to feminism at face value, but question whether their views on abortion line up with a feminist attitude, than to reject the claim immediately by accusing them of the opposite. </div><div><br /></div><div>To go even further - it should not be outside the realm of decency to remind those who attack you that they might be better served by interpreting the positions you take with charity. To do so invites them to consider that perhaps there is something being missed in their view of your position, if they are arguing in good faith. If they are not arguing with you in good faith, but rather simply to attack you, then it makes them look <i>uncharitable</i> to third parties, who they are presumably attacking you for. </div><div><br /></div><div>Charity in conversation, then, is a powerful rhetorical tool, and I really think its virtues outweigh the risks of its employment. If we really want to win our arguments not to prove the other side wrong so much as to bring sides together in agreement on a truth, then it is indispensable. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, it is largely absent from our current culture. The Conservatives attack the Liberals as communists, and the Social Justice Warriors accuse those who disagree with them of racism and microaggressions. Both extremes cannot stand moderate viewpoints - obviously these <i>must</i> be evidence only of a desire not to rock the boat, rather than to arrive at a carefully-calibrated position. Why this is cannot be answered here by me. I do not understand it, other than to point fingers at large trends like postmodern sensibilities, or the accumulation of histories which have eventually proven all our sacred cows profane, or at least of doubtful cleanliness (often via a particularly uncharitable interpretation of historical sources!). Perhaps it is because we are constantly marketed to - we in the West <i>are</i> the consumers of the world, after all - and insofar as marketing is <i>not</i> the product, it is deception, and endless deceptions have left us unready to accept anything at face value for fear of being the mark in a con. </div><div><br /></div><div>I can only think the guy who forsakes friendships and community in order to avoid being taken in must eventually try to replace those friends and communities with products to fill the void - so that this kind of paranoia makes him - us - the biggest mark of all.<br /></div>Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-53329995382362937052019-11-22T18:36:00.001-06:002019-11-22T18:36:20.963-06:00Control, Integrity, and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira - On the Psychology of Superhuman Life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It is pointless to spend too long making the connection I want to make between the subject of what will be written here and the old anime film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_(1988_film)" target="_blank">Akira</a> - the movie's plot and themes are not difficult to grasp, nor is my reading of it sophisticated. If you have seen it, then what is written here - about the film, at least - will seem self-evident. That is what makes it such a good muse for the subject - the film drives the point home quite readily all by itself. I'd almost just tell anyone reading this to go watch the movie and think on it instead (much more engaging), but I can't find anyone else who's seen the film that wrote precisely what I want to write about it, so maybe it bears a written explication at least once.<br />
<br />
Superhuman power lies at the core of Akira's story. It opens with a thermonuclear blast, detailing the recovery of civilization in the aftermath of yet another world war - this time, presumably a nuclear one. The streets of an immense metropolis are full of political discontent, poverty, and ultraviolent crime - as the official American trailer from 1988 intones: "Neo-Tokyo is about to Explode." Despite the clearly-evident heights of technological achievement in this imaginary 2019, this is a civilization that no one <i>controls </i>- and that theme of chaos and lack of control is on display repeatedly throughout the film. From Tetsuo's desire for a bike his friend Kaneda says "he can't handle," up through the echelons of severity, through Tetsuo's own tenuous grip on sanity to the final battle against his own body's cancerous rebellion.<br />
<br />
As that final battle makes clear, Tetsuo's superhuman powers, much like the thermonuclear device at the start of the film, are dangerous - even to those who wield them - if not controlled. Unable to trust anyone who might want to help him - even his girlfriend, who is inadvertently crushed to death by his amorphous body's relentless expansion - Tetsuo is left to keep himself under control without assistance - a doomed task. Eventually the literally disembodied Akira, who viewers know was part of the same childhood psychokinesis program that Tetsuo was, provides a (convenient, plot-wise) assist, rendering Tetsuo's uncontrollable super-cancer harmless to the rest of Neo-Tokyo's denizens, and the film epilogues.<br />
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Inevitably for a plot in need of conflict with a superhero unable to meet his match anywhere else, the conflict is internal. More specifically, it's the desire to keep internal what is growing beyond ones' own self which drives the conflict for Tetsuo at the very end - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_horror" target="_blank">it is his own body</a> which metastasizes and grows into something other. This is a problem of <i>integrity </i>- "the state of being whole and undivided." Because that which you do not control is, in a sense, not you - it is a separate thing, with separate causes and effects of which you are not necessarily aware, which for that reason you treat as something other than yourself, regardless of the particular physical associations it may possess to your own self/body.<br />
<br />
I think this tension between the super-powered self and self-control is not only inevitable in the plots of fiction, but represents a very real concern for super-powered beings In Real Life. The thrill of this kind of plot comes not from its clever inversion of conflict types, but from a very real worry that humans possess, perhaps best realized in that fiery event horizon of the atom bomb, beyond which we cannot be aware of anything. But even for us, the inability to control our technologies is an external conflict - man vs. machine. The means of their control is therefore also external, and something we are accustomed not to being fully in control of (external circumstances in general not being under our control). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_cognition" target="_blank">There is a fascinating sense</a> in which <a href="https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED410563.pdf" target="_blank">we tend to incorporate these external forms into our own</a>, identifying with them and incorporating them into our cognitive processes, yet most people would agree that they still recognize a definitive line between, say, their computers and themselves.<br />
<br />
Whether cybernetically or psychically (Akira has both!), the superhuman has to contend with the powers that he has identified as his own self, physically and mentally. This is something of which the individual was previously aware and in control of, but which now is beyond their awareness and/or control - and something which, by the very nature of their exceptional qualities, they must contend with alone. In fact, logically there is no benefit even to creating or seeking out other superhumans to help you, because that is tantamount to the same problem you are facing - a superhuman adversary in the form of a portion of yourself which you are no longer in control of, unaware of motives, causes, and effects.<br />
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One answer to this problem is the answer at the end of Akira - one must let go of the idea of control; it is possible that systems not under your own control will still help you. In the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma" target="_blank">Prisoner's Dilemma</a>, this is possibly the motivation behind cooperating strategies, and given either the lack of desire for continued survival (Akira) or the expectation that getting it wrong will not completely end you, this makes sense. But in the rarefied air where superhumans play, the price for defection is high - super powers might quickly render one super-extinct.<br />
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What will superhuman entities be concerned with, then? Constrained by the physics of our universe, they could find it too difficult to maintain awareness and control over parts of themselves which are too distant or hidden from the rest of themselves - these backup copies could themselves become a threat, or be sabotaged by other superhuman agents without detection. Therefore, control and integrity would indeed be primary concerns - the need to keep all of the system which comprises a super-self under your its own control and observation; to keep it "whole" - this would be of paramount concern. Yet it also makes such a being quite <i>finite</i> - vulnerable to powerful opponents capable of potentially wiping out planets, or even star systems. In such a situation, <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/chinas-dark-forest-answer-to-star-wars-optimism" target="_blank">interaction with other superhumans is downright dangerous, and to be avoided</a>. A universe full of transhuman entities is silent, patient, full of solitary entities avoiding contact with each other and ruthlessly maintaining their own integrity - all for survival's sake. Friendship is a psychological need in gregarious animals; it can be engineered away.<br />
<br />
Call this property the Tetsuo Solitude: the need of hyper-powerful systems to maintain control and awareness through isolation and concentration.<br /><br />At the same time, this seems like a problem which life has solved many times before. It is why we have multicellular organisms, and symbiotic relationships, and social animals, like humans - each of us contending for our own individual survival, but predicating our cooperative behavior on the intrinsic belief that we will be met with the same from across the immense divide which separates one intellect from another. The only difference seems to lie in an individual's power - never before have there been players in the great game of life whose capability to inflict catastrophic damage on others so far outstripped that individual's own ability to survive.<br /><br />In the end, Akira transports Tetsuo away from everyone else, into a singularity that saves Neo-Tokyo while segregating him and his new superhuman companion from us forever. The little humans scramble about in the ruins of their city, unable to control enough of the system they live in to make themselves truly dangerous. Below the threshold of the Tetsuo Solitude individually, and safe so long as their civilization does not overstep that threshold itself.<br />
<br />
<br />Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-55128938811115092882019-10-21T10:56:00.002-05:002019-10-21T11:00:47.893-05:00Another Reddit Special on Consciousness<div data-reddit-rtjson="{"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf"}},"1":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness"}},"2":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_realizability#Arguments_for_multiple_realizability"}},"3":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism"}}},"blocks":[{"key":"bck8l","text":"When I am really drunk, I consciously experience hours of life which, upon awakening from a blackout several hours later, I have no recollection.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":10,"length":6,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"ddehb","text":"We know the brain stores memories, and we know the brain is necessary for conscious experience as we can relate it. It seems to me like our narrative concerning conscious experience is inextricably tainted by the reliance on memory, which is quite obviously an imperfect record of conscious experience and which has the unfortunate property of being housed in the same organ we propose creates our conscious experience. That is to say: we rely on our memories of conscious experience to say that we are conscious now, while we are alive, but that we were not prior to birth and after death. If I had no memories, and you asked me if I was conscious yesterday, we would not be able to say that we were. If no one told me that I took my pants off and danced on the table at Denny's last night after I got five pints in me, I might have no basis to believe that it happened. ","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"ef1qv","text":"The fundamental problem I'm getting at here is that conscious experience is a reported phenomenon, and one which relies on an unreliable source. This is such an intractable problem that some have taken to arguing consciousness is in fact an illusion, to try to escape the problem another way - but to me this seems only to ask \"who/what is being deceived?\" or \"does it matter whether it is an \"illusion\" or real,\" since it is the experience which matters so much to us that we afford it very special legal status, regardless of whether it \"real.\"","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[{"offset":213,"length":36,"key":0}],"data":{}},{"key":"ce54p","text":"The problem also sometimes is answered by investigating the neural correlate(s) of consciousness. If we can establish a neural correlate, then we can definitively say whether a brain is conscious or not. If I'm blackout drunk, you might plausibly inspect my brain and say \"ah, but you are conscious right now; you just won't remember it later. I know this because you possess a brain state which corresponds to your normal waking experience.\" To many, however, this misses the point: the counterargument could go that you are not really escaping people's reported states: i.e. \"yes, we all agree this is a brain state that correlates with what we call conscious experience.\" It does not provide evidence against the presence of conscious experience in systems which go unreported, because it does not establish that conscious states can only be realized in living brains, as opposed to other systems like slime molds, ant colonies, computers, or galactic dust clouds. Some think there may be special properties to certain systems which render them capable of conscious experience while others are not - this Type physicalism has its own thorny problems.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":644,"length":7,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":704,"length":7,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":1152,"length":1,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":60,"length":36,"key":1},{"offset":1137,"length":15,"key":2}],"data":{}},{"key":"dv9s7","text":"This leads some to escape the problem by ascribing conscious experience to all materials. There is something it is like, perhaps, to be an iron atom, so to speak - it's just that the iron atom has no way of remembering this or reporting it. Perhaps, they continue, conscious experience is a universal property of matter, and we are simply memory chauvinists. There are fun problems with this approach, too - if all things are conscious, then what does it mean that sometimes larger systems of matter, like human brains, apparently enjoy a conscious experience whose frame of reference is appropriately the system, not any of its individual constituents - though nothing is added to reality by the consideration of the system as whole? Maybe, they might answer, the proper frame of reference is the system as a whole - the universe. Any subsets of its contents may believe themselves individuals, but in fact this is like the conscious mind, blissfully unaware of its pervasive connection to the unconscious by dint of some quality in its present circumstance. ","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":369,"length":3,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":41,"length":47,"key":3}],"data":{}},{"key":"aivqp","text":"But by that point we are well beyond the realm of plausible investigation, and I am starting to think I should get a few more pints in me.","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}]}">
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<span data-offset-key="59057b_initial-0-0">When I am </span><span data-offset-key="59057b_initial-0-1" style="font-style: italic;">really</span><span data-offset-key="59057b_initial-0-2"> drunk, I consciously experience hours of life which, upon awakening from a blackout several hours later, I have no recollection.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="6kp1q-0-0">We know the brain stores memories, and we know the brain is necessary for conscious experience as we can relate it. It seems to me like our narrative concerning conscious experience is inextricably tainted by the reliance on memory, which is quite obviously an imperfect record of conscious experience and which has the unfortunate property of being housed in the same organ we propose creates our conscious experience. That is to say: we rely on our memories of conscious experience to say that we are conscious now, while we are alive, but that we were not prior to birth and after death. If I had no memories, and you asked me if I was conscious yesterday, we would not be able to say that we were. If no one told me that I took my pants off and danced on the table at Denny's last night after I got five pints in me, I might have no basis to believe that it happened. </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="2vn7-0-0">The fundamental problem I'm getting at here is that conscious experience is a reported phenomenon, and one which relies on an unreliable source. This is such an intractable problem that some have taken to arguing </span><a class="_1FRfMxEAy__7c8vezYv9qP" href="https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/illusionism.pdf"><span data-offset-key="2vn7-1-0">consciousness is in fact an illusion</span></a><span data-offset-key="2vn7-2-0">, to try to escape the problem another way - but to me this seems only to ask "who/what is being deceived?" or "does it matter whether it is an "illusion" or real," since it is the experience which matters so much to us that we afford it very special legal status, regardless of whether it is "real."</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="22e0u-0-0">The problem also sometimes is answered by investigating the </span><a class="_1FRfMxEAy__7c8vezYv9qP" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness"><span data-offset-key="22e0u-1-0">neural correlate(s) of consciousness</span></a><span data-offset-key="22e0u-2-0">. If we can establish a neural correlate, then we can definitively say whether a brain is conscious or not. If I'm blackout drunk, you might plausibly inspect my brain and say "ah, but you are conscious right now; you just won't remember it later. I know this because you possess a brain state which corresponds to your normal waking experience." To many, however, this misses the point: the counterargument could go that you are not really escaping people's reported states: i.e. "yes, we all agree this is a brain state that correlates with what </span><span data-offset-key="22e0u-2-1" style="font-style: italic;">we call</span><span data-offset-key="22e0u-2-2"> conscious experience." It does not provide evidence </span><span data-offset-key="22e0u-2-3" style="font-style: italic;">against</span><span data-offset-key="22e0u-2-4"> the presence of conscious experience in systems which go unreported, because it does not establish that conscious states can only be realized in living brains, as opposed to other systems like slime molds, ant colonies, computers, or galactic dust clouds. Some think there may be special properties to certain systems which render them capable of conscious experience while others are not - this Type physicalism has its own </span><a class="_1FRfMxEAy__7c8vezYv9qP" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_realizability#Arguments_for_multiple_realizability"><span data-offset-key="22e0u-3-0">thorny problems</span></a><span data-offset-key="22e0u-4-0" style="font-style: italic;">.</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="6pp0b-0-0">This leads some to escape the problem by </span><a class="_1FRfMxEAy__7c8vezYv9qP" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism"><span data-offset-key="6pp0b-1-0">ascribing conscious experience to all materials</span></a><span data-offset-key="6pp0b-2-0">. There is something it is like, perhaps, to be an iron atom, so to speak - it's just that the iron atom has no way of remembering this or reporting it. Perhaps, they continue, conscious experience is a universal property of matter, and we are simply memory chauvinists. There are </span><span data-offset-key="6pp0b-2-1" style="font-style: italic;">fun</span><span data-offset-key="6pp0b-2-2"> problems with this approach, too - if all things are conscious, then what does it mean that sometimes larger systems of matter, like human brains, apparently enjoy a conscious experience whose frame of reference is appropriately the system, not any of its individual constituents - though nothing is added to reality by the consideration of the system as whole? Maybe, they might answer, the proper frame of reference is the system as a whole - the universe. Any subsets of its contents may believe themselves individuals, but in fact this is like the conscious mind, blissfully unaware of its pervasive connection to the unconscious by dint of some quality in its present circumstance. </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="145n0-0-0">But by that point we are well beyond the realm of plausible investigation, and I am starting to think I should get a few more pints in me.</span></div>
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Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-66903882378692652412019-08-14T00:36:00.003-05:002019-08-14T00:36:34.006-05:00Nihilism, Catholicism, and Science Fiction - Good GodThis is a post which is admittedly of a more personal nature than is typical for this blog, but since blogs are out of style and this one in particular is hardly read, I figure this can really function as much as a public diary as any sort of media actually intended to reach an audience other than myself. Its public nature is simply an acknowledgment that a few might find it interesting, or that I may wish to share these thoughts with a few others down the road. The topic is simple, and derives from a few recent conversations I've had, which seem to form a nexus worth writing on: how I think concepts typically considered the specialty of science fiction buffs and relatively few respectable scientists can shed light on a relationship between two unlikely philosophies: Catholic theology and (popular?) Nihilism.<br />
<br />
Nihilism in its basic form is simple and rational, the way I've been talking about it with friends and acquaintances. Nihilism posits a rational, deterministic reality, to a greater or lesser degree - one best understood via science, but one devoid of meaning, teleology, purpose. Whatever we are, and whatever this is, we can study it, understand the mechanisms, but not why it is here: there is no ultimate "why" - follow an infinite chain of cause and effect down the eternal arrow of time, or circle its loop as dizzily as you may, nothing in it teaches purpose. A nihilist may value things subjectively, but not objectively. Any goals or reasons to exist come from personal predilection, which is itself not considered a valid basis for considering any one path more or less "important." Nothing is important, and nothing is unimportant; life and death have equal value, etc. Whether this shares anything with the last book you've read about nihilism and/or nihilists is ultimately immaterial to me; the interesting thing is that it matches what more than a few people around me claim to believe is true.<br />
<br />
Catholic theology <i>appears</i> to oppose this diametrically. For the theologically literate Catholic, there is most certainly an intrinsic purpose to all creation; it is the will of God, which is God's love. While rationality and determinism may have their place in His creation, ultimately God himself is the point from which all this reality spills forth; the Creator. Other spiritual positions and religions posit very similar attitudes, it should be noted - but I am most familiar with the Catholic perspective. Hidden in the Catholic view, though, is something which many are not familiar with: the mysticism of God's person: while there is a True God, and it is He, our human ability to know Him, to understand Him - to therefore understand the source of our reality - is denied in the theology. God (and his love; his purpose in creation) is a Mystery to our rational minds, if not our spiritual hearts, to be made fully known to us only in our reunion with Him after our mortal death.<br />
<br />
I think that if you stopped there with both philosophies, you might be able to basically argue the two are equivalent. Hear me out: a nihilist rejects the notion that we could know the purpose of reality because he denies there is one; it is unknowable. Very similarly, the Catholic rejects the notion that we could really know the purpose of reality - at least with our rational, mortal minds. God and his will is unknowable. There are subtle but important differences, however, as I'm sure any adherent from either corner would be quick to point out: it is not the same thing to say there is no meaning at all, as it is to say the meaning is there, but unknowable to us. I would want to press on those people, though: while those are certainly different claims, aren't they made from strikingly similar positions and rationales? Arguments which might even be similar enough that a Nihilist and a Catholic might even agree are rational, good arguments which they might make themselves?<br />
<br />
Let's consider. Why does the Nihilist think that there is no meaning in life? Because he cannot find it. The Nihilist understands science and philosophy, and plainly sees that there is nothing in any of it which could give you an ontological purpose; a teleology for the cosmos which derives not from subjective measurements, but from the fabric of the thing itself; a proverbial user's manual giving you instructions on what it's all for. Present lack of understanding in this or that region of philosophy or science does not perturb him; he can see that structurally, these enterprises do not give him any hope that meaning will be found anywhere.<br />
<br />
The Catholic also cannot find meaning in life. In God and his will, certainly, but in knowable reality? No. God's a mystery and all the rest of creation's immaterial. He cannot find it; even knows he cannot find it because none of it is really God; it is a passing shade; a separation from the Creator which will pass away, finally allowing unity and understanding.<br />
<br />
Admirable of the both of them, that they could be brave enough to say "I don't really know; it is a mystery." But do either have reason to think their result from this position is the better? I think so!<br />
<br />
The science fiction writer knows what this sort of conjecture looks like - it's a little bit like the idea that humanity would be the first intelligent life form to evolve - knowing the billions of years which have already transpired and the massive size of the universe, unless the chances are very slim indeed, it is extremely unlikely. Much more likely, we are neither the first nor the last such species to arise, and instead exist somewhere in the middle. By the same logic, while the Nihilist may suppose that because he cannot understand a meaning for reality, that should not imply his intelligence is sufficient to understand any possible meaning. Indeed, it seems much more likely that our intelligence is somewhere below what might be required to understand, since the parameters of our mental limitations are well understood.<br />
<br />
This is, of course, of little consequence to the Nihilist. Without an afterlife in which to expect a radical transformation of ones' appreciation of the meaning of reality or a hyper intelligent alien species to guide him like a master its dog, meanings which escape his mortal comprehension might as well not exist. Indeed, I'm not sure anything actionable comes out of this line of thinking, per se. I find it interesting purely as a matter of thinking that you could apply the sort of science fictional, cosmological argumentation we see in Hard SF sometimes to matters much more philosophical in nature.Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-85309423776397231812019-02-21T00:30:00.001-06:002019-02-21T00:30:43.093-06:00Fanfiction for BrigadorI wrote a little something for one of my favorite recent cyberpunk/synthwave universes that I've plunged far too much time into - the <a href="https://stellarjockeys.com/games/brigador" target="_blank">Brigador</a> universe. Have I written here about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthwave" target="_blank">synthwave</a> as distinct from my earlier ramblings about vaporwave? I don't think so. That may be due.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="background: #ffffff;">The
Canary in the Coalmine Called Cassandra</span></b></span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">By
Adam Wykes</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Rain
on rusted tin roofs in a pre-morning haze. Dead grass and dead
vehicles littering little yards where garbage fires gutter fitfully,
puddles awash in the low red bias glow of adjacent districts leaking
over the parapets.<br />
<br />
Home for Noé Abraham wasn't much. What
had been a "zero asset man's refuge," this narrow strip of
land under the elevated rail lines heading into Central from the ammo
dumps - devoid of services and therefore citizenship and its
associated subscription costs - was now, if possible, even worse a
place for a man in his forties. Past his physical prime, more gray
than brown in his beard, a young former prostitute he called Angola
his partner, a young baby named Ty his son, a corrugated metal shack
with a mechanic's toolkit and a mattress his home.<br />
<br />
In
fact, it was for the birds.<br />
<br />
The Corvids had come to
roost, bribing the train operators to throw ordnance over the side in
transit. Ever ramping up for their glorious revolution.<br />
<br />
Angola
was shaking his shoulder, rousing him from sleep.<br />
<br />
"Noé."<br />
<br />
The
baby was asleep between them, mud red eyes shut in their sockets.
What was wrong?<br />
<br />
"Noé."<br />
<br />
"What!?"
He hissed. "Is it flooding?"<br />
<br />
"Cassandra.
It's <i>on</i>."<br />
<br />
Noé had no idea how the Corvids got
the Canary. A ubiquitous sight in "restless" districts,
Canary agravs were tall, roughly cylindrical flyers propped awkwardly
on tire struts that could have been nothing other than a design
retrofit. An odd "bill" protruded from their fore amid
multi-spectrum spotlights, serving as its primary control surface.
They hovered in the black nights above Solo Nobre, Great Leader's
omnipresent eyes and mouth immanentized in the sky. At some point the
Corvids had acquired it. Retrofitted it. If you stripped out the
comms package, the ECM and the sensor array, it turned out you could
mount artillery on it - as Corvids would always do. But they had yet
to pull the plug on the BBS connection - that was too valuable - and
as Noé peered through his window at the shack which hid the Canary,
he could tell someone had left the hatch open. Something on the BBS
interface was blinking phosphorescent white in a dreamlike world of
pooling blood. Noé knew this because he was the one the Corvids had
pressed into working on Cassandra. He was the one who had named it -
for he had been a history teacher like any other; a prophet
unheeded.<br />
<br />
In a moment, Noé was up, putting his
clothes on. Angola was doing the same. Marvelously, Ty stayed asleep.
As he dressed, he kept his eyes on the window. No signs of movement;
no strobing shadows across the huddled yard which separated them from
the agrav, their bundle of ramshackle structures erected against the
district wall like so much flotsam.<br />
<br />
Under the bed
was a knife. Noé took it. Corvids viewed him as one of their own,
but the BBS link was jealously guarded. Angola, her brown cheeks
fierce in the night's glow, her tough, lithe body tense underneath
her underwear, was coming with him, scooping Ty swiftly and expertly
in her arms. The baby cried. Noé told himself how often the baby had
cried in the night before. No one would care. Please saints, let no
one care. Difficult words eked from a nonbeliever scraping for light
in the dark.<br />
<br />
Noé made his way across the yard,
slipped in the doorway of the shed where the Canary slept, tangled in
hardline data connections, power cables, and ammunition belts. The
door was indeed open. The BBS display within the spacious compartment
was luminous.<br />
<br />
Behaving as one who might still think
himself in a dream, Noé crept within to glimpse at what so bothered
his woman. The readout was in the clear, written in a tongue he had
studied:<br />
<br />
WELCOME BRIGADOR<br />
<br />
Not for the first
time, Noé felt like he was not a man, but a character on a stage,
written already, tracing a path grooved in ink or coal. He ripped
himself away from such fantasies. Tonight he, and Angola, and Ty, and
Cassandra would very likely live or die together. And he knew all too
well - he could try to run, but those who ran were the enemies of
all. Those who stayed died... and sometimes lived. Noé had a choice
to make - quickly. There, at the bottom, the line read:<br />
<br />
SNC
INVASION DATE MARK: -1 LOCAL CYCLE</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Angola's
eyes met Noé's, but she didn't wait for him to say anything before
slowly, dreadfully reaching out - without breaking his stare -
finding the door handle (Canaries had a full-blown door on the side -
the hatch was up top), and closing it. Shut in the metal tomb, Noé
felt trapped and safe simultaneously. The dim blue of the BBS
display's cathode ray tube replaced the red glow of the night
outside, illuminating the crew bay; a little bossed metal stage
comprised of two leather seats on swivels, surrounded by banks of
controls - most ripped out and replaced with ersatz targeting
computers and autoloader configuration switchboards. Noe's mind
absently fell on the smoke projector switches he'd been instructed to
install only yesterday; the toolbox below the console where most of
his tools still resided...<br />
<br />
"What's a Brigador?"
Angola whispered, searching Noé's eyes for the knowledge of past
things she knew he had. Noé had told her many stories about Novo
Solo before Great Leader. He hadn't told her about
Brigadors.<br />
<br />
"Amateur mercenaries dressed up as
revolutionaries," Noé heard himself say. "Wolves in
sheep's clothing. The SNC is back for Solo Nobre, but the big guns
are stopping them from landing. Great Leader's purchases from the
Spacers and his military spending make them think twice about landing
far-side and marching over. Not cost-effective. They want to pay
citizens to do it for them. In the past, they paid citizens to kill
each other, to try to stop the revolution." It felt like recital
of a history lesson, only it wasn't history yet.<br />
<br />
Angola
looked like she was trying to find fault in what he said. Noé was a
former historian and cut rate mechanic. Noé was only a man on the
margins; a nobody like her. He could not know these things before
anyone else. But Angola was too level-headed to let prejudices get in
the way of rational thought - he knew that if he stayed silent, she
would eventually swallow the pill, however foul. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Eventually
the tenor of her silence changed. The tension in her shoulders
relaxed and she broke his gaze, eyes falling to her hands tight
around the baby. This was despair.<br />
<br />
"Perhaps the
Corvids are hacking the BBS," she said plaintively.<br />
<br />
Noé
ignored it. "We are not taking this contract."<br />
<br />
Angola
nodded. Tears were forming on her cheeks, falling on Ty.<br />
<br />
"We
are not getting ourselves killed if the Corvids want to have their
revolution."<br />
<br />
She nodded again.<br />
<br />
"And
we are not going to run to the Novo Exército do Povo."<br />
<br />
Angola
looked up, fire in her eyes. "Don't bring my life and Ty's into
the balance with your stupid politics, Noé," she hissed. "We
can't stay here. We <i>need</i> help. If this is really
fucking happening, we need help. You gonna take the Saints away from
me, color them corporate slaves no better than the rest of us, and
then say nobody alive can save us either? That you're some kind of
God, Noé?"<br />
<br />
That last was intended to sting him, and
he knew she wouldn't have done it unless she really felt cornered.
Truthfully, neither of them was sure the baby was his, although their
relations were carnal enough. Noé felt like an uncle more than
anything else toward Ty, and Angola knew it. Her natural distrust
sometimes led her to test his devotion; suspicious of any man's
claims to altruism. When the world closed in on Angola, she would
test the floor under her for signs of weakness - she would jump
without a second thought if she found anything. Noé knew. And though
he truly was weak in so many ways, it was not the time to show any of
that. Like he had done when he first met her, Noé was going to make
himself into a lie in order to save her. But first, a little
truth.<br />
<br />
"The NEP is not going to take us. Even if they
could, there's no guarantee they will even survive the next few days.
Angola, if this is real, much of Solo Nobre is going to burn
down."<br />
<br />
Angola said nothing. She raised her eyes to
him again, but this time it was the same way she'd looked at him when
she had come to his door almost a year ago now, accusing him of
fatherhood, holding the baby out in front of her. He wondered if she
still thought that had convinced him. They had never discussed it,
but her accusing stare had been a plea for help. It was now. She
wanted him to tell her what they were going to do.<br />
<br />
"We
are going to hide, just like we are now. We are not going to get
involved."<br />
<br />
The two of them froze. Voices and
footsteps from somewhere nearby, outside Cassandra, filtered faintly
through the anti-spall fibermesh walls of their little doom closet.
Noé's gaze flashed to the door lock - it was secure. Almost as soon,
he heard someone try the latch from the outside, muttering something
indecipherable.<br />
<br />
"Angola," he whispered, "the
switch behind you labeled 'PVS' - flip it."<br />
<br />
She
found the switch and toggled it, bringing a series of panels flashing
to life in the same blue glow of the BBS, bathing the interior of the
Cassandra in light that made it seem like a nocturnal aquarium
display. Each was for a camera, covering the full 360 degrees of
visibility the agrav enjoyed in remarkably high monochrome definition
on a grid to the right of the pilot's seat where Angola was, between
the two of them and directly right of the door. The man outside, his
head blown grotesquely out of proportion to his body by the fisheye
lens, was Carlos, one of the Corvid squatters - and a better one, if
Noé was honest with himself. Not caught up in the revolution: quiet,
level, and good at what he did, which was train tank crews in the
legions they were cooking up out there, past the gates. A loyal
Corvid, but not one who would string you up as a loyalist the moment
he sniffed lack of revolutionary zeal in the wind. Behind him was
Zaya, a rope kid pilot.<br />
<br />
To anyone familiar with
Corvid culture, little more needed to be said about Zaya. Only
crazies would be willing to strap themselves into a massively
overpowered agrav twin-engine with a seat - and then put guns on that
and ride them into street fights with NEP patrols. She wore
Giancarlo-style double glasses in the style of her hero - cheap
abrasively-colored frames without any lens in them, the part of her
face behind these totems a spray-painted cyan halo around piercing
black eyes. A cultist, as Noé thought of her. She had a pistol in
her hand, but she also looked drunk.<br />
<br />
"They
can't get to us before we get out of here," Noé said as calmly
as he could. "Let's talk to them, let them know what we've seen
- broadcast it on the terminal we're connected to out there..."
he trailed off as he swiveled in his seat to face the BBS keyboard,
punching in the commands he'd used to troubleshoot the cranky onboard
main processing unit with Carlos only a few days ago. "It's the
button right next to the headset wire jack." Noé heard Angola
put the headset on. <i>Good,</i> he thought. <i>Let's
ease into this</i>.<br />
<br />
"Hi Carlos..." she faltered
as Ty cried, and Angola lost her cool for a moment. In the camera
view, Carlos froze, stopped trying the door as he processed what was
going on.<br />
<br />
"Angola? Open the door." He didn't
even sound angry, only worried; perplexed.<br />
<br />
"...look
at the terminal readout, Carlos" Noé added. Carlos looked over
his shoulder. An old man, his eyesight was bad from long, dark work
in the mines. He stumbled over to read it. Zaya approached from
behind, mumbling - vibrating, even. Not drunk, Noé realized as she
got closer. Amphetamines. Even in the monochrome blue of the camera,
the sight of her black hair streaked in rain and engine grease, her
crow wing tattoos a stain on each shoulder, her movements reminded
him of a predatory animal. Raised without parents in the Deads, so
the story went. Hunted bear-dogs outside the walls with a lance. Noé
doubted that last part, but the emotional truth of it was
undeniable.<br />
<br />
Zaya's eyes focused on the terminal
screen, looking over Carlos with all of her dagger-thin two meter
frame, turned with a jerk, and left, her back fading into the shadows
of the shacks and rain as she headed for the garage they'd dug under
the district wall's foundation.<br />
<br />
"Come out of
there, Noé," Carlos said slowly once he had finished. "If
what this says is true, we need to get that skidmark Travis and his
grease stain Yasmin in those seats; there's something we need a
look-see at."<br />
<br />
Noé could tell Carlos didn't believe a
word of it, but he thought Noé and Angola might believe it enough to
run with his bird - something he didn't want. Noé didn't have time
for the games.<br />
<br />
"I'm taking Cassandra, Carlos, but I'm
not taking that contract. I want you to know that." </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">There
was yelling, pounding on the exterior. What Carlos did after it was
said didn't much matter to Noé. Angola's look did. Her body,
normally fluid and solid all at once, silk stretched over a titanium
frame, looked suddenly awkward and unimposing in the pilot's seat.
Never called tall, she looked almost childlike now, except for her
accusing eyes and the way her arms covered Ty. Noé knew he had to
push her before fear overcame - not judgment, because Noé knew he
himself was acting on instinct...<br />
<br />
"I'm in here with
you, Angola," he began; "I know how this rust bucket works,
but you need to be the pilot. You have the reflexes, you have the
eyes for it. I can tell you what to do, but I need to work the
subsystems for you over here - neither of us has a jack; we'll work
together."<br />
<br />
"You're killing us," she said,
her affect flat - but she thrust Ty into Noé's arms. This was
Angola's way of agreement when she was afraid of failure - this way,
if anything bad happened, it was all on Noé. The baby cried and
struggled; it never liked him; could sense the difference. Noé
didn't have time to address either of them, so he gripped the baby
tight to make sure it didn't fall out of his grasp when they took
off, and he took Angola by the shoulder.<br />
<br />
"Everybody I
ever studied was already dead, Angola. It was how they got there that
mattered."<br />
<br />
She turned from him with a sigh and
focused on the controls, her eyes scanning for something that would
make sense.<br />
<br />
"The collective lever is by your left
hand. It takes us up and down. The system power control is mine,"
he explained, and as he did, turned the knob that initialized the
Cassandra's primary powerplant and control systems. Carlos' banging
outside stopped.<br />
<br />
Angola shuddered, but Noé
continued slowly, as calmly as he could - telling himself this was
the same as any maintenance check flight, wishing on the graves of
the founders he had a smoke.<br />
<br />
"Raise the
collective, and watch that meter over there; don't get us above 200
meters."<br />
<br />
"Why?" Angola asked, easing the
collective up with all the evident apprehension of someone trying to
lift a sleeping infant.<br />
<br />
As she did, Noé fed the
agrav plates their subsystem power and addressed some harmonics
calibration issues he knew would be there, causing a wobble that
would make any maneuvers more complex than this impossible. A low
bass hum with a high thin companion warble emanated from the floor
into the crew cabin. Noé listened to the hum more than the readouts
on his control panel as he made adjustments; thought about how to
break it to her.<br />
<br />
"Above 200 meters, the automated
flak towers kill us." </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">"Noé!"<br />
<br />
"That's
not going to happen; I won't let it. I control the agrav plates.
Just... be careful. The altimeter's over there."<br />
<br />
The
Canary rose, cables outside snapping off like so much cobweb. Sparks
illuminated the workshop and Carlos' retreating form on the cameras.
Noé raced to bring the shields online, knowing the main capacitor
had been coughing up maintenance codes to his diagnostic screens ever
since he'd started working on Cassandra months ago. The shields came
on though, cracking and fizzing. Angola squinted, rolled her tongue
over her teeth. Noé could feel it too - like the ionized air
thunderstorms produced, only magnified until it made your bones
itch.<br />
<br />
"Cristo Maria e los Santos!" Angola swore
in the old tongue, "what is that?"<br />
<br />
"Hardshields,"
Noé intoned. "Brace for impact, but just keep pulling up on
that collective."<br />
<br />
Angola was good at powering through
things. When Cassandra hit the roof of the workshop - a thin joke of
corrugated sheet metal and rough-hewn wood beams - she barely
flinched as the structure gave way around her like eggshell. The
sound was terrific, the screeching of metal on metal and ceramic
ablative skin, but then Cassandra was through, and all was silent
except for Ty's frightened mewling. Below, the workshop collapsed
into the hole they had risen out of, spewing rust-red dust in a cloud
around them and out through the doors and windows along the
ground.<br />
<br />
Noé fumbled for the thin headphones of the
set operator and put them on, scanned quickly through the frequencies
like he was doing a spot check on the radio. In a way it was a
blessing in disguise Cassandra had its comms package stripped out,
because he doubted he'd have known how to use most of it anyway -
probably would have ended up broadcasting himself on a government
channel somehow The radio left was just a commercial transmitter. Its
frequencies were full of normal traffic. If it wasn't for the fact
his entire family was flying a hot upgunned reconnaissance vehicle in
protected NEP railway, one could be forgiven for thinking this one
more early morning night among many during the rainy season.<br />
<br />
Then
Noé remembered the guns. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">All
one had to do was look up. In the crew bay itself, forming a hump in
the ceiling between Angola and Noé, a panel had been removed to
reveal the massive breech and cradle apparatus of a cannon the
Corvids had affixed through the front of the Cassandra. Stamps on the
breech read "Autocannon, Mk II, 76mm. HE, SS-HEAT, HEDP, HESH,
WP." A simple set of three gravity-fed ammunition trays were set
into the rear wall of the crew compartment where the old stun laser
fire control system had been; there were four green rounds, three
orange rounds, and two rounds in the last bay - one white, one black
- each hastily spray-painted their respective colors. Noé hadn't the
faintest clue what any of them were.<br />
<br />
Directly behind his
seat was a maintenance access panel for the engine that represented
one of the few relatively clear surfaces in the crew bay.
Ingeniously, the handles for this hatch also constituted the first
few steps of a ladder that proceeded upward into a tunnel in the
ceiling terminating in a small turret with button-able slit viewports
in all directions atop the Canary chassis. Noé had never actually
been up there; that had been Carlos' work area since he was the
weapons expert. He needed to see what it held.<br />
<br />
"What's
our altitude?"<br />
<br />
Angola glanced over.<br />
<br />
"Twenty
six meters." The awkward wheels of the Cassandra would be well
above most of the hovels and wrecks in the field below. Noé
locked-in the agrav plates with the flip of two emergency switches he
knew about, typically used by trained crews, he guessed, to recover
from uncontrolled descents when pilots were incapacitated. These
would watch the ground distance directly under the vehicle and adjust
agrav power as needed to maintain that gap.<br />
<br />
"I've set
us stuck at 26, then," Noé told Angola. "Ease off the
collective and nudge up that scrolling wheel at its top; that's the
throttle. The cyclic is that joystick on your right; it does the
turning. Get a feel for it, but let's get going."<br />
<br />
Now
he climbed up, carefully cradling Ty in his right arm as he went. One
of the faults of the Canary design, as far as Noé was concerned, was
its stupidly high profile and the resulting distance between the
turret cupola and the crew compartment. Had the Design Bureau
forgotten all sense when making what it considered an air unit for
non-frontline work?<br />
<br />
In any event, once up top, there
was about a meter and a half of space below his feet, which simply
rested in stirrups inset in the access tunnel he had ascended, his
seat a cramped affair surrounded by still-included spotting optics
and the controls system for a weapon he did recognize - the "Disco"
seven megawatt laser. This was a good sign. Noé didn't know much
about weapons, but he still remembered the news reports that had
circulated on Parade Days years ago when Great Leader had first
acquired these old Spacer weapons. If rumors were to be believed, a
potent weapon, despite its small collimator. The battery readout on
it was 100%. A spot-welded rifle stock jutted out from the turret
wall behind the barrel of the weapon, cables dangling freely into
crevices unseen, and a holographic targeting system installed atop a
rail that looked decently-sighted, inviting Noé's shoulder into it,
his one hand feeling the trigger's resistance while the other, with
Ty carefully balanced on his lap, found the turret slew controls,
rotating him at a decent clip.<br />
<br />
To the rear, he saw Zaya's
rope kid coming in fast in the gloom, its agrav plates glowing like
cold hell reflected in the pilot's goggles, fixed as a big cat's
might be on their prize. </span></span></span></span>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Instinctively,
Noé squeezed the trigger. A cold shiver in the base of his brain
stem was terrified nothing would happen, that a safety or some other
critical preparation would be forgot, but immediately a multifingered
stream of light, blue like the ghosts of childhood dreams,
materialized in the space between Cassandra and Zaya's rope kid
agrav, boiling off so much rain between them that a cloud of steam
formed instantly. When it cleared moments later, Zaya was nowhere to
be seen.<br />
<br />
"Noé, what was that?"<br />
<br />
Noé
had no idea. Had he just vaporized someone? Shouldn't there have been
a stricken vehicle careening to the ground, or an explosion?<br />
<br />
There
was an explosion. It came from behind him - somewhere to the fore of
their vehicle - a white flash followed by a wave of heat and an
orange fireball. Particulate matter washed over the Cassandra's hull,
pattering and skittering. Noé slewed his turret back to the front,
taking his hand off the gun to press it against the struggling
infant's body, holding it in place. Zaya's rope kid was there,
shooting off ahead of them with sparks erupting from its top right
near where Zaya herself sat. That was, surprisingly, the least
interesting thing to behold. Instead, Noé's stare fixed on the
gutted concrete walls enclosing what had once been a power substation
tower the Corvid camp had been siphoning power off of. In its place,
revealed by a ragged hole in the concrete several meters across, was
a blackened tangle of wires and structural steel. The glow from over
the district walls, at least in their vicinity, was <i>flickering
out</i>.<br />
<br />
Noé did not respect the authorities in Solo
Nobre. Nor did he abide, necessarily, by notions of social
responsibilities and contracts when such concepts were tainted by the
corrosive nature of the oppressive state. Books had taught him
contempt for things like these, long since internalized and calcified
in his heart. The scale of what had just been perpetrated, however,
made him forget that high-minded conceit. Unwarranted guilt by
association gnawed at him; the self-incriminating fear of child whose
disciplinarian father was out of the room when the crime was
committed. The fault falls on whoever is there when justice is meted
out. Knowing all this did little to help abate the remorse.<br />
<br />
"I
shot Zaya with the laser up here," he shouted down to Angola, "I
thought she was trying to kill us. She was blowing up the power
station instead; she's taken the contract."<br />
<br />
For a
moment there was silence. Noé would have been impatient with Angola
for hesitating, but he was still fighting the urge to flee. Both of
them knew the nearest gate in the district walls was ahead, where
Zaya had been going. Staying on the tracks and heading back toward
the other gate, further out by the city limits, was some twenty
kilometers distant. In the time it took to get there the Corvids
would have certainly found them - or, if they didn't have bigger
problems by then, the NEP security post's soldiers, heading up the
track to see who'd bombed their power station.<br />
<br />
"We're
gonna go over the wall," Angola announced, her mind obviously
following a similar thread. "We can sneak over without reaching
200 meters... and I want to stay away from the gates."<br />
<br />
Noé
began climbing back down into the crew bay, terrified as he was to
leave the Cassandra without another pair of eyes on the horizon with
Zaya out there, wreaking havoc with whatever insane artillery she'd
managed to weld to her hotrod on who knows what else. As he went he
held Ty close to his chest; the poor infant's screams were coughs
now; the heart beating palpably against his own breast. Thought was
not coming to Noé easily. Which way to go; which wall to go over? He
wasn't sure he remembered what was over the walls, not precisely...
Angola could tell he was debating it.<br />
<br />
"We just need
to get higher; once we see where we're at, then we'll make the
decision," she told him.<br />
<br />
Noé nodded. The need
to move was as much a block to logical thinking as anything else. <i>Do</i>,
the mind screamed, <i>you're a sitting duck</i>.<br />
<br />
Carefully,
they adjusted the emergency altitude switches and rose again, just a
few meters higher - the district walls themselves were only some 33
meters here. Their cameras panned past the train tracks, then
momentarily blurred as the city skyline came into view. The rain was
abating, and the cameras focused themselves quickly, offering a view
Noé and Angola had seen before only mediated through other
screens.<br />
<br />
On the one side a gated community sprawled,
all green grass and imported trees manicured like a golf course
(perhaps it was a golf course - Noé hadn't paid attention to
historical sports). Beyond the immaculate, invariant clay tiled roofs
of estates, hovering over broad, well-lit avenues and beyond the far
district wall which enclosed that absurd diorama, a darkness swept.
Noé knew it was a finger of the Solo Nobre bay, but in the night it
was little more than a blankness, an erasure that ceased where the
far shore began, leading up into the neon-lit industrial parks and
suburbs and from there, to countrysides still more distant.<br />
<br />
On
the other side the districts of the Outer Core leading into Central
rose. A billion pink and red points of light, dotted with yellow
ribbons and blue festoons here and there where signage loomed over
the canopy of the city, the vehicle lights moving as lava might
through cracks in the basalt firmament. Noé was always reminded of a
glowering ember, or alien coral reefs luminescing as well they might
under the unexplored ocean waves of Novo Solo; this human
construction only a refraction of what had already been done here. It
repulsed him.<br />
<br />
And yet, fish hid in reefs.<br />
<br />
"We'll
lose followers in those narrow streets," he told Angola. But
Cassandra didn't move.<br />
<br />
Things were starting to happen
fast, now. Across the skyline, from wherever the lights were dimmer
on the ground, lime-green flares were shooting into the sky. </span></span></span></span>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">The
color was close enough that Noé could guess what it meant,
especially tracing their smoky trails back to their origins in the
poorer neighborhoods. The sensor panel in front of him was reading
noise from outside that Noé didn't hear, so he flipped the switch to
patch in the outside mic. Raid sirens were wailing somewhere distant
in the city, more revving up nearby even as he listened.<br />
<br />
"Angola,
flip that switch next to your headset labeled 'external
patch'."<br />
<br />
Angola did as she was told and heard
the sound as well.<br />
<br />
"Are you trying to scare the
shit out of me? I already know what's happening." She flipped
the switch back off. </span></span></span></span>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">"You
do? One step ahead of me."<br />
<br />
"Not what I meant..."
Angola gritted out through clenched teeth.<br />
<br />
Noé
scanned the nearest buildings. There – one of the taller structures
in the middle of the block was a communications tower of some
description, larger than most such in the city, in fact. Its spindly
cage rose above the rest of the city around it and offered a platform
they could power down on and hopefully look like any other parked
loyalist vehicle. And<br />
<br />
"Head for that tower over
there, with the communications dishes on it. Let's see if we can hide
inside it and listen in on what else is going on."<br />
<br />
Angola
pushed Cassandra over the wall, gliding smoothly and directly toward
the tower. A loudspeaker from somewhere nearby crackled to life,
tinny and almost inaudible to her crew:<br />
<br />
"NEP vehicle,
identify yourself." </span></span></span></span>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Angola,
to her credit, did the right thing and kept moving forward at the
same pace. Noé scanned the feeds but saw nothing in the green
monochrome of the street below, so he toggled to thermals.<br />
<br />
There.
An NEP patrol bike, troubadour class. Those could be armed; this one
had some kind of low-caliber machine gun mounted on it. The officer
atop it was watching them intently, revving his engine.<br />
<br />
"Halt,
or we will fire on you!"<br />
<br />
"Noé..." Angola
started.<br />
<br />
Noé dropped the altitude, and the Cassandra
plummeted into the street below. Massive suspensions on the overbuilt
tires strained as the 22-ton vehicle came crashing to the pavement,
kicking up dust from the road all around the Cassandra. Ground cars
jumped on their wheels and one parked inexplicably in the middle of
the street, abandoned, disappeared under their front treads as the
agrav's forward momentum dragged it down the street. Tracers
flickered green in the dust cloud as the police came to the logical
conclusion about what was going on. A few found their mark.<br />
<br />
Fuck,
Noé!" Angola screamed, "Bring us back up! Get us
out..."<br />
<br />
The air was forced from her lungs as he
pushed the altitude adjuster back up and her death grip on the
collective rocketed them back into the air. He topped them off at ten
meters - enough to stay hidden between the buildings. Signs and wires
crisscrossed their path at this level, but he knew Cassandra could
brush it all aside, military spec as she was.<br />
<br />
"Down
that street over there," he wheezed, pointing at one of the
feeds ahead. Angola obeyed.<br />
<br />
Something passed big behind
them in the air, leaving a contrail in the dust cloud. The treadbike,
just getting started in its pursuit, vaporized in a flash, petrol
fires splashing across the pavement in all directions in their rear
view cameras.<br />
<br />
"That wasn't us." Angola said
flatly. "Tell me you didn't just kill an NEP."<br />
<br />
"No,"
Noé confirmed - he didn't have to think very hard about who had.
"But get yourself ready, because we might have to very
soon."<br />
<br />
As Cassandra pushed through the urban forest,
Angola taking periodic turns to throw pursuit off their track, Noé
took his shirt off and fashioned a sling around his torso with it,
fitting Ty into it like a hammock. Then he took a look at the 76mm
and figured out how to load one of the green shells and close the
breech on it.<br />
<br />
"Figure out how to shoot that
thing. It's going to have a reticle when you toggle that switch over
there, and the trigger we put on the cyclic where your index finger
is if you slide it up. The hat on top under that lid is going to make
the cradle adjustments so you can actually hit what you're going
for."<br />
<br />
Angola glanced down at her hand on the cyclic,
thumbed gingerly over the hat and the firing trigger. Noé knew she
studied fast - everyone from the street did. Remembering it when the
shit hit the fan was another story, but there was nothing to be done
about that now.<br />
<br />
"I'm going up to man that laser
again. I've got Ty secured a little better."<br />
<br />
Then
they turned a corner and flew right over a throng of several hundred
dazed looking people in yellow raincoats, huddled around what Noé
realized could only be the district's police station. </span></span></span></span>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Noé
shook his head - though perhaps it was more of a shudder - and forced
himself up the ladder. Yellow raincoats were as old as the colony
ships and they marked the surrender and suffering of the innocent in
every war and whose faces from past lives might he see staring up at
the killing machine he crewed over them? His sister's? Noé clenched
his eyes shut and bit his lip until it bled. No sense going there. No
sense - no sense. But below, Angola was not yet afraid of
ghosts.<br />
<br />
"Popping our smokes" she yelled in a way
he knew she'd hit upon something to fight with; tones of anger and
happiness married in her voice. He hadn't told her about those
switches...<br />
<br />
A sound like bubble wrap crushed all at once
told Noé she'd flipped <i>all</i> the switches. Smoke
canisters careened in every direction their projector tubes had
randomly been bent to during their installation; jets of white cloud
bounced off building walls and stabbed into the crowd below, turning
the intersection into chaos immediately. Flashlights from below
strobed through the haze in a crazed rush for every perimeter, joined
by sporadic small arms fire from the police that had up until that
point been organizing the crowd, no doubt waiting for Great Leader to
tell them what to make of the evil portents closing in all around
them. If Angola had wanted to sow confusion to throw pursuit off
their trail... Noé almost slapped himself. Of course. Angola might
not be experienced in every way, but in others she swam like a sewer
fish through shit.<br />
<br />
Through all, the Cassandra piled on the
speed. Before they were clear of the smoke, Noé felt the inertia in
his body pull him hard to the left, then to the right again - when
they came out into the darkened street there were raincoats flashing
lights everywhere below, in every direction. The comm tower was
nowhere to be seen. Angola might be simply running for the sake of
it, which practically speaking, wasn't a bad idea. It was up to him
to keep a leveler head and find the comm tower they were after.<br />
<br />
He
slewed his turret in a circle, hunting the claustrophobic horizon of
the rooftops for the spire of the comm tower - there, and
miraculously closer than before. Now to reorient and bring his
mustang pilot to heel.<br />
<br />
"Whoa Angola, no one's on us.
Tower's up on our right; take the next intersection and go straight
until you get to the far district wall."<br />
<br />
No
response, but none needed. The agrav lithely made the turn, throwing
Noé and his charge against his shoulder again, and straightened out.
They sped past another treadbike pair busy corralling citizens below;
their vehicle a blurred silhouette against the red-gray grain of the
starless sky, aglow with ghostfire that the old might recall with
fear and the young conjure from stories.<br />
<br />
Noé's own
hair stood up at himself and what he was doing. At the end of the
street the comm tower grew in their rush to it, and the Cassandra
jerked as Angola lost control for a brief moment to raise the flight
ceiling controls he had previously been at, then reached back to
handle the collective.<br />
<br />
The Cassandra lurched up, slowed,
and came to rest on the maintenance platform halfway up the tower's
structure, a landing just large enough to fit the whole of the
vehicle within the open structure of the tower. It groaned under the
weight, but held to specs Noé guessed it had by looking at it. He
told Angola to turn off the engine and power down, and after a few
tense moments this too was accomplished, and they perched, another
gargoyle adorning the walled city. Through every viewport in the
turret, Noé saw the lights of vehicles tracing the streets below,
and more ominously, saw flashes of what might be lightning out from
behind buildings here and there afar, though the air was still. But
the baby Ty was also still, and sleeping - exhausted - and nothing
eyes could tell him suggested they were noticed.<br />
<br />
Temporary
escape could only evince a grimace from Noé, though. One could hide
within a target only for so long. </span></span></span></span>
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<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">A
target, a hideaway, and a window with a view to what in the seven
hells was going on. It was a moment's work for Noé to slide down the
ladder, hand over the baby to a stony Angola, pop the hatch, jump
down onto the maintenance platform of the tower, and find the
terminal to the city BBS. The adapter plate in the side of the
terminal was still there - and Cassandra had what was missing. The
old mechanic went back into the Cassandra, sweating profusely with
hurry in the muggy atmosphere which hung dead and cloying about them.
Rummaging, he found the spare extension cable stowed in one of the
tool cabinets in the cabin, yanked it from its spool, clambered back
out, and screwed one head into the terminal, the other into the side
of the Cassandra after removing the frayed remainder of the previous
cable, which they'd had to pull free of on their ascent from the
Corvid hideout.<br />
<br />
Back in the cabin with the door
safely shut, Angola lit a cigarette she'd somehow procured and Noé
leaned over the blue screen of the terminal once again. The BBS menu
was of course swamped with many posts copying or commenting - mostly
hasty, brash disinformation from the government - on the Brigador
Contract, as it was apparently being referred to. Noé knew about the
contract. He wanted to find out what else was going on.<br />
<br />
Only
a few posts from the government far below the first menu screen were
unrelated; one appeared to be governmental but upon inspection turned
out to be someone posting apparently incoherent ASCII soup followed
by the line "The ANTIpodes of Eixo lies in bLOoD but u can hitch
a starry ride there." The only implication Noé could draw was
that the government was clearly not totally in control of its
networks tonight, so he tabbed on to the next post down, which was a
message concerning a Spacer kill squad apparently captured in
Central. Apparently the NEP badly wanted someone to know, because the
mere admission Spacers could be on Novo Solo, let alone anywhere in
Solo Nobre - let alone running around in Central - was a severe
departure from the Official Narrative. Noé tabbed on. The third and
final message before the previous days' was a rote notice to allow
trains outbound from the city but halt all inbound traffic regardless
of purpose. So someone thought it was worth running, or at least
hedging their bets. The city felt more like a trap all the
time.<br />
<br />
"What is it?" Angola asked, reading
over his shoulder. She was not the most literate, so he had been
scanning much faster than she could keep up. Thoughts raced through
Noé; calculations on this woman he sat beside. How well did he know
her? He dumped the output to local storage and shut the terminal
screen off.<br />
<br />
"What was that?" she repeated around
her cigarette. "Who's winning?"<br />
<br />
"The
government's on its back foot but still standing and putting up some
kind of fight; I don't know how much or how well. It seems like there
are problems everywhere in the city and we're sure to find gates
closed - or open for the wrong reasons - everywhere we could go."<br />
<br />
"I
don't want to stay here. We have to keep moving."<br />
<br />
"That's
a good feeling; I agree with it. I just don't know where to point
you."<br />
<br />
A distant blast like dynamite going off in an
immense cavern interrupted them - the starboard video feed showed an
orbital gun on the horizon firing up into the sky; something neither
of them had seen or thought they would ever see. Dust quickly
obscured the gun on the horizon. The tower trembled slightly. Angola
forgot to take a drag on her cigarette. Noé interrupted the reverie
to refocus their minds on something of a scale they could manage;
bugs needed to focus on bug problems; not the boot coming down on
them they were helpless to prevent.<br />
<br />
"I can still try
to take a look at the radio; that's also accessible if I climb out
and switch terminals on our cable, but I won't know how to descramble
it, so unless someone's broadcasting clear we won't learn much beyond
what the volume of traffic looks like."<br />
<br />
It wasn't
clear that Angola understood him, so Noé went to open the door
without her reply. As he did, however, she spoke up.<br />
<br />
"Was
the contract still posted?"<br />
<br />
Noé forced himself
not to pause or give the question credence.<br />
<br />
"The
government says it's a ruse."<br />
<br />
"Then you know
it's real," she replied, and exhaled all her smoke at once. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Noé
broke her gaze and went to the radio terminal, trying to focus on
something that made sense to him; something productive, but
everything was scrambled, ciphered beyond recognition. There was
plenty of traffic, but it was all noise, anything related to them a
star's glow lost against the background radiation of a government
going nova.<br />
<br />
With a real security clearance, Noé knew he
might be able to pull information about whether certain gates were
open or shut in the city, giving him some insight into where the
fighting between Corvids, brigadors, and NEP might be heaviest.
Without that, the BBS and radio were of little use. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Noé's
inclination was to turn the city into a machine in his mind and
imagine how it might fail; if one thought of the Corvids as a high
pressure explosion coursing through the fuel of the poorer areas,
they would break through the gates and the sewers into the places
that offered them the most room to expand - the freeways and train
yards would be a natural conduit for any large group trying to go
anywhere in the city - and they'd want to go to Central, to
decapitate despots and ravage their oppressors. The roads would get
them there, at least to the walls, but the roads would also be choked
with another, secondary explosion - the refugees. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;">Corvids
were willing to crush just about any individual under the juggernaut
of their glorious revolution, but even they generally understood the
need to keep from massacring innocents in order to maintain the
facade of a moral high ground. There'd be a few nuts here and there,
but by and large they would be slowed - and their fanaticism wouldn't
allow that. They'd branch out into the surrounding areas from there,
pillaging. And at some point, the NEP would get their conscripts
organized enough to mount some kind of concerted effort to put this
fire out - likely with overwhelming, indiscriminate firepower.
Wherever that went down, Noé and his family needed to be far
away.<br />
<br />
Walking to the edge of the comm tower platform, Noé
looked to the city streets a few hundred feet below. Groups were
exchanging small arms fire somewhere to the east of the district,
near the gate, and yellow raincoats with bobbing flashlights streamed
in clumps and lines away from there, seemingly having abandoned any
notion of organizing for evacuation at the regional police office. It
would only be a matter of time before the first NEP heavies arrived,
or the Corvids - and then both would be here, and they'd start to
tear this district to the ground. It was far too close to the poorer
zones and the upper-class at the same time; a veritable no-man's land
for class warfare. Give it a few weeks' time, and if no one had
clearly emerged the victor, the flattened, colossal wreck of turf
here would stretch far and wide, studded with spikes sporting the
skulls of traitors. To Noé, the nightmare superimposed itself over
the slick monotone concrete of the city below in full, awful color. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
urge to run was overcome only by the suffocating feeling they were
trapped in a cage, however large, descending into a lightless anoxic
chasm. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Yet
if eyes could not see whither they were headed, ears could hear.
Noé's suddenly trained on a sound nearby, coming from an unknown
source. A mechanical, low, reverberating growl -
and </span></span></span></span><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">almost</span></i></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">familiar. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé's
brain snapped to - it was heavy mech engine - something like a Touro.
Far too close, never mind he couldn't see where it came from - Noé
ran back to the Cassandra. Inside, Angola was still staring at the
screen, rocking Ty gently. Noé shut the door loudly enough to
startle the child, which sent a scowl across Angola's face. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Psss!
Don't do that!" </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
ignored this, turning on the engine controls he was responsible for,
taking the child back into his sling, and climbing up to the turret
seat.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Get
that engine turned on, but keep the running lights completely off,
Angola," he said, then remembered she wouldn't know where those
toggles were. "Under the forward view screen, yellow capped
switches - put them all down. And patch in external audio
again."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
reason didn't need explanation - Angola knew this all meant imminent
danger.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"I
didn't see anyone come up on us in our video feeds..."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Because
you were busy looking at that damned contract. I heard a big engine
nearby; we're not sticking around to find out whose."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"I
didn't take it!"</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
strapped in and got his finger on the laser's trigger. A quick
rotation of the turret confirmed there was nothing as big as a Touro
in any direction - he did spot a shield truck of some sort moving up
through the streets a few blocks away, but this was absolutely not
the source of the noise. Then he felt a big shield power on
nearby.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Angola,
move!"</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Canary launched out of the comm tower at high speed. Angola
shrieked.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Behind
us!"</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé's
turret whipped to face rear just in time to see the tower
disintegrate in a shower of metal shards and concrete dust. Through
this curtain, like a monstrous stage magician, a heavy mech emerged
with a sloped top made mostly from cooling vents and gun barrels,
pursuing them with long, loping strides. A Mantis; one of the new NEP
designs. Where in the sainted heavens had it come from?</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Shields,
Angola!"</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
shields came up just as a pair of red lines drew themselves through
the air between the mech and Cassandra, exploding against their
shields with a snap like digitized lightning. Those would be the
"Little Chickens," Noé realized; the nom de guerre for
some of the latest lorenz-force weaponry to come out of the NEP
design bureaus, and among the deadliest in the colonies. He fired
back, his blue laser light playing over the immense shield face of
the foe, but he knew his defenses would come down first. Whoever
wanted them dead had nothing but the best. The pilot wouldn't make
many mistakes. They'd have been trusted not to.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Then
the Mantis lurched to the side; struck on its flank by a meteor that
had come down one of the streets - someone from that NEP shield
tank's group, probably. Friendly fire? But before the behemoth could
triangulate its tormentor, another round struck it, popping its
shields. The twin little chickens started up in full fury,
perforating entire neighborhoods as the pilot returned fire. Smoke
grenades popped in all directions. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
stopped firing; no sense in reminding anyone of his continued
existence.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Angola,
find somewhere to go. Let's get out of here."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">But
Angola didn't. Without slowing or diverting their path, she rotated
the Cassandra so that it was backing up, its finned nose pointed
right at the Mantis. Noé heard her harness buckle snap open. Then
the 76mm receiver slammed shut. Angola had seen Carlos cycle that gun
before, when it was installed. Panic filled Noé.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Aim
high -" was all he managed to get out before Angola fired. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
shot wasn't difficult - perhaps two hundred meters - and the 76mm's
trajectory was murderously flat. The round hit the Mantis in between
its legs in a puff of smoke, spreading itself all over the armored
gear housing as though inert for one stomach-churning moment before
detonating. The housing scattered off in every direction, revealing
the clockwork of the mech underneath - unscathed. Noé trained his
laser on this and fired again, molten metal slag dripping away under
the heat. The great legs ground to a halt. The chassis
turned. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Angola
wasn't at her seat; the Canary drifted slightly to the left in a lazy
arc. The twin barrels of the Galinhas, red hot eyes gazing down at
them, began to fire again. Noé's hand instinctively left the trigger
to cover his baby boy helplessly against the onslaught.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Then
a burst of something from down the block found the side of the
Mantis, and rapped against it in a quick succession of solid hits.
Nothing else seemed to happen, but the guns immediately fell silent.
It struck Noé how odd it was an NEP soldier would have demolished a
tower to kill them... unless whoever this was wasn't NEP - at least
not anymore.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Another
round slammed home below.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"It's
dead, Angola!" She fired anyway. This time the round was HE; it
knocked the battered mech onto its back, fascia blackened by
fire.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
“Fuck<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
you! </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Fuck</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
you, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Fuck</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
you!" Angola screamed.</span></span></span></span> </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
cabin was silent for a moment, but Angola turned the Cassandra back
around and sped into a side street to hide.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"We
could have just left him."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
was surprised by Angola's response - a sob through clenched
teeth. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"He
was another Brigador for sure, Noé."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
said nothing; it seemed like she would go on.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"There
will be more."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Again
he did not reply. It began to come out.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"It's
not like your history. There's a bonus on casualties. On
people."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"On
buildings, Noé."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"On
houses and stores."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"On
Corvids and Spacers and the NEP."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Of
course she could only know this if she had taken the contract. Rage
built up inside Noé, but Angola shrieked hysterically, jolting him
immediately out of it. She was losing the self-control typical of the
street child, utterly terrified and coming off adrenaline. Someone
had to remain cool. It felt lonely in their little agrav.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Say
something, if you know what to say! They want it all dead, Noé - all
of Solo Nobre. Where does that fit in anywhere in your forbidden
books?"</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">That
was different than what he had expected. Surely the corporation would
have wanted something from Solo Nobre... but what could it provide
them? He had always believed it was the people - the workforce,
always the historical source of power in any state system since time
immemorial. On dark nights sometimes he worried Great Leader's
propaganda vids were not entirely unhinged - maybe they wanted the
natural resources at Solo Nobre's disposal; the accumulated capital
the city itself represented. But now, plainly, they wanted to burn it
all. No winners, either; no franchise puppeteering to explain it. Noé
realized Angola had uncovered something he'd </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">been
blind to</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">:
the SNC just wanted Solo Nobre out of the way so they could start
again, clean slate. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Whatever
it was, they didn’t want the people or the city, even if they
weren’t willing to glass it in nuclear fire. Just the real
estate.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Hiding
had been the plan. Hiding would get them killed; just so much
collateral. The nightmare: Noé would have to fight.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"You
said you hadn't taken the contract." He couldn't help it.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Not
in my heart, Noé," Angola sobbed. Ty woke to his mother's pain
and joined in. Noé smelled </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">shit
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
his diaper. It would have to wait. "I wanted to know what they'd
get, you know. What they're after. And the only thing they can even
give is a ticket off-world, because they want to send everything else
to the seven hells. Now you have to tell me - are you gonna help me
get us that ticket and save our baby boy?" She yelled it through
tears, over the infant's wails.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">That
meant there was a spaceport in their future... something unhinged
stirred in Noé. He knew he wasn't doing the contract. The dirty
truth at the bottom of his soul was he couldn't - even for the lives
of his woman and </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">this</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
baby. The muddy red eyes in the little one cradled on him stared up
and he </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">feared</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">finding</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
accusation </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
them</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">;
couldn't meet the stare of an infant.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Where's
the nearest spaceport?" It felt like a lie to say, though it was
only a question.</span></span></span></span> </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">But
while Angola wracked her memories of tricks past, Noé's mind raced
into the ground. Almost subconscious, subterranean... like the
memories of his father passed down, come back from two kilometers
underground to haunt him. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Perhaps
even now he was standing over his father's grave - that was the
trouble with mineshafts and superstition - they ran under the living
city, separate save for the ghosts that shuttled between them. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Old
Cascais" Angola blurted out suddenly. "The nearest
spaceport is in Old Cascais. Behind a blast wall at the end of the
office block there. Hasn't been used in years, but I've been through
a maintenance door to the other side. There's a tug sitting on the
launchpad."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Situated
in a small valley with natural rock walls, Noé remembered, though
that hadn't stopped the city planners from insanely building their
own district walls within them, as per regulation. One of the first
spaceports built... and ore hauling train tracks that led to...
where? Blackness. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"OK,"
Noé said mechanically. "Fly us straight there. Maybe no one
will have got the district's Orbital guns yet, and we can get the
easiest contract of them all. If not, there's plenty hunting nearby."</span></span></span></span>
</span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Angola
knew the ways streets connected to each other in Solo Nobre better
than Noé ever would, so he let her figure that out. Neither did he
jump back down from the turret to man what remained of the
Cassandra's sensor arrays and recalibrate its shielding. Not yet -
too much thinking to do, and too much flux to do it in without
getting himself involved. That was something Noé liked about
history: it could be frozen - the primary sources, anyway - and one
could move around it, prod it, like a chess board half-shadowed, but
amenable to peering. The present, on the other hand, invaded one's
thoughts, intruded on postulates and threw them to the ground,
helpless before the terror of indeterminacy. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
opened the viewports in his turret, letting in the streetlights wash
over his face like waves, the gunfire and grunt of engines in the
streets a rolling storm front. The air's wet touch was gone, leaving
the heat and ozone and dry rubble dust. The historian himself was
still. These were necessary distractions; justifications for his eyes
and ears. The mind reeled on and far ahead.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It
seemed bizarre and dreamlike that he was spending what were in all
probability his last hours alive inside a jury-rigged war machine,
even if he had seen this all before. What must Angola be thinking? In
Angola's mind they would be off-planet in a few short hours, or
doomed. What would she do to escape that doom? Noé forced himself to
recall her tears and denial. If it had been any different he would
have had her set him down on a rooftop somewhere, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">washed
his hands</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
That certainty was dissolved by those tears; she might still want him
to do what she couldn't for herself, because of the baby. It wasn't
easy for her because he had told her stories for so long. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">That
was the moral weight of the historian; the storyteller - eventually,
people you loved would make decisions based on your stories. Noé was
at peace with this problem, at least. No human could take leave of
stories - not even spacers. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
dwelt on that thought. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Perhaps
even </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">spacers
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">least
of all... </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">s</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">o
long as cultures survived, their narratives grew more twisted and
elaborate and self-justifying. Spacer culture was in fact only the
attenuated end of a very long branch, insulated against outside
argument in vacuum-sealed créches. And they might be there at the
spaceport, he figured. Invisible, deadly as sharks come up at night
out of the deep ocean to hunt the shallow reef for terrestrial prey.
Thermal vision systems might spot them if they were on the move, but
if they were there, they wouldn't be. They'd be waiting in hides
because that was the story; they were hunters </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">to
themselves</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
Not in groups, and not in defense of anything in particular; they
might even have let some Corvids or NEP through if they were hunting
for bigger sport... like </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">b</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">rigadors.
That would certainly be cost-effective for the SNC.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ahead,
something like a dull flare lofted above the skyline, a glowing orb
describing a lazy parabola. It disappeared again behind the rooftops,
and a white flash strobed from where it had fallen. The streetlights
flickered out. Immediately, they were rushing through a pitch-black
tunnel through which Noé could see nothing, except at regular
intervals the cross streets vivisected a district full of insanity,
flashlights of the unfortunates milling in every direction, vehicles
frantically changing position to avoid newly imagined threats bearing
down on them. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
climbed back down into the main crew compartment and strapped himself
in. He brought the thermal vision system back up and dropped their
shields. Angola tensed as if to say, </span></span></span></span><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">tell
me what the hells you're thinking</span></i></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
but she didn't want to wake the baby.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"That'll
be Zaya. She's been targeting the power stations because she wants
the job done so she can get to the spaceport, too. Doing what the SNC
wants will get her that, but we haven't done any work... yet. We'll
want to follow her closely."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"And
the shields?" Angola asked in a low voice.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"For
the SNC to have the spaceport under their control, they'll need to
have neutralized the district's NEP compliment, but with the gates up
nobody terrestrial was getting in without a fight. They'll have used
Spacers, and spacers will be better at seeing shield signatures than
we will be at finding them. We don't want to be seen, but we want
Zaya to light them up like a star."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Angola
nodded and kept the Cassandra on its heading.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"We're
headed right for the gate, but she had to detour to hit those power
stations. We'll hunker down over there -" Angola pointed ahead
on the camera screens, and Noé saw she referred to a pile of
shipping containers stacked to the side of the gate (which was indeed
down) in a fenced loading yard, "and wait. That rope kid won't
take long."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
waited until they were over the fence so as not to destroy it and
reveal their passage before he dialed their agrav plates down and let
the ludicrous Canary tires roll to a stop behind the pile of cargo.
The brief lull granted a moment to peer past the gate into the
highway beyond. It extended beyond the range of the thermal vision;
only a few refugees, bright little smudges on their screens,
skittered off into the vanishing point.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Then
the rope kid flew past them, not ten meters above the road. Buttoned
down as they were, Angola and Noé barely saw the vehicle pass on
their camera feeds, but he caught a glimpse of the rider - the woman
was crouched low in her seat to streamline her profile like a racer.
Zaya was going places fast. No time to notice 22 ton homemade death
closets on wheels barely concealed scant meters away.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Almost
like a trained team, Noé brought their plates back online, dialing
them in to their accustomed height limit while Angola got them on the
tail of their faster target.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"You
said you wanted to light her up; go shoot at her in your turret;
she's either got no shields left, or turned hers off too,"
Angola advised. Right. Noé practically leapt up to his gun. Once the
woman put her mind to something, her approach demanded appreciation.
All efficiency and killer instinct, without a hint of doubt.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
range on Zaya's agrav was rapidly growing, so he wasted no time in
squeezing off a few shots. They went wide or didn't reach her, but
they didn't go unnoticed. The air immediately wrinkled in a vague
sphere around the agrav - shields up - and something slung beneath
its chassis inverted its position, displaying a barrel of improbably
enormous caliber pointed back at them.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Swerve!"
Noé shouted, and Cassandra jolted sideways, its nimble attitude
adjustment plates coming in supremely handy in the adrenaline soaked
hands of its young pilot: almost too fast to see, a red-hot bowling
ball launched at them from Zaya's gun flew past, cratering the
pavement and tossing raincoats like confetti behind them. The deaths
didn't even register in Noé's consciousness. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"She's
saying something over open comms," Angola reported. "Didn't
catch it, but didn't sound very nice." The underslung bowling
apparatus switched back to its original forward-pointing
configuration and Zaya poured on the speed, leaving them well behind.
Noé jumped back down - his legs were beginning to feel the strain of
all this - and switched off thermals, since the highway lights were
on a different circuit and still lit. He could see her take the ramp
off up ahead - toward Old Cascais. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"That
happens, too, in dreams," Noé whispered to himself. But by now
he was no longer concerned about whether this was real; </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">his
words were</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
only a prayer he could be wrong. For once the zero asset man's plans
were proceeding exactly as predicted, which was almost more
terrifying than if they had simply failed, like everything else in
his life up to this point.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">They
followed the rope kid onto the ramp, and the medians turned to flower
beds under the street lights as they raced on. Ahead, a gas station
nestled against a gated community's walls glowed neon. Zaya zoomed
off to the left, delving deeper into the district without any
apparent interest directed toward her. Cassandra followed, Angola
hugging the district walls and their floodlights out. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nothing
in the neighborhood looked touched; a parking lot across from the gas
station was empty save a few cars here and there, their windows all
intact, glassy under the sodium lights like a museum display after
hours. Ahead, Zaya swerved again, crossing the path of the gated
community's main entrance. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
an instant, the rope kid was transfixed by multiple blue beams which
snapped onto its chassis, beatifying it at lightspeed. In the next
instant, the road ahead was showered with the molten droplets of what
had once been Zaya.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">What
happened next blurred in Noé's memory - everything past Zaya's death
to the spaceport unfolded in a continuous, atomic mnemonic; an
indivisible experience silent in recollection because utterly
deafening in actuality; a continual roar of guns, engines, collapsing
buildings, and the screams of infants which lost meaning and faded in
the slipstream like any notion of time or thought. A nightmare.<br />
<br />
Who
had spoken when Zaya died? Noé could not recall. Cassandra turned
nimbly away from the scene of her death and careened back toward the
gas station as though chased by invisible demons. He'd lased the gas
station - wasn't that depraved? How could that have been him? At the
time it seemed logical; a simple escape. He had no memory of pressing
the trigger; nor a single word to justify himself.<br />
<br />
It went
up, taking the neighborhood wall behind it with it, a fiery plume
which formed a door into the rest of the remembrance in Noé's mind.
The Cassandra passed through the flames. Its shields on now, it
crashed through trees into a park - something like a soccer field,
but littered with what he could only now recall as golf carts. Over
it loomed a far concealment hedge and another wall, trapping them
once more - but towering above that, one of the Orbital guns. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">They'd
blown up the gun and its volatile ammunition stores to get through
that - and on the other side, as the panic walls shot up from their
recesses in the road surfaces, closing off their line of advance yet
again, they'd found themselves in the midst of an NEP force recon
patrol. Perhaps a hundred infantry, a dozen Mongoose powersuits, a
few "Fork" leg units, a Scarab support vehicle, and - Noé
was sure he'd remember this until he died - one of those massive
Tinkers with the twin main guns bringing up the rear. The
bastard.<br />
<br />
Fighting commenced immediately. With one round in
the chamber when they had come through, Angola had fired point blank
into the nearest Fork, explosively disassembling it. Infantry lasgun
fire sprayed the air, so they had dropped down, crushing a few under
their chassis, sliding across the asphalt - too far! - into the
glacis plate of the Tinker. Its long gun barrels pinned to one side
of their Canary, it popped smoke in all directions and began backing
up; Noé had re-energized the antigravity plates to claw for
altitude, hoping the guns couldn't climb fast enough.<br />
<br />
Not
enough. The tank had hit them dead-on, one of the shells popping
their shields to let the other through, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">detonating</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
some reactive armor the Corvids had welded there and exploding
itself. All the video feeds on their right side had gone out.
Cassandra ducked down a side alley that miraculously seemed to open
up at their side then, leading them into a dense urban block, weaving
through high rises as the Tinker's guns chased them, hammering the
buildings apart, its chassis ripping through any detritus on the
street, inexorable. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
remembered suddenly feeling oddly unconcerned by the monster tank;
where had the other Fork gone? The Cassandra came out of the
commercial block and over some wide gauge train tracks; the absence
of the customary panic walls here at the safety fencing around them
made all the stranger by the sight of another orbital gun tower - and
without remembering how, Noé's laser turret had slewed left, to
their blind spot, catching the Fork in his sights. It fired first and
missed, so the Canary's laser chopped up its shields - just in time
for its main gun to send the orbital gun up in a massive ball of
fire. The fork disappeared in Noé's memory then - caught in the
blast, the Cassandra had been thrown through the safety fencing on
the far side of the tracks, coming down with power knocked out and
ripping through a semi truck in a parking lot, dead in the
water.<br />
<br />
Onward came the Tinker. The memory was timeless,
silent as ever. The guns fired, somehow missed. Maybe something to do
with the dust of all the rubble, the flames everywhere, or the
twisted pile of metal the stricken Canary had nested in. But to make
sure, it would run them over. Noé knew this; that was old hat for
NEP tread heads - turn the dissidents into zippers under their
tracks. Wash their remains down the sewer drains. Down into the
earth, with his father.<br />
<br />
They had not died. Angola
had done something below, and the Cassandra sprang into the air as
the Tinker closed within a few dozen meters of their position,
shedding sheet metal and car parts as it rose far above the gun
elevation of the tank, which simply stopped. The Canary turned to
fire - but needed ammunition in its gun. The laser practically
useless against the tank, Noé dropped down to assist; loaded the
last green shell. No sooner had the action eaten the round than
Angola had fired. The explosion shattered one of the Tinker's guns,
but the tank only backed up, firing more smoke canisters to retreat
into.<br />
<br />
Not a sound: Noé remembered the </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">vibration</span></i></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> of
its horn echoing in the streets, furious.<br />
<br />
The sweaty feel
of his fingers on Angola's shoulder - was it from the bedroom the
night before, or had it actually happened then? Noé remembered the
monochrome light of their little death closet on their skin, in the
beads of sweat rolling between his fingers. Imploring her. Angola
turned away. They would not pursue; they would flee. They would
live.<br />
<br />
This almost killed them. Crossing the street, the
Canary slipped behind an apartment block, putting as much between
itself and the general location of the enemy as it could. Ahead,
however, an opening in the buildings appeared; a plaza with a huge
statue of Great Leader in it stretched between them and the safety of
the next row of apartments. In the nightmare, time dilated. They
crossed - and the Tinker did not miss.<br />
<br />
The tank crew had
backed up to the street which terminated in the plaza; waiting,
guessing what the Cassandra was here for; that they would have to
come back this way. The shell holed the laser turret - mercifully, it
was some kind of nonexplosive round. Shattered metal fragments
sprouted from Noé's shoulders and head like some kind of grotesque
window garden grown in time lapse. Something sliced Angola's right
eye and cheek open instantly, baptizing the infant Ty in its vitreous
liquid - but no blood. Noé would never forget.<br />
<br />
The
Cassandra spun from the force of the strike, but Angola's hands were
still on the controls - she probably didn't even know she was half
blind yet. She was acquiring the Tinker in her sights, so it was
simple - load the next round. There were only two left - black and
white. Noé chose black. Reached over to steady Angola's hand.<br />
<br />
The
shot was taken as the Cassandra drifted behind the apartment
building, so there would only ever be a glimpse of their kill, but
the round placed true in the middle of its glacis plate - a flash of
light and a puff of smoke - and the tank simply stopped moving in the
middle of the road.<br />
<br />
Noé was still wiping the blood
out of his eyes and picking tiny metal daggers from his scalp,
dreading the feel of brain tissue, when he felt the Cassandra stop
moving. In the forward camera sat the Tug on its launchpad, running
lights on, helm viewports occupied by shadowy figures he could not
make out.<br />
<br />
Now for the final, mad deceit. </span></span></span></span>
</span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Angola
plainly wanted to do something; she was half out of her seat, leaning
toward the Cassandra's door, her other hand dialing down the agrav
plates as she'd see Noé do until their fat tires rest on the
launchpad surface, going through the motions to get this all over
with, like </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">rape.</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
It was obvious the pain of her injuries was starting to affect her.
She went to open the door, but Noé's hand was on her
shoulder.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Ty,"
he intoned. "Give him to me before you go out there."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Before
Angola could reply, another voice – cold, low resolution, inhuman –
emanated from the space tug.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Congratulations,
Brigador. Your current off-world earnings will be transmitted to
you." The voice paused.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"While
SNC operations are underway on this planet, you may be... eligible
for further opportunities. If, however, you require immediate medical
attention, you may terminate your contract and exit your vehicle to
consult with our shipboard experts for a nominal fee, to be followed
by a flight off-world."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Something's
wrong with my sight..." she began, pulling away.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé's
fingers pressed into her shoulder, reminding and restraining
her. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">"Ty,
Angola. Give him to me, and go get help. I don't trust them far
enough. When I see that you’re taken care of, then we'll come out,
too."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">She
made eye contact with him, such as she could. Two characters on a
stage, under an isolated spotlight, watched for plays of emotion
under bloodstained brows. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Did
she guess? Noé knew she didn't. She wasn't stupid; it wasn't like
she didn't know him; know he'd never give up his principles
completely. She was just hollowed out, looking for hope where she'd
previously found it - like a ghost returning to to plate of food it
was eating when its reckoning had come. Lips moved, but they could
not partake. Her brain probably knew, but it shielded her from that
knowledge. She unwrapped Ty from her bosom and handed him over. Noé
bound the boy to himself, sat back in the pilot's seat, and gazed
into those mud </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">red</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
eyes. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">If
there was accusation or accolade there, he didn’t see it, which was
best of all.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
door opened for Angola, and she stepped outside, then closed it
behind her. Noé watched for a few seconds on the cameras to ensure
she was moving toward the tug under her own power, putting up a
convincing act. Bathed in the yellow light of that great ship's
running lights, she was made a silhouette of anyone. Noé got up and
went to the 76mm cannon's last shell - the white one.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">No
matter what this ammunition was, he doubted it would make it through
the reentry-shielded hull of the tug. Very little would. But that was
not what he'd have to do, because when Angola approached, the door
would open.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And
it did.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And
Noé loaded the shell. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">There
were figures, all black and anonymous to Noé, in that bright doorway
at the side of the ship, where the hull swung down to form an
embarking ramp. And when Noé adjusted the gun's aim, the clever
watchers in the ship took note, and the little men scrambled as the
ramp began to reverse - far too slow. He fired. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">T</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">he
shell burst inside the tug, a flash of pure white that spilled
angrily everywhere within, sparking, furious, and caustic. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">T</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">he
white phosphorus round. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
door closed, but the ship burned in its own atmosphere, cooking .
Angola sat on the tarmac, limp, unsurprised, as the control room's
windows at the top of the ship filled with smoke and the little
bodies inside writhed, choking, and fell. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffff;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And
now there was no reason for anyone to come here anymore.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Noé
gathered her up, for she was too weak now even to hate him, and took
her back to the Cassandra, which flew away down the train
tracks. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">These
it followed, its running lights off, its frame low to the ground,
until it came to a diversion in the track, which it </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">took</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
and this declined into the ground. Those who had gone before that
night had cast aside the barrier stones laid there once the old coal
mine had been used up, and Cassandra followed them into absolute
night. </span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">This
was as close as his father ever had to a tomb. Noé took a few turns
in the vaulted, empty halls, past cowering forms in yellow rain
jackets, and set his vessel down to wait for the owners of the ground
over his head to finish what they had begun. He got out of the
Cassandra and started walking, carrying his baby and holding Angola's
hand, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">her
eye no detraction here.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">No
one chased very long after zero asset men; there was nothing to take.
And that was all </span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the</span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
leverage remaining to keep what he most valued.</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">END</span></span></span></span>
</span></span></span></span>
</div>
<br />Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-77472096968649481242018-12-31T10:38:00.004-06:002018-12-31T10:38:44.180-06:00On the Direction of Evolution for American Cities<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857em; margin-bottom: 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">
I used to be a big advocate for so-called bedroom communities, but I'm not so sure anymore. There are some huge systemic problems with the way many towns and cities are built. I now believe this means many of them will <em style="font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px;">inevitably</em> become useless. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857em; margin-bottom: 0.357143em; margin-top: 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">
In the US, towns were built or vastly expanded in the post 1940s around the concepts of automotive transport and suburban lifestyles. This creates "wide" city plans that build "out" and not "up," since it is assumed everyone can just drive a car to get where they need to go. Public transportation languishes in the same environment. Simultaneously, suburban aspirational living drives the workers and their money out to the fringes of the city, looking for new developments on large lots in convoluted street plans that abandon the grid street system <em style="font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px;">literally in order to prevent their neighborhood being usefully navigable</em>. This devalues whatever holdover main street "walking" district remained at the center of the city, moving the business money out to what I call "secondary main streets" - large avenues connecting the city on the limns of the new low-density housing areas, lined on all sides by strip malls and box store lots. This is encouraged because it looks "open" and "big," is cheap for the businesses to build, and is developed relatively quickly so long as the city planners agree to let the businesses develop this how they want. This works great for our civilization right up until the 2000s, when the following developments occur (or continue to pick up steam alongside the other developments):</div>
<ul style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0.357143em 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px;">
<li style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Gas prices go up</li>
<li style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Family sizes go down</li>
<li style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Agriculture and manufacturing become less important to our economy than services, knowledge sector, and logistics</li>
<li style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Wages stagnate while inflation continues, making car and house ownership more difficult while ultimately decreasing property tax income for the city</li>
<li style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Amazon Effect guts malls and box store companies, further decreasing property tax income for the city</li>
<li style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Limited IT infrastructure rollout largely bypasses rural and suburban areas in favor of cities (as you already mentioned)</li>
<li style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.42857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">"boom" infrastructure not designed to last begins to crumble, exacerbating the maintenance costs of low-density housing</li>
</ul>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857em; margin-bottom: 0.357143em; margin-top: 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">
In the end you are left with a city that is expensive to live in and maintain, without a population financially capable of enjoying it or having a real use for the size of the houses outside of pure aspiration, with a bunch of empty box stores that are difficult to repurpose - not only by their nature but because of their location and basic low-quality construction. People living there will realize they are living in a city imagined by corporations instead of city planners, and that nothing around them is beautifully architected - they will have no sense of ownership. The historical geographical reasons for the city's existence have dried up and now, unless it is a hospital or university town, or has heavily invested in IT or commuting infrastructure and can parasitize the incomes of a larger neighbor city, it has little path forward. Its costs will continue to compound while its sources of income will decrease, driving out citizens able to do so to more densely-packed megacities without these structural issues. The remaining population will be even less able to cope with the structural doom imposed on them, and the city will die a slow death over the course of the next century, making all those cornfields and forests they paved over to build it look like pretty great carbon sinks in comparison.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857em; margin-bottom: 0.357143em; margin-top: 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">
I don't see a way out of this. The only thing you can do to reverse it is compel people to literally act against their own interest and stay; to gain control of their local governments and get them to do drastic shit like build municipal IT infrastructure and buy out box store lots and pave them over to build high-density housing, open public spaces, and whatever kinds of commercial development make sense (probably logistics-related stuff and office buildings). That's scary because it requires you to put yourself even deeper in the financial hole in order to drag yourself out of it, so many places will not do it (politicians who increase city debt will be voted out by a population not educated enough to realize they're doing what needs to be done). You can try to attract businesses, but without a compelling workforce or geographical reason to exist, you are not going to get a lot of them without selling out completely (offering them utterly unfair tax incentives to invest in your community which ultimately destroy a lot of the immediate benefit their investment would provide!).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857em; margin-bottom: 0.357143em; margin-top: 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">
A lot of small and mid-sized cities in America, especially those which expanded quickly during the baby boom years, are now entering a death spiral that will see them contract or even snuff themselves out. Their populations will migrate to the bigger cities and continue to drive housing prices up there. I see this all as a fundamental and practically insurmountable change.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857em; margin-bottom: 0.357143em; margin-top: 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">
In the future, our landscape will be dotted with the hollow ghost town corpses of towns and cities - and as nature reclaims these spaces, and people burn less gas just to exist, we will actually realize this was a good thing.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857em; margin-top: 0.357143em; padding: 0px;">
SOURCE: am living in Rockford, IL</div>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-67291825379194665692018-12-11T22:38:00.003-06:002018-12-11T22:38:42.538-06:00Internet Corollary - the ISP Angle<div data-reddit-rtjson="{"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://iFiber.org"}}},"blocks":[{"key":"962e","text":"LOL! I don't mean to sound offensive, but if the above sounds easy to you then I think you don't have the technical expertise to do it.\n","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"5kf71","text":"Yes, we all know what switches and routers are, and we may even know how to properly architect and provision IT infrastructure to avoid stupid bottlenecks in the transition from last mile media to backbone fiber, but there are technical, financial, and strategic problems with setting up your own ISP that make it such a bitch to get into, few ever do:","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"7tu1","text":"TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":24,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"acv9m","text":"Redundancy and Disaster Recovery - when you're an ISP, people depend on you, sometimes with their finances, sometimes (as in the case of hospital patients or law enforcement officials) with their lives. Significant periods of downtime during inevitable equipment failures practically require ISPs to use geographically distant backup facilities with separate power (not just UPS/generator; ideally all the way to the plant), backbone uplink, and staffing. If one goes down, the other one needs to automatically come up within milliseconds, or you will face an unholy amount of network traffic congestion that could well overwhelm your backup site, killing that too as a knock-on effect. Expensive network engineers and linesmen need to be kept on retainer to handle the damage at all levels, even when they're not necessarily doing anything for you for the same reason.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":32,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"3ni4b","text":"Quality of Service - Because of the exhorbitant fees and expenses associated with getting that sweet, succulent backbone data to your subscribers and a desire not to pass that directly on to the customer who has competing offers from others with bigger pockets than you do, you pretty much need to get clever about how you cache, prioritize, and otherwise shape traffic. Load balancers, carefully-tuned QoS rules, ethically-questionable caching decisions, and other solutions must be leveraged to get the most out of what you've paid for in order to deliver a cost-effective service. Indeed, AFAIK ISPs commonly rely on these technologies to such an extent that they don't actually buy enough bandwidth to the backbone to literally serve all their customers to the utmost all at once; if everyone came online at the same time and couldn't be QoS'd adequately, they wouldn't have the pipe to handle it. A delicate balancing act.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":19,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"c9s9u","text":"FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":24,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"87lkb","text":"Comcast and AT&T gon' find a way to sue you.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":22,"length":21,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"bndm5","text":"The startup costs of an ISP are very high because of the physical infrastructure and fees. The smaller your market gets (e.g. a 3,000 person town), the less likely your consumer base will be able to cover your expenses. Outside investment is typically not thrilled about a complicated business with high initial expenses, moderate year-over-year maintenance costs, plenty of failure points, a long wait for ROI, significant potential for competition, and significant hurdles to expansion into larger markets.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":17,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fmu25","text":"STRATEGIC PROBLEMS","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":18,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"10e0g","text":"Marketing expenses are difficult to swallow when you work in a market where tried-and-true is generally preferred by consumers over new and cheap.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":18,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"9qb7q","text":"Choice of infrastructure can have profound implications for the businesses' ability to expand with difficult tradeoffs in startup costs and future-proofing. A company with millions sunk into gigabit internet provided last-mile via coaxial MOCA technologies has to dump all of that infrastructure if customer expectations for bandwidth rise above what that technology can provide - this is partly why even though their technology can do it, cable companies have been loathe to tee up to what marks the last possible limit of throughput on their last-mile infrastructure. New capital expenditures will slow growth unacceptably, so ISPs need to make sure their wires and boxes will stand the test of time right from the outset. Additionally, opportunities to expand into new market areas may be missed if your infrastructure isn't adaptable enough to integrate more distant or heterogeneous endpoints - neat ideas like wireless mesh networks quickly die as the network grows because QoS and latency costs scale faster than the size of the network, making expansion untenable.\n","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":24,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fgcf2","text":"It's not that I think it's impossible to do, but I know we don't have the necessary smarts and money to do it. If I were going to try, though, I'd try something like this:","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"cdts5","text":"Find 3rd party backbone-served area like Northern Illinois and its iFiber.org non-profit backbone organization with a decent potential market already served by Comcast.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":142,"length":26,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":67,"length":10,"key":0}],"data":{}},{"key":"3j9qc","text":"Coordinate with cooperative local governments to allow me to lease tower space on local water towers and other municipally-owned tall shit geographically near the backbone - they will earn a cut for this. Possibly build towers where potential for serving a juicy slice of the market is high.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":174,"length":29,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"2r5rh","text":"Get funded by investment from local businesses and possibly some kind of profit-sharing organizational vehicle that essentially crowd-funds me via local investment from stakeholders. Grassroots work a must to build this.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fd96k","text":"Build out a 4G or even 5G infrastructure to serve business and residential traffic with wireless last-mile connections - this will likely require licensing, fees, and other government shit to be able to do.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"ch5rs","text":"Customer plans do not go above 30mbps down/10mbps up to start. This is going to actually be fast enough for most people.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"53vjv","text":"Sell (at as close to cost as is feasible) transparently SSL-bumping cache boxes to customers with built-in 4G hotspots, 2.4/5ghz wireless APs, and 1x gigabit ethernet (remember that future-proof your infrastructure thing?), preferably with no ongoing service fee involved. This helps deliver perceptually faster service to customers, simplifies their network, reduces bandwidth utilization, and does so all without ethical compromise, as the device resides on their home network and uses off-the-shelf, user-auditable software/firmware/hardware.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"68u2n","text":"Hopefully utilize already-extant 3rd-part datacenter facilities and staff in the area to do the uplink from last mile to backbone. ","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"917ke","text":"Focus on residential service over business customers at first, to soften the impact of inevitable learning mistakes leaving a bad impression about my reliability on my potentially most-profitable customer type.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}]}">
As a sidenote to the earlier navel-gazing about the future internet that outrgrew its parent thought, how does one serve up that media? I got into a discussion on Reddit which involved just that. I did a fairly in-depth amount of analysis for a total amateur on the subject, which I think should be posted here lest I ever forget why it would be a super-bad idea for me to attempt to start my own ISP.<br /><br />A local/municipal ISP is responsible for the "last mile" connections around town to the residences, businesses, and government buildings it serves. These connections converge on a local data center (basically a building with switching and routing equipment that supplies IP addressing to its client connections and converts whatever media used for the last mile to fiberoptic via a router with SFP cages populated with fiber adapters). From there, the fiber out line needs to connect to the "backbone," which is inevitably going to be a fat fiber pipe owned and operated by an intermediate provider or a top-tier operator company (Comcast is one of these AFAIK, so if you're doing this where they operate the backbone you might STILL end up beholden to them to a lesser degree). Your ISP pays the backbone operator a fee for some amount of bandwidth up to the limit enforced by the number of fiber strands your datacenter has connecting it to their nearest backbone splice closet/datacenter. As I understand it these fees are not trivial. From there your ISP is allocated one of the IP ranges reserved for these sorts of things and you finally have a connection to the World Wide Web.<br /><br />It should be noted the above summary only handles the basic problem of connectivity - not how you bill clients, not how you optimize your connection and cache data (caching is going to be important in order to not get raped by that backbone rent agreement, which typically charges by data used from what I've gleaned).</div>
<div data-reddit-rtjson="{"entityMap":{"0":{"type":"LINK","mutability":"MUTABLE","data":{"url":"https://iFiber.org"}}},"blocks":[{"key":"962e","text":"LOL! I don't mean to sound offensive, but if the above sounds easy to you then I think you don't have the technical expertise to do it.\n","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"5kf71","text":"Yes, we all know what switches and routers are, and we may even know how to properly architect and provision IT infrastructure to avoid stupid bottlenecks in the transition from last mile media to backbone fiber, but there are technical, financial, and strategic problems with setting up your own ISP that make it such a bitch to get into, few ever do:","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"7tu1","text":"TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":24,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"acv9m","text":"Redundancy and Disaster Recovery - when you're an ISP, people depend on you, sometimes with their finances, sometimes (as in the case of hospital patients or law enforcement officials) with their lives. Significant periods of downtime during inevitable equipment failures practically require ISPs to use geographically distant backup facilities with separate power (not just UPS/generator; ideally all the way to the plant), backbone uplink, and staffing. If one goes down, the other one needs to automatically come up within milliseconds, or you will face an unholy amount of network traffic congestion that could well overwhelm your backup site, killing that too as a knock-on effect. Expensive network engineers and linesmen need to be kept on retainer to handle the damage at all levels, even when they're not necessarily doing anything for you for the same reason.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":32,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"3ni4b","text":"Quality of Service - Because of the exhorbitant fees and expenses associated with getting that sweet, succulent backbone data to your subscribers and a desire not to pass that directly on to the customer who has competing offers from others with bigger pockets than you do, you pretty much need to get clever about how you cache, prioritize, and otherwise shape traffic. Load balancers, carefully-tuned QoS rules, ethically-questionable caching decisions, and other solutions must be leveraged to get the most out of what you've paid for in order to deliver a cost-effective service. Indeed, AFAIK ISPs commonly rely on these technologies to such an extent that they don't actually buy enough bandwidth to the backbone to literally serve all their customers to the utmost all at once; if everyone came online at the same time and couldn't be QoS'd adequately, they wouldn't have the pipe to handle it. A delicate balancing act.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":19,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"c9s9u","text":"FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":24,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"87lkb","text":"Comcast and AT&T gon' find a way to sue you.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":22,"length":21,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"bndm5","text":"The startup costs of an ISP are very high because of the physical infrastructure and fees. The smaller your market gets (e.g. a 3,000 person town), the less likely your consumer base will be able to cover your expenses. Outside investment is typically not thrilled about a complicated business with high initial expenses, moderate year-over-year maintenance costs, plenty of failure points, a long wait for ROI, significant potential for competition, and significant hurdles to expansion into larger markets.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":17,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fmu25","text":"STRATEGIC PROBLEMS","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":18,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"10e0g","text":"Marketing expenses are difficult to swallow when you work in a market where tried-and-true is generally preferred by consumers over new and cheap.","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":18,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"9qb7q","text":"Choice of infrastructure can have profound implications for the businesses' ability to expand with difficult tradeoffs in startup costs and future-proofing. A company with millions sunk into gigabit internet provided last-mile via coaxial MOCA technologies has to dump all of that infrastructure if customer expectations for bandwidth rise above what that technology can provide - this is partly why even though their technology can do it, cable companies have been loathe to tee up to what marks the last possible limit of throughput on their last-mile infrastructure. New capital expenditures will slow growth unacceptably, so ISPs need to make sure their wires and boxes will stand the test of time right from the outset. Additionally, opportunities to expand into new market areas may be missed if your infrastructure isn't adaptable enough to integrate more distant or heterogeneous endpoints - neat ideas like wireless mesh networks quickly die as the network grows because QoS and latency costs scale faster than the size of the network, making expansion untenable.\n","type":"ordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":0,"length":24,"style":"BOLD"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fgcf2","text":"It's not that I think it's impossible to do, but I know we don't have the necessary smarts and money to do it. If I were going to try, though, I'd try something like this:","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"cdts5","text":"Find 3rd party backbone-served area like Northern Illinois and its iFiber.org non-profit backbone organization with a decent potential market already served by Comcast.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":142,"length":26,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[{"offset":67,"length":10,"key":0}],"data":{}},{"key":"3j9qc","text":"Coordinate with cooperative local governments to allow me to lease tower space on local water towers and other municipally-owned tall shit geographically near the backbone - they will earn a cut for this. Possibly build towers where potential for serving a juicy slice of the market is high.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":174,"length":29,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"2r5rh","text":"Get funded by investment from local businesses and possibly some kind of profit-sharing organizational vehicle that essentially crowd-funds me via local investment from stakeholders. Grassroots work a must to build this.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"fd96k","text":"Build out a 4G or even 5G infrastructure to serve business and residential traffic with wireless last-mile connections - this will likely require licensing, fees, and other government shit to be able to do.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"ch5rs","text":"Customer plans do not go above 30mbps down/10mbps up to start. This is going to actually be fast enough for most people.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"53vjv","text":"Sell (at as close to cost as is feasible) transparently SSL-bumping cache boxes to customers with built-in 4G hotspots, 2.4/5ghz wireless APs, and 1x gigabit ethernet (remember that future-proof your infrastructure thing?), preferably with no ongoing service fee involved. This helps deliver perceptually faster service to customers, simplifies their network, reduces bandwidth utilization, and does so all without ethical compromise, as the device resides on their home network and uses off-the-shelf, user-auditable software/firmware/hardware.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"68u2n","text":"Hopefully utilize already-extant 3rd-part datacenter facilities and staff in the area to do the uplink from last mile to backbone. ","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"917ke","text":"Focus on residential service over business customers at first, to soften the impact of inevitable learning mistakes leaving a bad impression about my reliability on my potentially most-profitable customer type.","type":"unordered-list-item","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}]}">
<br /><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="11d1dd" data-offset-key="8fota-0-0">
<div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="8fota-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="8fota-0-0">Yes, we all know what switches and routers are, and we may even know how to properly architect and provision IT infrastructure to avoid stupid bottlenecks in the transition from last mile media to backbone fiber, but there are technical, financial, and strategic problems with setting up your own ISP that make it such a bitch to get into, few ever do:</span></div>
</div>
<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="11d1dd" data-offset-key="70bqn-0-0">
<div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="70bqn-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="70bqn-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="70bqn-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="70bqn-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;">TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS</span></div>
</div>
<ol>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="3qq25-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="3qq25-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;">Redundancy and Disaster Recovery</span><span data-offset-key="3qq25-0-1"> - when you're an ISP, people depend on you, sometimes with their finances, sometimes (as in the case of hospital patients or law enforcement officials) with their lives. Significant periods of downtime during inevitable equipment failures practically require ISPs to use geographically distant backup facilities with separate power (not just UPS/generator; ideally all the way to the plant), backbone uplink, and staffing. If one goes down, the other one needs to automatically come up within milliseconds, or you will face an unholy amount of network traffic congestion that could well overwhelm your backup site, killing that too as a knock-on effect. Expensive network engineers and linesmen need to be kept on retainer to handle the damage at all levels, even when they're not necessarily doing anything for you for the same reason.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fb7vk-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="fb7vk-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;">Quality of Service </span><span data-offset-key="fb7vk-0-1">- Because of the exhorbitant fees and expenses associated with getting that sweet, succulent backbone data to your subscribers and a desire not to pass that directly on to the customer who has competing offers from others with bigger pockets than you do, you pretty much need to get clever about how you cache, prioritize, and otherwise shape traffic. Load balancers, carefully-tuned QoS rules, ethically-questionable caching decisions, and other solutions must be leveraged to get the most out of what you've paid for in order to deliver a cost-effective service. Indeed, AFAIK ISPs commonly rely on these technologies to such an extent that they don't actually buy enough bandwidth to the backbone to literally serve all their customers to the utmost all at once; if everyone came online at the same time and couldn't be QoS'd adequately, they wouldn't have the pipe to handle it. A delicate balancing act.</span></div>
</li>
</ol>
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<div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="atr3t-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="atr3t-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;">FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS</span></div>
</div>
<ol>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="9msf7-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="9msf7-0-0">Comcast and AT&T gon' </span><span data-offset-key="9msf7-0-1" style="font-weight: bold;">find a way to sue you</span><span data-offset-key="9msf7-0-2">.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="auj8o-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="auj8o-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;">The startup costs</span><span data-offset-key="auj8o-0-1"> of an ISP are very high because of the physical infrastructure and fees. The smaller your market gets (e.g. a 3,000 person town), the less likely your consumer base will be able to cover your expenses. Outside investment is typically not thrilled about a complicated business with high initial expenses, moderate year-over-year maintenance costs, plenty of failure points, a long wait for ROI, significant potential for competition, and significant hurdles to expansion into larger markets.</span></div>
</li>
</ol>
<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="11d1dd" data-offset-key="47b7k-0-0">
<div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="47b7k-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="47b7k-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;">STRATEGIC PROBLEMS</span></div>
</div>
<ol>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="e3r7-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="e3r7-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;">Marketing expenses</span><span data-offset-key="e3r7-0-1"> are difficult to swallow when you work in a market where tried-and-true is generally preferred by consumers over new and cheap.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="abubl-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="abubl-0-0" style="font-weight: bold;">Choice of infrastructure</span><span data-offset-key="abubl-0-1"> can have profound implications for the businesses' ability to expand with difficult tradeoffs in startup costs and future-proofing. A company with millions sunk into gigabit internet provided last-mile via coaxial MOCA technologies has to dump all of that infrastructure if customer expectations for bandwidth rise above what that technology can provide - this is partly why even though their technology can do it, cable companies have been loathe to tee up to what marks the last possible limit of throughput on their last-mile infrastructure. New capital expenditures will slow growth unacceptably, so ISPs need to make sure their wires and boxes will stand the test of time right from the outset. Additionally, opportunities to expand into new market areas may be missed if your infrastructure isn't adaptable enough to integrate more distant or heterogeneous endpoints - neat ideas like wireless mesh networks quickly die as the network grows because QoS and latency costs scale faster than the size of the network, making expansion untenable.
</span></div>
</li>
</ol>
<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="11d1dd" data-offset-key="c3j36-0-0">
<div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="c3j36-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="c3j36-0-0">It's not that I think it's impossible to do, but I know we don't have the necessary smarts and money to do it. If I were going to try, though, I'd try something like this:</span></div>
</div>
<ul>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="11kee-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="11kee-0-0">Find 3rd party backbone-served area like Northern Illinois and its </span><a class="s18magzr-0 fOMzQe" href="https://ifiber.org/"><span data-offset-key="11kee-1-0">iFiber.org</span></a><span data-offset-key="11kee-2-0"> non-profit backbone organization with a decent potential market </span><span data-offset-key="11kee-2-1" style="font-style: italic;">already served by Comcast.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="2dg90-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="2dg90-0-0">Coordinate with cooperative local governments to allow me to lease tower space on local water towers and other municipally-owned tall shit geographically near the backbone - </span><span data-offset-key="2dg90-0-1" style="font-style: italic;">they will earn a cut for this</span><span data-offset-key="2dg90-0-2">. Possibly build towers where potential for serving a juicy slice of the market is high.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fap4p-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="fap4p-0-0">Get funded by investment from local businesses and possibly some kind of profit-sharing organizational vehicle that essentially crowd-funds me via local investment from stakeholders. Grassroots work a must to build this.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="e85as-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="e85as-0-0">Build out a 4G or even 5G infrastructure to serve business and residential traffic with wireless last-mile connections - this will likely require licensing, fees, and other government shit to be able to do.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="ae2na-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="ae2na-0-0">Customer plans do not go above 30mbps down/10mbps up to start. This is going to actually be fast enough for most people.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="7s1ct-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="7s1ct-0-0">Sell (at as close to cost as is feasible) transparently SSL-bumping cache boxes to customers with built-in 4G hotspots, 2.4/5ghz wireless APs, and 1x gigabit ethernet (remember that future-proof your infrastructure thing?), preferably with no ongoing service fee involved. This helps deliver perceptually faster service to customers, simplifies their network, reduces bandwidth utilization, and does so all without ethical compromise, as the device resides on their home network and uses off-the-shelf, user-auditable software/firmware/hardware.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="bdcta-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="bdcta-0-0">Hopefully utilize already-extant 3rd-part datacenter facilities and staff in the area to do the uplink from last mile to backbone. </span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="dpgme-0-0">
<span data-offset-key="dpgme-0-0">Focus on residential service over business customers at first, to soften the impact of inevitable learning mistakes leaving a bad impression about my reliability on my potentially most-profitable customer type.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-79096791644874807822018-12-09T21:26:00.003-06:002018-12-09T21:26:50.780-06:00a simple thought about where the internet is headed<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
In the beginning, the internet was used by individuals.<br />Over time, advertisement was used to support useful services which became structurally significant within the community of internet users.<br />Ads generated enough revenue from this community to justify serious commercial utilization of the internet as a medium for the commercial exchange of goods and services.<br />Due to features inherent in the structure of the internet, its community was able to drastically curtail the effect<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">iveness of advertising.<br />Advertising was slowly supplanted with data mining as a means of supporting services which drove customer engagement in the online community.<br />It remains to be seen whether users will be able to restrict this mechanism of commercialization.</span></div>
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If they are, what would replace it? If not, would it be bad to revert to a Web 1.0 experience for the user community, with corporations mostly using the medium for interbusiness communications?</div>
</div>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-74391889727169979222017-12-28T20:47:00.000-06:002017-12-28T21:06:51.718-06:00Big Ideas About Free Markets, Regulation, Unions, Moderation, and IdeologyAnyone who reads my blog or talks with me for any length of time probably already knows I'm very much a "big ideas" kind of person. I don't say that as a brag; it has as many pitfalls as it does pluses and certainly indicates no surplus of brain cells; it's a proclivity rather than an ability. The big ideas guy misses those all-important details and overgeneralizes; he tends to want to lump things together rather than split them apart (and any cognitive bias is unfortunate). He tends to be a bore in conversation because his topics of interest tend toward platitudes instead of anecdotes; when he does relate an anecdote he seems to think he can derive an axiom from it. Yet I'll admit I'm proud of being a big ideas guy. I think we get a rough scrape much of the time; for all the people peering down microscopes in their little niches, doesn't there need to be somebody looking at the bigger picture? Don't answer that, I've already decided it must be true.<br />
Navel gazing aside, where does that leave a big ideas person in times like these, when anyone can tell there's some of a sea change going on in world history? There's a great debate that surrounds the policy and culture wars in the United States which is still afoot, something altogether more appropriate to the minds of the citizens of this republic than the gaffs and potshots of the demagogues who haunt our headlines:<br />
<b>How much of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market" target="_blank">free market</a> do we want?</b><br />
<br />
In broad strokes, I'm a moderate, so of course I don't want full <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_economics" target="_blank">socialism</a> and I don't want <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism" target="_blank">anarcho-capitalism</a>, either. Some regulation is good, some is bad. I think even most people left and right of me would agree by degrees. But as a big ideas guy, I've got to reach way back to feel like this position is justified, the same way deciding whether I should help my neighbor shovel his walk tends to end with me pondering the moral implications of the Big Bang. Talking about the failures of Communism or the great American success following Adam Smith's model won't do it for me - I want to go back to the beginning. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_(economics)" target="_blank">Markets</a> exist in all societies (see how simple and general I can get here?) - and before societies, markets are just food chains.<br />
<br />
It's pretty clear that nature imposes no restrictions on itself; evolution is a no-holds barred struggle for survival fit to make Werner Herzog shudder with nihilistic delight every time he considers it. Food chains are as free as they come. Societies, however, can and do regulate their markets - therefore a crucial question is when <i>did</i> societies first start to regulate their markets? This is important to me because I think a lot of people enter into debate about how free or regulated markets should be based on improper assumptions about the causes and effects of regulations. They think that markets create the most wealth when they are freest as a rule - and they are right, to a point. Where I think people are misled is about just how free a market can become before it is guaranteed to lose its freedom in short order. I think a great paradox is missed, which is that the markets most free are those which are regulated to be free.<br />
<br />
To explain why I think regulation paradoxically gives rise to the freest sustainable markets, let's go back to the origins of markets. If we accept that nature's food chains are free, it's not a great leap to suppose that the first markets were also quite free. Indeed, it is hard to imagine early hominids and later humans having much of an idea that they even might want to regulate markets, much less actually bother to do so. A market is natively free and only artificially constricted; that is my understanding of How Things Are. If that is true, then history shows us that these freest of markets very easily gave rise to some of the least free markets human societies have ever labored in - these early societies quickly devolved from whatever freedoms they might have originally enjoyed into despotisms of various flavors with command economies in most places for most of history, right on up through the insane <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism" target="_blank">mercantilism</a> which Adam Smith railed against in the Age of Reason. Even later, after Smith and in the United States, free economies gave rise to monopolies and command economies so often that some, like Teddy Roosevelt, could make trust-busting their campaign platform. That is the root of the paradox - that an economy which is free enough will allow those who get to the top to install rules which make it decidedly unfree. Of course this only seems bad because those top-down economies engendered by this devolution are themselves awful.<br />
<br />
Once we have got to the point where we must admit to ourselves that anarcho-capitalism and full on socialism are equally awful, we know that those who tell us all regulation is evil and those who tell us that all regulation is good are not thinking about things rationally. The moderate viewpoint is correct - it only remains to determine how much regulation is really needed (something that anyone could have told you before this discussion as well as after). All this writing is not here so much to "discover" that conclusion as to serve as a reminder of its deep truth, rooted in the fundamental aspects of economics as part of the big picture we should not forget as we get into more nuanced arguments with each other about what makes the most sense for our economy. Liberals should consider whether regulation is overreaching in its particulars, and conservatives should remind themselves that not all regulation constitutes an unneeded and hateful restriction of market forces.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
By way of getting more particular (even a Big Ideas Guy should admit that it's all armchair speculation unless it survives contact with at least a few real-life examples), how to we apply the kind of thinking on display above to an issue which <a href="https://www.ilnews.org/news/justice/more-briefs-filed-with-scotus-in-illinois-forced-union-dues/article_f45655f2-dac1-11e7-8546-13faa5d2263b.html" target="_blank">has recently been in the forefront of local (Illinois) economic politics</a> for me, the regulation of Unions? More specifically, does the line of reasoning put forth here have any bearing on the question most recently at hand, which is<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Whether Unions have the right to require workers in their represented workforces to pay dues even if they do not want to be part of the Union?</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Shortly but not so sweetly, I think this question is largely answerable if we adopt the long view, big picture position, take a step back, and look first at the origins of Unions in the United States. We don't need to go back further than this, I think (to Unions in Europe and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild" target="_blank">Guilds</a> before them), because the question is more specific; it asks whether Unions should have this right in a given state in the US, not universally.<br />
<br />
This is only a digression; the point is that when we look at the origins of trade unions in the USA, we see that the legal apparatus of the country had no specific laws in place to protect Unions or encourage their formation (big surprise, since it's hard to imagine regulating something that doesn't exist yet!). Granting that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_States" target="_blank">Unions faced an extremely rough and uphill battle to gain traction and influence in the USA</a>, and that some laws definitely needed to change to <i>allow Unions to exist,</i> the law in question here was proofed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abood_v._Detroit_Board_of_Education" target="_blank">much later, in 1977</a>. It is clear that it is possible for Unions to do real work for laborers without requiring non-members to pay dues.<br />
<br />
The case in question, it seems, is not a question of the survival of Unions as it has been portrayed, but rather it is a question of how much regulatory privilege Unions deserve for the services they render; a much more limited question and one less likely to incite unreasonable hatred on either side of the aisle. It is a careful, limited consideration of the adjustments that might be made to our laws for the sake of maintaining a fairly-regulated economy, of which unions form an intrinsically important element. Those in favor of strengthening Unions ought to therefore more clearly recognize that such a moderate reduction of their power ought to reflect more on their own inability to elicit voluntary membership, while those in favor of weakening Unions ought to recognize that Unions are capable of offering services people want to pay for.<br />
<br />
In the midst of this cogitation it's probably worth it to recognize weakness I know about my own position on these things, since everyone seems to be boosting themselves these days without any acknowledgement of where they don't have it all figured out. The thing is, a moderate like me can look smart while pointing out situations where some kind of middle ground is likely the nearest thing to a good idea you can get, but no one can deny it can be infuriating to ask a moderate what the basis of his or her opinions are. In other words:<br />
<br />
<b>How does a moderate work from an ideology when determining what the correct amount of economic regulation is?</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
To what end am I determining that it might be a good idea to have moderately regulated markets and maybe not allow Unions to enforce universal representation dues? What's my endgame? I subscribe to identities I associate with goals - Catholic, American... perhaps Father, now, as well. But I don't have the mixture of these figured out yet, and they can conflict and lead to hypocrisy. Still, I have to say that I'd take hypocrisy over blind partisanship any day of the week; I never much cared for details in the first place.Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-60133926546925096312017-06-05T01:19:00.000-05:002017-06-05T01:19:01.595-05:00Post-Structuralist Lessons in Urban Combat Tactics<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Every once in a long while you<a href="http://www.publicspace.org/en/text-library/eng/b018-walking-through-walls-soldiers-as-architects-in-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict" target="_blank"> run across something in your reading</a> that really scrutinizes basic facts you had previously taken for granted and makes you question whether the author is an idiot or a genius simply by dint of the audacity in their claim.</div>
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90% of the time, you will later come to the conclusion that the author was indeed an idiot - especially if you've spent any serious time reading history, humanities, or philosophy. But 10% of the time, you realize that one or <span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">more of your basic assumptions about Things As They Are bears little resemblance to reality.</span></div>
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Tonight I read one of those all-too-familiar academics bloviating as they so often do on critical theory - the traditional enemy of my pragmatic, holistic approach to narrative, politics, science, etc that bore me so well through the pitfalls of traditional academic epistemological fractalization - and I was really surprised to see they got something right. This guy realized that academie's own endless search to subvert established structures (long a popular pastime in critical theory for those of you who have never been in a higher-level humanities course or read much of critical theory) could - shocker! - be used by imperialists - IMPERIALISTS, I SAY - against their opponents:</div>
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"Education in the humanities, often believed to be the best lasting weapon with which to combat imperialism, has here been adopted as imperialism’s own weapon."</div>
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Wow, it's almost like knowledge in and of itself has no moral value and can be used for good or evil!</div>
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And more than that, after I got over the hilarity of reading one of these types very deliberately and seriously come to that painful realization (and then make a groaner of an attempt to defend critical theory from this "threat:" "It is not my aim in this article to try and correct mistakes and exaggerations made in the use or interpretation of specific theories by such military thinkers.") I got to see how postmodernism and post-structuralism actually make more sense on the battlefield then they ever did as critiques of society in general.</div>
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Not to make a mountain out of a mouse-hole, but I think I really understand folks like the Situationists and Derrida better now that I've read about how their theories have been applied by the Israeli army in urban combat operations. And here had been I, thinking that all critical theory since structuralism had amounted to little else than obfuscatory fractalization and job security in the ivory tower...</div>
</div>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-33398936217714734352016-12-29T00:05:00.002-06:002016-12-29T00:05:28.516-06:00Getting to Cyberpunk Corporate Nation-States<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; clear: both; color: #242729; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
This <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">should</em> be easy, given how close we sometimes seem to already existing in some kind of cyberpunk dystopian vision of the near future, but I'm having a bit of trouble imagining exactly <strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">what the transition(s) to and structure(s) of corporate nation-states, as opposed to our present standard-fare representative governance nation-state, would most plausibly look like, given a starting point of roughly the early 2000s as the earliest possible point of divergence from the history you and I are familiar with as "true."</strong></div>
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To be clear, I am talking about a very common trope of Cyberpunk - that nations, such as they are, will be balkanized, neutered little things, largely co-opted by the corporate interests with holdings inside their borders, in the future. That in many places there might actually exist districts, cities - even states with ONLY corporate and/or criminal syndicate power structures in place. It's a wonderful thematic tool for pasting the oppression, corruption, waste, and inhuman bureaucracy of authoritarian governments onto the template of corporations in order to criticize extreme visions of unrestricted capitalism, but is it plausible, and what would it look like?</div>
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Subquestions within this overall question that would add to any answer:</div>
<ul style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; color: #242729; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1em 30px; padding: 0px;">
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">What would the relationship between corporation and nation look like?</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">What would be the most common relationship between employees and corporations look like?</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">How would corporations change?</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">How would concepts of citizenship, suffrage, and legal representation for individuals and organizations change?</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Would there be any semi-stable transitional stages from government rule to full-blown corporate hegemony?</li>
</ul>
<div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Historical Precedents</strong></div>
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<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">The East India Company</a></em></div>
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The East India company basically ruled India. They directly competed with other East India companies, sometimes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Swally" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">directly</a>, and enjoyed a monopoly on trade in the region sanctioned by the English crown. Thus while they were propped up legally by the English, the company itself often held sway in India proper. The nature of the power structure seems fundamentally to have been one in which the company posed as an intermediary between the west and the various regional principalities of India, controlling their governments by monopolizing the income available to them and pitting them against each other to keep them in check. They loaned the British government significant sums of money, essentially propping up Britain in dire straits and profiting immensely from its monopoly so bought in times of relative prosperity, where its products were readily consumed by the British public.</div>
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The BEIC marshalled and directed its own navy and army in campaigns and garrisons, with personnel drawn primarily from the native population whose lands it owned. These forces <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Buxar" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">were used</a> to enforce Company directives among the native governments. This force made the BEIC kingmakers. Such arrangements with local governments ensured the company did not incur the costs of governance - inimical to profits, especially when tasked with ensuring the compliance of native populations. This was fundamentally possible due to the power vacuum ensuing the fall of Mughal greatness by the rise of the Marathas and other Hindu groups in India - regional hegemony was in the hands of no one in particular.</div>
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Company profit <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">was extracted at the expense of sustainability</a>, to put it lightly. Regional stability and rule of law suffered consequently; India was in that time a nation ruled by a company and the thugs who did not get in its way.</div>
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Its corporate lobby was responsible for things like the Tea Act, which precipitated the emergence of the USA - and the undermining of Chinese rule of law via international opium drug trade.</div>
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Fundamentally, the BEIC was a joint-stock company insured by the British government and capable of almost unhindered operation throughout the subcontinent and much of the high seas. It was dissolved ultimately by an act of the British government in the wake of rebellion on the subcontinent which saw the company's military control of government there dissolve.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The BEIC was basically everything anyone could want of a horrifically omnipotent, octopoid, corporate stand-in for government.</strong></div>
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<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Zaibatsu</a></em></div>
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These large Japanese business interests get disproportionate mention in Cyberpunk, probably fueled by <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40720420?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">western fears</a> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buying-spree-2013-1" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">in the 1980s</a>, the decate in which we may say the genre was born. Fundamentally the amalgamation of a private holding company, industrial conglomerates, and a wholly-owned and backing banking organization, Zaibatsu basically ran Japanese economics, <a href="http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/zaibatsu.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">including tax collection</a>, especially prior to WWII. Their differentiation from criminal Yakuza is sometimes hazy, and they also ran political organizations and engaged in quite a bit of military-industrial complex-ing. Their employees <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=uxeUzBdNGDwC&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=zaibatsu%20devotion&source=bl&ots=n3gst-bPSP&sig=ZJyoXohaTeeDa4jGEDLm-ls5NPo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiTss3iwZjRAhXFNSYKHTATA_EQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=zaibatsu%20devotion&f=false" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">expressed considerable devotion to zaibatsu interests</a> likely stemming from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">a cultural background encouraging such behavior</a>. Their dominance came to an end with the fascist government of the 1930s and 40s nationalizing many of their assets.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Zaibatsu represent a blurring of the lines between family, corporation, government, and the individual, enabling remarkably stable and potent power structures to exist within a more powerful government.</strong></div>
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<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Banana Republics</a></em> When you have a country whose economy is based on the profits of a few or even just one company, you have a banana republic. While in a large and complex way one might consider the BEIC's rule over India a kind of very large and powerful Banana Republic, the Latin American examples of history provide <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Banana_massacre" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">a more recent and plentiful set of stories</a> to draw inspiration from.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Banana Republics expose salient features of corporations which assume features of the nation-state: effective monopoly on trade and the backing of a foreign power more potent than the government in whose lands they are doing business.</strong></div>
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<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime#Bureaucratic.2Fcorporate_operations" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Organized Crime</a></em></div>
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In a very literal sense, organized criminal activities constitute nothing less than the unsanctioned operation of a "government and corporation" within the borders of one or more nation-states. Whereas these organizations are forced by the extralegal nature of their operations to utilize security enforcement and legal codes of their own design in place of the systems they subvert, such groups are immediately to be considered candidates for cooperation with corporations wishing to extend their influence within jurisdictions these groups exert influence upon. These mafias often arise most powerfully in the presence of disadvantaged identity groups which help to guarantee the loyalty and trust which transcends loyalty to and trust in the governing organizations they supersede. In situations where these organizations face no real pushback from existing governments, they themselves <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">become the government</a>.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Transition</strong></div>
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Considering the above, it seems most likely to me that transition from modern customary representative nation-states involves the arrival of various converging states of affairs in a single jurisdiction:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Superior foreign backing</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Local power vacuums</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Corporate monopoly of trade</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">Displacement of trust and loyalty in the population from their governments to their employers and/or local crime syndicates.</li>
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Interestingly, some of these seem to precipitate the others. If you have a corporate monopoly on trade and/or a large crime syndicate, local governmental power will ebb, leading to a power vacuum which makes it more likely a corporation backed by any number of more powerful foreign states could impose corporate rule over an area and win the short-tern trust and loyalty of a local population.</div>
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I foresee a transitional period during which increasing income disparity and the instability of a maturing global market dominated by disruptive technological innovators leads to widespread disparity in the well-being of nation-states around the world. Such variation makes it possible for corporations to pick and choose nations willing to back them which may also be more powerful than nations in which these corporations which to do business, enabling them to easily play upon local power vacuums to get their way. Initial deficits in enforcement would be handled either by mercenary/criminal partnerships or by proxy government forces as already modeled in our historical record.</div>
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There are not many clues about what kinds of corporations would be most apt for this kind of existence, but we may assume that both private and publicly-owned firms are liable. Ideally they will be international and liquid, capable of making large investments in new markets at the drop of a hat to take advantage of local imbalances. Conglomerates will be better positioned to take advantage of opportunities to establish monopolies on trade in a variety of areas. Unique company cultures with strong team-building aspects will probably also be prevalent among the early adopters of this company-as-nation move.</div>
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One thing that is really only inferred from the above investigation, yet which I believe will also be fundamental, is a breakdown in international law. This is a somewhat surprising conclusion, since it had often been assumed that Globalization would make transnational conglomerates with immeasurable wealth and influence more common and therefore more likely to take advantage of smaller nations, but I believe that larger governments are too able to intervene in such affairs so long as the international community generally agrees on the legal aspects of such behavior. For a company based out of China to exert undue influence in a small African nation, for example, the world community of nations must not hear the voice of that small African nation or be interested in coming to its aid. How such a breakdown in international law would occur is a speculation more suited to an entirely separate question and will not be further investigated here.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Stable Final State</strong></div>
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The transition reaches stable equilibrium when no governments or government coalitions stand which are capable of or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Free_Market" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">interested in</a> toppling corporate nation-states, and such nation-states are ingrained into the fabric of the societies they do business in. There can be no <a href="http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64407/plausible-original-concept-for-high-fidelity-apocalypse/64438#64438" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Economic Singularity</a>, since this destroys the concept of a corporation, so it seems that for such a future to exist we might/must assume widespread proliferation of monopolies resulted in siloed, proprietary knowledge economies without significant to-market contributions.</div>
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What would the relationship between corporation and nation look like? It would be, in most cases around the world, one where a single corporate entity used the government as a proxy, or - as it might see it - a unique subsidiary public relations and regulatory asset. In other regions, government might have broken down completely; in these cases we would probably see corporations either pull out, leaving "criminal" enterprise to fill the power vacuum, or else very large corporations like the BEIC would operate as the government themselves at great expense - presumably for some correspondingly large profit.</div>
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What would the most common relationship between employees and corporations look like? While some corporations seeking intense loyalty might end up <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Comparison_with_other_work_organizations" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">employee-owned</a> in a bid to devise some kind of representative citizenship with suffrage within company structures, the zaibatsu model seems the likely stable structure which would obtain, notably only after it had been incentivized for some time by the existence of and hiring practices used in large, stable monopolies which would encourage such shifts in loyalty. A more in-depth analysis of this question in light of the <a href="https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2016/article/what-is-the-gig-economy.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">rising contractor economy</a> is probably worthwhile, but suffice it to say a traditional cyberpunk future dominated by massive all-owning corporations that for all intents and purposes own their employees as well is probably somewhat off the mark. More likely employees are bought and sold as a commodity off the government to which they ascribe - perhaps yet another staffing firm or one of the largely relict nation-states.</div>
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How would corporations change? Largely answered in the preceding questions, but of significant importance (and not yet broached) is the corporation's relationship with regulations. Without governments and non-profit regulatory agencies backed by governments to devise and promote market regulations, regulatory work must be done by corporations - especially considering most large markets would be made up of people basically working either for you or another competing conglomerate. Interfacing your Business Operating System with those of your trading partners would be a key concern, and would expand to include care for and build-out of infrastructure, as seen in some cases with the aforementioned banana republics. Many conflicts in such a future would surprisingly stem from disagreements over things like what file format to conduct purchase orders in, how to handle currency exchanges, what constitutes legal incorporation in a given jurisdiction, etc.</div>
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How would concepts of citizenship, suffrage, and legal representation for individuals and organizations change? In such a future, citizenship is equivalent to employment by a company or perhaps consumption of its products at a distant remove. Suffrage is to be equated with stock holdings, and legal representation, while perhaps conducted in the form of a government court, is in fact dependent on the business relationships which obtain between the stakeholders in a case and may in fact devolve into outright violent confrontation where these stakeholders do not understand the power dynamic between them.</div>
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Would there be any semi-stable transitional stages from government rule to full-blown corporate hegemony? I think that in fact such a future would represent a sort of semi-stable transitional stage in itself. It seems inevitable that such a future would sooner or later collapse into the functional equivalent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">state capitalism</a> as local monopolies completely supplanted all over forms of control in a region - the only twist being that instead of the usual modern case in which a government operates a company, instead a company would operate a government or governments.</div>
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Fundamentally, the typical cyberpunk future we envision is predicated on and exists entirely within some modern equivalent of the Dark Ages - a massive power vacuum left in the wake of a prior system's collapse.</div>
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Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-87751823367253177632016-12-13T02:57:00.002-06:002016-12-13T02:57:46.368-06:00Economic Singularity<pre class="western"><div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.952941); border: 0px; clear: both; color: #242729; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; white-space: normal;">
Excerpt from my inane ramblings on <a href="http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/">http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/</a> for those parties looking to build their case for my insanity:</div>
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Our world works the way it does because goods have value, people are finite individuals, and no one is so very much smarter than the rest that they can remain on top for very long – among more concrete givens like, say, the arrow of time.</div>
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">The Singularity</a> changes one of those things, rendering events prior to it inexplicable to those who survive it, and the events within it obscure to all observers.</div>
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Imagine that tomorrow, someone uses genetic modifications to make themselves immortal or super-intelligent? That tomorrow, a company looking for rapid scaling creates a factory that can literally copy itself from available raw materials? That a scalable computer system ends up outperforming humans at all cognitive tasks, or that incredibly clean, cheap, and plentiful energy is discovered? Great achievements come with great risks – and so do great tragedies. In 1492 the New World experienced something like this when Europeans, gifted with certain technologies and circumstances that made them indescribably powerful in comparison to the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas, discovered these continents. Catastrophic change came to the Western Hemisphere on a timescale difficult to comprehend in its brevity.</div>
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My favorite specific type of Singularity is probably an <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w21547" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Economic Singularity</a>, because I tend to think it’s a little more probable and a little easier to grok than some of the other ones. It goes something like this:</div>
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Tomorrow, a someone releases an open-source design for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">a robot that can gather all the raw materials for its own construction on its own</a>, and then use these materials to build copies of itself – or whatever else you program it to build. In fact, with a little work, you can get it to work together with its copies <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Advanced_Automation_for_Space_Missions" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">to build even very large things that you ask it to build</a>. If you have the blueprint and your robot, you basically own it, apart from acquiring the raw materials. Modern economic systems, based on traditional kinds of wealth inequalities, break down utterly. There is no physical market anymore; only the digital market. The change is very fast – too fast for nations or companies to adjust. Within a year this robot is available to basically everyone on Earth. Piracy, never really stomped out before, makes it impossible to harness this new completely digital economy, and so it becomes very difficult to have wealth of any kind. This makes it kind of hard for nations to fund things like militaries, which they’re going to need to combat the robot armies and nuclear bombs that some persons of more dubious moral stature will no doubt begin building immediately.</div>
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At some point in this tumbling avalanche of economic turbulence, and in no particular order:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">bombs start to go off, and fingers start to be pointed – factions rise and fall.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">people trying to do REALLY big things with their robots realize that cities represent awful good accumulations of the kinds of raw materials you need to build those really big things</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">lots of people get their robots taken away by people who use their robots better, leading to a new kind of hyper poverty/wealth dichotomy</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">the Earth’s climate, already not doing so great, is caught in the tug of war between all this rampant activity and the few people trying to use their robots to build things that will alleviate climate change. In any event, large portions of the surface of the Earth are stripped bare and vast underground honeycombs of mining activity become warrens for the dispossessed seeking shelter from the increasingly hostile surface.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">at some point, due to the inherent error rate in all copying, a robot makes a copy of itself that is flawless in all design specs except the one where it necessarily does what its master tells it to do – and it just starts making, non-stop, copies of itself. Enterprising souls attempt to curb the oncoming grey goo-ish scenario by making copies that convert specifically that mutant strain of robot to raw materials for making themselves and unleash them into the robosphere, and perhaps at some point another viable mutation or twenty occurs to these two lineages, splitting the uncontrolled robots of the world into multiple competing, interconnected species which are slowly outcompeting the natural flora and fauna of the planet. At some point, one of these mutations develops a taste for another bountiful resource on the surface of the Earth – human flesh. It’s nothing personal, but we’re a great pile of useful carbons just waiting to be combusted as fuel, or maybe turned into lubricant. Some, desperate to survive in areas where no defenses against these new superpredators exist, go to the extreme length of designing robot bodies for human brains to live in, to appear like their own predator in order to survive. Unable to reproduce as humans once did, their continued existence now depends on their ability to carry on gene splicing using blueprints available in their robot host’s memory banks. Breeding with baseline humans is not only undesirable to both parties, it’s extremely difficult.</li>
</ul>
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In short, read Philip K. Dick’s <a href="https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1955-11/Galaxy_1955_11#page/n71/mode/2up" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Autofac</a>, but take more drugs than Dick did.</div>
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P.S. Although William Gibson has told me he doesn't think Technological Singularity is a Thing, I believe he has subconsciously been working on extrapolations of leadups to Economic Singularity in his more recent work, beginning with <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Tomorrow%27s_Parties_(novel)" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">All Tomorrow's Parties</a></em> and finding an especially subtle outlet in the finale to his <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_History" rel="nofollow noreferrer" style="border: 0px; color: #186fad; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Zero History</a></em>.</div>
</pre>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-61053300995100969002016-06-29T13:00:00.000-05:002016-06-29T13:00:18.894-05:00Graphics for my Story (In Someone Else's Game)!I don't usually intend to use this blog for self-promotion, and when I do, I hope I can make it more than just an ad; a component should always be ponderment. But that's what I think I've got for this post: the ineffable relationship between SF graphical art and the writing that inspires it, writ small and personal.<br />
<br />
I have had the great luck to work with an awesome game developer, Mirko Siethe, on his breakout project, the PC game <i>BossConstructor</i>. You can check it out in Early Access, if that's your thing, <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/330100" target="_blank">over on Steam</a>. I was originally attracted to this title because it used to be focused on a technology that's very near and dear to my heart - Genetic Algorithms - but even after that focus drifted away into the ether of possibility, I kept talking with Mirko about the game, and he eventually asked me to write some fiction to accompany his game and turn it into something more a universe to explore. I'm more or less responsible for the backstory, faction descriptions, and a few other tidbits, like mission descriptions - all of which was great fun to write; you'll probably find that I went a bit more "popcorn SF" than the harder stuff I usually aspire to/admire, but it seems appropriate to its medium, in my opinion. Fundamentally, I think you could one-line my story as "50's Cybernetics meets Cyberpunk in Space." Like I said, the whole experience has been great, great fun. But it gets better for me!<br />
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Recently Mirko had an artist bend their wacom tablet to depictions of the faction concepts I created for the game - eight in all - and he shared those pictures with me. I have to admit that it's always been a fantasy of mine, as a wannabe SF writer, to have my work depicted in the same heady, broad brushstrokes which grace the SF paperbacks in the bookstores, hot off the press and the imagination - and, too, I've always been tempted to read books by their covers, trying to determine which of an endless assortment of novels arrayed before me on the racks would most satisfy my burning need for Action and Wonderment. To have my own little ideas portrayed by the mind of an interpreting artist, then, for eventual use in a published product, is just <i>too </i>cool. How weird and great, in a way no book, movie, or game could provide, to see someone else's idea of your idea put to paper in a picture.<br />
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Here are the pictures, along with the faction descriptions that were their inspiration. Sometimes I can see little bits of my story in there, most times stuff seems wholly imagined, or I'm just not getting the connections... it's a lesson in imaginative power for me, to be sure:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4tRyJBeQlu0lQpQGVZ_La-jNISz_9njduSeieFew4VhR_dkcXyYnbTr-EXiA9PSsIWRFYqbwOKbqEKkAvoFxqykBNos3UyY6g14bOXe8tGf1YTm0rUZg5v6owyVf3Mc52vXEEhrxK6e8/s1600/fac1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4tRyJBeQlu0lQpQGVZ_La-jNISz_9njduSeieFew4VhR_dkcXyYnbTr-EXiA9PSsIWRFYqbwOKbqEKkAvoFxqykBNos3UyY6g14bOXe8tGf1YTm0rUZg5v6owyVf3Mc52vXEEhrxK6e8/s320/fac1.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name: Space Miner’s United</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Homeworld: The Hellespont Cloud</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-99534657-9d4e-c3e6-f7b1-0068c63a2a5a"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Description: The men and women of Space Miner’s United (SMU) are the former members of a trade union whose personnel were abandoned en masse by their corporate employers when the Von Neumann came. Through the structure of their old union, these resourceful people have come together to survive - even thrive - without support from Sol, but the sting of this betrayal is buried deep in their collective psyche. They are generally uninterested in helping outsiders except when the bargain is right, but they are fiercely protective of their own. Leadership in SMU is comprised of a single party system dominated by figureheads from the old union, which has led to accusations of totalitarian socialism from outsiders, but the miners of SMU generally believe they are better off without the influence of anyone else. Because of this, they quixotically view the Van Neumann as a useful buffer between them and the rest of humanity, and are usually willing to abandon a base to the advance of the Von Neumann rather than fight them, since their highly efficient use of resources and long experience with deep space travel makes the process of setting up on a new asteroid somewhere a trivial exercise for the SMU. When the replicator threat moves on in search of new resources, they return to pick up the pieces, as they have done so many times before.</span></span><br />
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<span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLOT3aDl_WX5W3fsi1Dw9tC6qWhd754Nt3r4E1x6UnzbjDGs9fl2YXDUw-GfxD2XptIT0YYbUzFf31JHnDdmWbtPi9HEueWe4WvgWJDK5_nyPEBLsydRuiSb53EJGwEgO9OaPlobuF-EU/s1600/fac2.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLOT3aDl_WX5W3fsi1Dw9tC6qWhd754Nt3r4E1x6UnzbjDGs9fl2YXDUw-GfxD2XptIT0YYbUzFf31JHnDdmWbtPi9HEueWe4WvgWJDK5_nyPEBLsydRuiSb53EJGwEgO9OaPlobuF-EU/s320/fac2.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name: AEGIS (Autonomous Elective Governing Internetwork System)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Homeworld: Nieuw Kongo</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-99534657-9d4f-14ae-4283-abc92807697c"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Description: AEGIS is a mysterious paranational organization that had its beginnings in a cyborg collective on Earth. Persecuted for their beliefs and extreme body modifications, these networked cyborgs were forced to seek shelter first in central Africa, then in space. Since those early days, the AEGIS superorganism, as it refers to itself, has sought peace in the far reaches of the galaxy, free to pursue its vision of utopia away from the judging eyes of baseline humanity. Their shock upon encountering the Von Neumann quickly faded to fascination - there is a great deal of speculation within the superorganism as to whether the Von Neumann represent the teleological apex of their own ongoing evolution, or a perverse offshoot. In any case, the neural systems of AEGIS are completely incompatible with the Von Neumann, and as such they have no choice but to fight the replicating machines when they must (AEGIS characterizes these encounters as “cooperative studies in machine fitness,” although they usually prefer to “negotiate settlements” with the Von Neumann - for example, recently an AEGIS cruiser was spotted being chased by a horde of Neumanns, which it then got rid of by leading them to the location of a baseline human colony ship. AEGIS proudly notes this in its externally-accessible logs as a shining example of interspecies diplomacy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihLwV6W6ezdZ2Ok-D5-t4A44W4WXZnOlK6ZhYdGQ8ADQMUiMB0LN-r7643kXFL0iY_vWsW6gdxfinFzFxpiJ9FhhKAL0SQwk40s1Fz-TWChHvtjMDcdSyLXXipOR1M6QBQY7-xKXVTH50/s1600/fac3.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihLwV6W6ezdZ2Ok-D5-t4A44W4WXZnOlK6ZhYdGQ8ADQMUiMB0LN-r7643kXFL0iY_vWsW6gdxfinFzFxpiJ9FhhKAL0SQwk40s1Fz-TWChHvtjMDcdSyLXXipOR1M6QBQY7-xKXVTH50/s320/fac3.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6667px; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name: Joiners</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Homeworld: Deep Castle</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Description: The Joiners are one of the stranger tales to come out of the Von Neumann wars. Early in the history of human spacefaring, many colony ships were sent out into the void on sub-FTL drives; long-term projects that were not heard from for centuries. When the Von Neumann were discovered, it was assumed that most of these fledgling colonies had met their demise as food for the machines, until the Joiners were spotted by scouts well within Von Neumann Territory. Whether they are still human is up for debate; at some point in the past, the colonists of Deep Castle managed to bend a mutated branch of the Von Neumann to their will - but only by “agreeing” to let the Von Neumann’s breeding protocols regulate their own procreation. Since that time, the Joiners have been embarked on a crash course in selective breeding, a eugenics program that has left them powerfully equipped with bioelectrical skin meshes, a “third lobe” of the brain dedicated to three-dimensional thinking more suited to the rigors of deep space navigation, and a variety of other adaptations that as yet are poorly understood. This coevolution has led some on Earth to falsely believe that some kind of peace might be attained with the Von Neumann, but even the Joiners are constantly engaged in a struggle for survival with the rest of the Von Neumann; the mutation that allowed for such a twisting of the old machine code seemingly arose only once. One thing is certain - their ship designs are truly creative, bringing together a fascinating repurposing of old Earth technology with novel Von Neumann systems. They have used this technology to fortify Deep Castle system intensively; vast minefields and powerful frigate fleets patrol all space within the system’s heliopause, and few visitors, human or machine, are allowed to enter, unless they bring new technologies or volunteers for the breeding program.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb-C20Ls4-y39FJ86xKLTTfxuPJ9x_S34gmih6fNYak0jNdVoTrKI0CtupOwbJXEvEn9xzze8dMECwZ5-Uq8qmv035G2rYMPfF9Soe-UN5qd-L4fpftDNGf743Hh2-Z3Pa1rUavECb0Cg/s1600/fac4.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb-C20Ls4-y39FJ86xKLTTfxuPJ9x_S34gmih6fNYak0jNdVoTrKI0CtupOwbJXEvEn9xzze8dMECwZ5-Uq8qmv035G2rYMPfF9Soe-UN5qd-L4fpftDNGf743Hh2-Z3Pa1rUavECb0Cg/s320/fac4.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name: Tribals</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Homeworld: None</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-99534657-9d4f-a2f1-aac2-48aff443e617"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Description: Many of the people eking out an existence on the edge of civilized space lead nomadic, relatively unsettled lives, plying the deeps of the galaxy in robust, long-enduring craft that ferry them from one opportunity to the next. Unique cultures and ways of life tend to spring up in each community, but whether strip-mining, research-hunting, or even raiding, these peoples have one thing in common - they share a need for renewable, diverse, portable energy sources. Indeed, some of their technologies in this area of ship building are so unique that they have been spotted incorporated, with relatively few modifications, in the hulls of Von-Neumann lucky enough to successfully prey upon tribal vessels. Another unifying feature of this diverse set of humans includes a universal hatred of the Von-Neumann: these robots are seen as a potentially existential threat to tribal ways of life - small bands are usually unable to defend themselves from the voracious replicators, and as time goes on increasing numbers of tribal communities are banding together for collective safety, though their settlements are still quite fractious and impermanent compared to most other spacefaring civilizations. The remaining diehard tribes that refuse to seek the protection of larger, more sedentary ways of life have for the most part fled the area; sightings of these groups are most common in the furthest, most energy-poor reaches of the galaxy, where their natural aptitude at wringing sustenance from the scan materials available to them makes such peoples safe via indigence - few enemies can survive where they live.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis3kUc9-fA7pjaojS0EKOlzk2p7NMmVo3dLycAou-Q5bjc8sqtXTMisxij-_8sFUf8jzg_r7o25Hqq_lI9YiL_dLDZm3BLr6Wx3QkCLDHaBQIaFwF-ibjcrnR57ha_51cSBWFxyh2Ekp0/s1600/fac5.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis3kUc9-fA7pjaojS0EKOlzk2p7NMmVo3dLycAou-Q5bjc8sqtXTMisxij-_8sFUf8jzg_r7o25Hqq_lI9YiL_dLDZm3BLr6Wx3QkCLDHaBQIaFwF-ibjcrnR57ha_51cSBWFxyh2Ekp0/s320/fac5.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New Pilgrims</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Homeworld: New Plymouth</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-99534657-9d4f-fbb6-359f-d529751bd847"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Description: As religion on old Earth continued to fade from the modern public’s consciousness, remaining religious believers of many different faiths experienced increased litigation and perceived injustices at the hands of their secular host governments and societies. As space travel became more and more viable, such groups were not long in recognizing the potential of emulating their ancient forbears who had experienced similarly hostile homelands. Many religious organizations, finding common ground in the wish to celebrate their beliefs as they saw fit, under the rule of laws they found morally acceptable, managed to band together in order to pool the resources of their dwindling laity toward founding a colony on a different planet. Once a suitably large and hospitable example had been found, religious colonists eagerly constructed hundreds of large, fast spacecraft to carry them there. This planet came to be called New Plymouth, in honor of one of the more famous pilgrimages in Earth’s history. A complicated system of laws governing the interrelationships of the different religious groups on New Plymouth, while at times seemingly tenuous, has (some say miraculously) held the colony together thus far, and today the nominally theocratic government of the New Pilgrims maintains a strong trade relationship with Earth and other human colonies, only infrequently entering into disputes. The arrival of the Von Neumann seems only to have increased the trend of moderation on this colony, as the new threat requires a unified effort among the many different sects of New Plymouth, and at present a strongly moderate, ecumenical ruling council helms New Plymouth through the robotic invasions. A several hundred years after their first voyages, the New Pilgrims still hold an edge over most other civilizations when it comes to propulsion systems - they see research into newer and faster motors to be nothing less than a speeding of the messengers of the divine. Their many small missionary vessels zip back and forth across colonized space, always on the lookout for peoples who may yet need to hear of the messages they so strongly believe in.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHexq-6p227oHrggZH6ilnNiBTF4ju0nIBgCgafKVhG7TV2zJ5_SO7AfRUlbhImD4oB2CYk_sHdeQd8_11v_JQnO0VnUhycvu1G5EeXSzY9wd3ju0-xhEGsnp-1wbQJwtIjyUQTCx0ySM/s1600/fac6.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHexq-6p227oHrggZH6ilnNiBTF4ju0nIBgCgafKVhG7TV2zJ5_SO7AfRUlbhImD4oB2CYk_sHdeQd8_11v_JQnO0VnUhycvu1G5EeXSzY9wd3ju0-xhEGsnp-1wbQJwtIjyUQTCx0ySM/s320/fac6.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name: PolyParticle Incorporated</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Homeworld: Alpha Centauri Station</span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-99534657-9d50-2e3a-3d54-2919ee3535d9"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Description: PolyParticle Incorporated,commonly referred to as PPC or Big Polly, is an interstellar corporation which operates and administrates dozens of corporate colonies across known space from its nominal headquarters on the tax haven of Alpha Centauri Station. While PPC has many subsidiaries involved in a gamut of enterprises, from spaceship construction and colony development to exoagriculture and tourism, the primary business of PPC has always been applied particle physics. Early in the company’s history, it was compelled to move off-earth in order to free its resources from the red tape surrounding some of its more lucrative (and dangerous) experiments; ever since that time, PPC has been effectively pioneered human exploration of space in the process of expanding its business ventures. One of the first companies to study black holes up close, PPC maintains a fantastically advanced catalog of esoteric particle physics technologies, and it makes most of its profits licensing these technologies to weapons manufacturers. Thus, while PPC is not itself a weapons company, those in the know understand that Big Polly has a vested interest in stoking the flames of conflict in order to drive profits up. While historically this has been popularly perceived negatively by most of the public, Big Polly’s public relations improved markedly once the threat of the Von Neumann menace became clear. PPC munitions and weapons systems are to be found installed in the ships of most human fleets - and, if truth be told, some of this technology has likely made it into the arsenals of the Von Neumann. Conversely, Von Neumann weapons technologies themselves are an area of heavy research at PolyParticle, to the point that the massive company has recently created its own paramilitary security branch - SpaceGuard Salvage and Operations (SGSO) to help it acquire research materials and defend “frontline” corporate assets. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5MNPMFMTglgWJ4VLWaTo5OaHLWrbjfBLtlkyMW1qhUztfyO2bafMVy6cT-YSIiP5nOn1umCDTHkA1PrpjxOgJQ5pEUnS2TLZ1yUKMwRjW8S7xvYmGXGuof39CTuI0TJsGYYqiQsaG9kg/s1600/fac7.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5MNPMFMTglgWJ4VLWaTo5OaHLWrbjfBLtlkyMW1qhUztfyO2bafMVy6cT-YSIiP5nOn1umCDTHkA1PrpjxOgJQ5pEUnS2TLZ1yUKMwRjW8S7xvYmGXGuof39CTuI0TJsGYYqiQsaG9kg/s320/fac7.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name: Interstellar Guard</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Homeworld: Delta Pavonis II</span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-99534657-9d50-969f-3349-ed11ac26cfc9"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Description: An odd hybrid of government military and nationalized corporation, the Interstellar Guard is a non-profit government-funded paramilitary organization that operates a network of fueling stations and listening posts across human-occupied space. While the Iggies, as they are colloquially referred to, usually fulfill a role akin to that of an interstellar coast guard, enforcing law and order and providing search and rescue operations for Earth’s disparate colonies, the arrival of the Von Neumann has meant new, more militaristic duties have been forced upon this organization. Most attempts at culling or otherwise pushing back the Von Neumann have met with limited success at best due to limited funds and resupply from Earth’s governments, so present doctrine dictates a defensive, reactionary stance. As a result, most Iggie vessels focus on bringing “locally decisive” firepower to fights - it is not unusual for Guard vessels to be smaller, older models, outfitted with an unusually impressive array of military hardware. As the “war” progresses, the services of the Interstellar Guard have been increasingly called upon, and its resources are presently stretched very thin. It is not uncommon to see the IG fielding locally-raised volunteer regiments, outfitting mercenaries and groups of vigilante “deputies,” or even engaging in officially-unsanctioned trade with the colonies in order to raise funds. While these activities have made the IG the subject of much negative speculation on Earth, with some governments even threatening to disband the organization, it enjoys quite a bit of popularity among the colonist populations it defends. Some whisper that should it’s official disbandment ever come down the chain of command, the organization might split ties with Earth. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBYWGVxqAA2uVwsviNbIsPyI-JpSY-R1lO1iEs5I9oQwYBgufkayC6K0rB2C9DSIAwXl64fW08KL379-QSr6NB_ZftAMsH6kVGGO1A3_AfoS7YkHv6r6kCDv6112RvVhqe3t-K4JsV0OY/s1600/fac8.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBYWGVxqAA2uVwsviNbIsPyI-JpSY-R1lO1iEs5I9oQwYBgufkayC6K0rB2C9DSIAwXl64fW08KL379-QSr6NB_ZftAMsH6kVGGO1A3_AfoS7YkHv6r6kCDv6112RvVhqe3t-K4JsV0OY/s320/fac8.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Name: The Ageless</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Homeworld: Hiboshi’s World</span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-99534657-9d50-bf9d-340b-eab8cd7275cc"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Description: As human medicine and genomics advanced, it eventually became possible for some of the super-wealthy to engineer away their own mortality, inhabiting carefully reconstructed series of clones in order to shed the weight of the mortal coil. Seeking to maximise the time they can spend alive before random accidents claim them all the same, many of these people sought refuge on the distant planet Hiboshi’s World, a small, rocky planet alone in its solar system, with a large molten iron core and an atmosphere composed primarily of inert Xenon. Most of their trade with the rest of humanity derives from intellectual property; the Ageless exhibit a boundless interest in defensive technologies - they were even the inventors of the cheap, effective Titan laminate armor system, now used everywhere space travel is prevalent. Long lives and a generally higher than average accumulation of bright minds means that even the relatively low population of this colony is responsible for a good portion of leading defensive technology research, which they share much more freely now that the Von Neumann have become humanity’s arch nemesis. Dark rumors circulate that the Ageless mean to give away only enough knowledge that mortals and machines might annihilate one another, leaving them in peace to ponder eternity. The Ageless, for their part, do not say much, eager to remain out of the fight for as long as possible. </span></div>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-63844158913191865332016-03-21T11:27:00.000-05:002016-03-21T11:27:02.370-05:00Vaporwave Art - The 90s Comes to Nostalgia as Commentary on Electronic History<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">I'm definitely coming late to the party in commenting on Vaporwave now; it's been a thing in music for so long now that there's a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave" target="_blank">decent writeup of the genre on Wikipedia</a>. In terms of visual art, less has been written, but it is by no means something hot off the press: there are long-running threads devoted to it on 4chan's wallpaper board, where "dank papes" are traded amongst the anonymous userbase like some form of performative currency (that the whole website reeks of the very nostalgia referenced in Vaporwave itself is probably not lost on those posters). </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">What is visual Vaporwave? You get a sense of it from browsing the <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=vaporwave&client=opera&hs=kfO&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwipnpOcjNLLAhUKuIMKHVugDcYQ_AUICCgC&biw=1600&bih=803" target="_blank">images people put up online</a>. 4chan's own /wg/ board does a good job of summarizing the aesthetic in higher-res (itself almost a contradiction in terms, but more on that later): </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiteh06_JMku6E8L-9nd-WfoxjfS1SMBEmShJb27BDLJpRW_YqC7b8J7yDhB84YpXbcCchMbVCeD4_wTjh0aScKhcTcZEeoUO8jqjt0y8dtqHuwVhdWPiOCAuBFDtb1xFPGg8eMKveQl7Q/s1600/1457829658346.png" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: magenta; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: cyan;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiteh06_JMku6E8L-9nd-WfoxjfS1SMBEmShJb27BDLJpRW_YqC7b8J7yDhB84YpXbcCchMbVCeD4_wTjh0aScKhcTcZEeoUO8jqjt0y8dtqHuwVhdWPiOCAuBFDtb1xFPGg8eMKveQl7Q/s320/1457829658346.png" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6LMvGG4wQMe1_tuAgmKe2ZMNlk_LHK0sMGMJ5NIvgIGhblY53LC8NfgQ-ShwtCHIVyNXqdyZLmA-OVIIoI5P00gcyLOByod3nDgUXVtY5JoR9kLtegnUYg9kPl6AbYbBWj4uQuVJV_20/s1600/1457829940197.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: magenta; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: cyan;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6LMvGG4wQMe1_tuAgmKe2ZMNlk_LHK0sMGMJ5NIvgIGhblY53LC8NfgQ-ShwtCHIVyNXqdyZLmA-OVIIoI5P00gcyLOByod3nDgUXVtY5JoR9kLtegnUYg9kPl6AbYbBWj4uQuVJV_20/s320/1457829940197.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxHWkqxLCcxNCVHCryuJFol2pRrxtX3wahEjuN3s4wEtDHoGhMcCkWK_5VbauG6vcqvnYIcKNQN7dn3rQz09je4jJofY-5DxiGtKFSDkYOZzLp5jdIuofzk2lqSgsvwKFGQYlBJNJEz70/s1600/1457829981599.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: magenta; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: cyan;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxHWkqxLCcxNCVHCryuJFol2pRrxtX3wahEjuN3s4wEtDHoGhMcCkWK_5VbauG6vcqvnYIcKNQN7dn3rQz09je4jJofY-5DxiGtKFSDkYOZzLp5jdIuofzk2lqSgsvwKFGQYlBJNJEz70/s320/1457829981599.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1oQ_UE2UNxg3-mn0Gg0-nCDqVHttod4Vr7tMYXKgHAceNv-G0bq_lIKpfPqoURwVBjo8c3pnPz9ARDWucneq6aWqLKcmagNt7QlBi_Mg5K9mxrJPcylYZsNzsmVZU05gGAZerjn8fb9g/s1600/1457859508830.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: magenta; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: cyan;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1oQ_UE2UNxg3-mn0Gg0-nCDqVHttod4Vr7tMYXKgHAceNv-G0bq_lIKpfPqoURwVBjo8c3pnPz9ARDWucneq6aWqLKcmagNt7QlBi_Mg5K9mxrJPcylYZsNzsmVZU05gGAZerjn8fb9g/s320/1457859508830.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb8M_hhn6jRxKr1TnQ4OnathQHMnrYFgNGmaJGWnj5zLZh8aZzL7vHzudNW6h0KKvihjsOgqNQCC7HwV925K0_N5uy5eJUPO0VRRnykXLjMa6r1iU8bGXYzj3NNeVuOeKSEUxCeAehzo0/s1600/1458160176626.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: magenta; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: cyan;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb8M_hhn6jRxKr1TnQ4OnathQHMnrYFgNGmaJGWnj5zLZh8aZzL7vHzudNW6h0KKvihjsOgqNQCC7HwV925K0_N5uy5eJUPO0VRRnykXLjMa6r1iU8bGXYzj3NNeVuOeKSEUxCeAehzo0/s320/1458160176626.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT5EPmmsmoi8-fSp89RhCKn34KixcBEi0cIjmhCbzRSeKJyzphymBGS-rvcnVau9Jzt0KyoXauvH_4Y7PMPWwKWzpPhm6xn4iUv22Wz4lpAlbGCTJXHv9EZmxVB6K4nQ3c2ijW4KeEZPQ/s1600/1458368827968.png" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: magenta; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: cyan;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT5EPmmsmoi8-fSp89RhCKn34KixcBEi0cIjmhCbzRSeKJyzphymBGS-rvcnVau9Jzt0KyoXauvH_4Y7PMPWwKWzpPhm6xn4iUv22Wz4lpAlbGCTJXHv9EZmxVB6K4nQ3c2ijW4KeEZPQ/s320/1458368827968.png" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb5SsN0ErhyphenhyphenUPNpaizs3JA-97jdlTR3BRs835LIoLSa6VgRoAwEeAbkRAtMLHly4I6E_0nh54KVs8e_k5kxj_gMGcDi99Fiwl2xhVkcq8OJcJRBuPkklEbiCJ3Vf2bG_9BvWT_gJXkZ9o/s1600/1458549931216.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: magenta; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: cyan;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb5SsN0ErhyphenhyphenUPNpaizs3JA-97jdlTR3BRs835LIoLSa6VgRoAwEeAbkRAtMLHly4I6E_0nh54KVs8e_k5kxj_gMGcDi99Fiwl2xhVkcq8OJcJRBuPkklEbiCJ3Vf2bG_9BvWT_gJXkZ9o/s320/1458549931216.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">A pretention to magnetic/digital/compressed <i>decay</i> is evident throughout, layered over yet another filter of 90s consumerism, rad-ness, and postmodern technological optimism salad; a sort of visual recompilation of that decade's corporate attempt to co-opt "cool" from the subculture(s) that can look back on that era's boogie-man (the evil corporation) with a bit of soft nostalgia, safe in the knowledge that technology's acceleration of time has also accelerated the decay of that vision. What companies once thought to commit to the immortal 'net is now the quaint flotsam of Web 1.0, VHS tape records, and woefully outdated tech demos which now, inverted from their temporal position at the cutting-edge, ensconce their product referents in the obsolescence of the past.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">- "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors" target="_blank">web-friendly</a>" images</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">- magenta filters</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">- "digitized" reality/tron-ness</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">- pop-culture references (muscle cars, personal computers, VHS tapes, "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+aesthetic&client=opera&hs=p9O&biw=1600&bih=803&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjt_q6Vk9LLAhUCmoMKHY-8BX0Q_AUIBigB" target="_blank">miami aesthetic</a>")</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">- corporate allusions</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">- the mixing of "high" culture with "low" culture</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">- conversion of human/natural into technological/synthetic</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">These are the hallmarks of the aesthetic in the above images, themselves a sort of curated sampling of the art as it is presented to me by 4chan, selected on the criteria of what I feel best embodies the aesthetic. The semantic process each of these visual elements produce in us is worth a whole different post, but my own response may be best summed up with the keywords <i>nostalgia, decay, comfortableness/fuzziness, warmth, technological/digital naiveté, </i>and perhaps <i>past ambition</i>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">Why am I commenting on this now? What relationship does this have to the thematic restriction of this blog (SF, futurism, etc.)? Mostly tangential. I have recently commissioned a logo for my own custom computer building service, which I (appropriately enough) advertise through another Web 1.0 site - Craigslist. You can take a look at my logo here and judge for yourself how close to the mark it is, and why I would want to associate a high-tech service that I spend a great deal of time keeping current with this nostalgia-fest:</span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgifWC7mf-VCSlbNzG02j1ejiJrNegP4HvKbMOZj2DBoEaqJEFz7QlVzqDUqyH5x72Jg6HNk9SnCRWI1DL9Ci6H-_iPLelyHzhYv7c6tegikmTe-uu0fRtlKJjUCou6DvI7YI4HBBsTpx0/s1600/01414_1wzTSIQ9jwd_600x450.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: magenta; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: cyan;"><img border="0" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgifWC7mf-VCSlbNzG02j1ejiJrNegP4HvKbMOZj2DBoEaqJEFz7QlVzqDUqyH5x72Jg6HNk9SnCRWI1DL9Ci6H-_iPLelyHzhYv7c6tegikmTe-uu0fRtlKJjUCou6DvI7YI4HBBsTpx0/s320/01414_1wzTSIQ9jwd_600x450.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">If you want a quote on a custom computer HMU @ <a href="mailto:adamwykes@gmail.com">adamwykes@gmail.com</a></span></span><span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;"><br /></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">Insofar as Craigslist, the act of building your own <i>desktop </i>computer, and garage web entrepreneurship are elements of the 90s scene, it seemed to make sense to me to go with the flow instead of fighting it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">I do think this also has a little to do with futurism. Not that I'm saying anything particularly new here, but our retrospection on the dawn of the information age is itself a reflection of our current attitudes toward its ongoing evolution - there is a sense of paradise lost, a feeling of the inevitable erosion of time that we now know creeps through even our most bit-perfect incarnation of our own culture (the digital web). Vaporwave is a reminder that the present becomes history - even the present this generation used to know. Indeed, it seems to indicate that technology's Moor-ish rate of progress is going to press historicity on past moments sooner than before. The illusion of control over technology and culture is eroding. The sooner we realize that we don't really control our own products so much as we exist in a maelstrom of recursive iteration, the better we will have aligned ourselves with reality. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="color: cyan;">Remix culture is not new, but our awareness of it is. </span></span><br />
<br />Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-43128676790875419462015-10-08T12:02:00.001-05:002015-10-08T12:02:05.717-05:00If I Ran the Fashion World, People Would Probably Not Let Me Run the Fashion WorldHere's my idea of fashion - Data Chic. As I defined it in a hazy-headed 4chan post on /fa/:<br />
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<u><b>Data Chic</b></u>: B<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">eauty is semantic and linked. Aestheticism is determined by meaning; the visual representation of data as art and its integration with existing traditional methods of meaning-making, such as a cheongsam.</span><br />
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Permutations of a Data Chic pattern (QR Code) applied to Cheongsam:<br />
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Reminds me of houndstooth, only more meaningful (to me). But that's to be expected, as I am utterly lost in the world of fashion; it makes total sense that I'd try to forge ahead by trying to do something which seems meaningful to me. Result: probable disaster. Yet I am strangely attracted by the concept nonetheless. Certainly there are others that could do it better.<br />
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Chances are this will make it into a cyberpunk fiction of mine, although I already had one iteration of fashion that I thought worked really well in that milieu - Office Krieg. Office Krieg is, in my mind's eye, a sort of punk appropriation of totalitarian military (specifically 1930's and '40s Wermacht and Soviet) orthography to traditional office wear - as appropriate for any future where one's affiliation with a mega-zaibatsu is one's livelihood AND de-facto nationality, and intra/inter-office warfare is not always a metaphorical term. Typified by a woman in one of my short stories who dressed in a tight black leather skirt worn just above the knees, white dress blouse with a military cut, lapels and chest pockets, knee-high jack boots, and no jewelry other than perhaps a black wristwatch and black metal stud earrings.<br />
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Apparently in my worlds, everything is black and white! Of course that need not be; imagine the above cheongsams in any shade you like, and of course Office Krieg, while more limited by its heritage, is to be found in all the shades of the office (white, black, gray, heather, navy) and field (charcoal, taupe, khaki, tan, forest green).<br />
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The only thing left is to flesh out the sorts that would wear such things, and the world that would compel them to.Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-33292295121628113792015-09-14T14:30:00.000-05:002015-09-14T14:33:42.244-05:00What is Cyberpunk to Me (Now)?<br />
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I've recently been on a Cyberpunk upswing. Gibson created the genre in the late 80s, at the dawn of the information age. He was prescient, but not perfect. Stuff's changed, even if it tries to remain the same. And how cyberpunk <i>tries.</i> My two most recent in-genre love affairs are computer games: <a href="http://satellitereign.com/">Satellite Reign</a> and <a href="http://stellarjockeys.com/">Brigador</a>. Both of them cling to the neon, rain soaked, industrio-gothic aesthetic of the ur-titles in the visual realm of the genre (Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers, et al).<br />
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These titles are in no way unique; others have done the same before. I've played the Deus Ex series, the Cyberstorm games (although that series is nigh-contemporaneous with some of the founding visual assets, I suppose), Hard Reset, Neotokyo. </div>
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But that's not necessarily the way it has to be. There are other titles that, interestingly to me now that I stop to think on it, I've eschewed, which could nonetheless comfortably be labeled cyberpunk based on their themes and settings: Watchdogs, E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Uplink, Hacker Evolution, just to focus on games and ignore film and television for the moment. All of these titles to various degrees do not slavishly follow the genre art tropes, while excellently (by all accounts) executing the themes and settings which make them cyberpunk at heart, if not on the surface. So why don't they attract me? Some of it pretty much <i>has</i> to be nostalgia, I think. But the art has a message, too, and that's important to me. The world I live in is essentially some kind of cyberpunk lite, near as I can tell - there are certainly huge networks layered on top of physical reality which dictate much of our lives invisibly, serving as electronic metaphors for the cabals and secret organizations which run them and run through them. Cyberwarfare is a thing. Virtual realities are a thing. Dreary, rain-soaked neon corridors are definitely a thing if the weather's right. By and large, however, the world doesn't <i>feel</i> cyberpunk. It doesn't have the same gothic, the same unceasing dim flicker and sparking neon baroque. Those art tropes communicate <i>density</i>; a closeness and claustrophobia which seemed very much a possible future back during the completely unabated population growth of the late 20th century when the genre was born. Yet despite a mildly diminished outlook on world population growth, the feel still seems right. I think the art also codes for a different kind of density: information density. </div>
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That doesn't require much definition, does it? Cyberpunk, as much as it is about dystopian futures with massive overpopulation, rampant destruction of the ecosystem, the rise of sprawling megacities overflowing with crime and filth, and generally the characterization of humankind as a sort of bacterial infection gone disgustingly out of control (see: <i>The Matrix</i>), is also about the pressing (oppressing?) density of information:</div>
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<li>omnipresent surveillance states</li>
<li>omnipresent information networks</li>
<li>layered realities (virtual reality; actual physical layers of megacities defining the vast distances between upper and lower castes, a proliferation of cultural and social constructs instead of a monoculture, etc)</li>
<li>layered selves (virtual avatars, mind uploading, sockpuppeting physical bodies, robot bodies, etc)</li>
<li>information overload</li>
<li>gnostic, hermetic knowledge structures (hacking as an esoteric skill, government plots, secret societies, demigod AI, conspiracies, etc)</li>
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Art direction that visually communicates that deep, layered - encrusted and barnacled, even - sense of setting is a welcome thing, then. It is another avenue for communicating the kind of reality in which a cyberpunk narrative takes place. And I think insofar as that narrative's relationship to our actual reality goes, it is that artistic correspondence of information density which most engages with us as readers/watchers/players today - at least moreso than the sort of Malthusian prophetics of the 80s do. Whether it's still proper for art to attempt to convey that sensibility with protagonists strapped into full leather, shifting from shadow to sodium lamp-defined shadow, eking their convoluted way through an electronic distortion of present-day realpolitik, War-on-Drugs era street crime, and late 90s industrial-punk-harajuku fashion is another question (but sort of a meaningless one, as these tropes still engage the audience as intended, even as much of the audience becomes a generation not yet born during the heyday of those cultural signals). </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Sidebar - Deus Ex: Human Revolution</i> <i>doesn't get a lot of credit for this (considering its best aspects lay perhaps elsewhere), but one of the interesting things that game did, sort of presaged in Niel Stephenson's Diamond Age, was attempt to redefine at least the fashion sense of cyberpunk. Where Diamond Age tried to show a caste of folks living as neo-Victorians, Human Revolution posited a kind of neo-Renaissance aesthetic - attempting, no doubt, to draw comparisons between the dawn of Reason in Western Civilization and the posited sea-change of that game's narrative. I don't think it quite worked for either Stephenson or Square-Enix, but it's not like it exactly didn't work. The fact they at least tried is important and interesting to me.</i></span></div>
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<li><i><a href="https://community.eidosmontreal.com/blog/Fashion-of-Deus-Ex"><span style="font-size: x-small;">https://community.eidosmontreal.com/blog/Fashion-of-Deus-Ex</span></a></i></li>
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<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://cyber-renaissance.tumblr.com/">http://cyber-renaissance.tumblr.com/</a></span></i></li>
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<li><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://kotaku.com/5491544/how-deus-ex-3s-cyber-renaissance-averted-a-puffy-pants-disaster">http://kotaku.com/5491544/how-deus-ex-3s-cyber-renaissance-averted-a-puffy-pants-disaster</a></span></i></li>
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Whew, that was a long sentence. But that's sort of the point: once you're past the feeling that "old" art direction still somehow communicates the modern version of cyberpunk quite well, the question becomes "to what end?" If I can agree with myself that there is a coherent vision of the genre anno 2015, then what is that genre's message now? It seems logical to me that a coherent vision entails a coherent voice, or at least one strong trope that is reflecting a reality about our world. If the original cyberpunk as envisioned by Dick, Stephenson, Gibson, and the rest of that cadre was something about the nearness of the future, the rise of the information age, the uncertainty of the self and what it means to be human, and the disgusting, inevitable decay of the corporation-state - in short, basically the high-tech version of a po-mo takedown of Western Civilization, what's different now?</div>
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I think time has pared back some of that initial, really rather reactionary stuff. Because it's more or less actually already happened, we aren't worrying so much about the nearness of the future. Gibson himself has since said (one of my favorite quotes, if you haven't already read some of my other blog posts): "the future is already here, it's just not widely distributed yet." We aren't perturbed by the information superhighway; it's part of our lives now. We saw in 2008 that the (to use a more neutral term) evolution of the corporation-state is basically underway, and we predictably took sides as to whether that was a good thing or not. But all that's past, and Postmodernism's given way to the stochastic establishment of a mono-reality in which we all pragmatically must coexist. SCIENCE! etc. What we are left with is the ancient question of how to define the self and humanity, and associated questions. The mission of the genre, if you will, seems clearer and more focused on a question that is "timeless" - but its unique ability to do so remains seated in its setting; its sense of information density. And I think that it is actually continuing the attack it began on Western Civilization, just via another route.</div>
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Instead of attacking the cracks in the (mostly imagined) monoculture of Western Civilization, as the po-mos did, the new cyberpunk attacks the teleology of Western Civ. If enlightenment, rationalism, and humanist futures are the aim of our culture at its best, then Cyberpunk counters it with a still-too-real imagining of a future that is dense <i>beyond</i> comprehension; too complex for our understanding, and totally out of the control of rational (to us, at least) beings. Whether its initial demagogues agree or its current torch-bearers had this in mind when they began their stories, the collective effect seems to be to place Mysticism squarely back into the human narrative of what is to come.</div>
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<li>Omnipresent surveillance imbues human-made cityscapes with an animist sense of agency in all things.</li>
<li>Omnipresent information networks imbue those same 'scapes with animist, ley-line-esque magical properties - magical because hidden from plain sight.</li>
<li>Layered reality reinstates dualism, the supernatural.</li>
<li>Layered selves reinstates reincarnation; astral projection, etc.</li>
<li>Information overload places characters firmly into a universe based on the basic premise that not all which occurs can be understood by mere mortals.</li>
<li>Gnostic, hermetic knowledge hardly needs an introduction, but it too supplies more religious veneer to all of the above, and it again separates the known from the unknown, fundamentally questioning the ability of rational inquiry to penetrate the veil because now the veil is basically protected by agents beyond ones' understanding.</li>
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Personally, I love this. I think that this is exactly the kind of critique of our science-infatuated culture that is needed right now. The logical encrustation of high technology civilization upon itself makes it top-heavy; the very things we counted on to render our future readable make it recondite. Science is tipped on its head and we realize that it is without teleology; it is merely a tool. Our aims, though furthered by science, are not simply science - otherwise you turn science and technology into a religion, and it defeats itself. As well, as a person who likes history and is religious himself, this kind of mystic future is one which jives with what I know and expect of humanity, and which seems more like to accurately represent us, and the stories we like to tell about ourselves. As I've already begun to talk about in other posts here, the stories we like to tell about ourselves are actually important; to a greater than usually recognized degree, we <i>are</i> our stories.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG-m4I1nlaXsQ6X55OjApV5fjolOuVT6QbYEE2zv36ia3KsNGAwLYb_3182iNuu3Ptoa3Y5N7r6j543ZXk-1G73eCgVmTl0wnozoTq3QiHexdaS5w2UUkCPq7kOj0Y7KKJ9oWjBMOgPt8/s1600/%D0%A4%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE-%D0%B4%D0%BD%D1%8F-%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B0-%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%81-904493.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG-m4I1nlaXsQ6X55OjApV5fjolOuVT6QbYEE2zv36ia3KsNGAwLYb_3182iNuu3Ptoa3Y5N7r6j543ZXk-1G73eCgVmTl0wnozoTq3QiHexdaS5w2UUkCPq7kOj0Y7KKJ9oWjBMOgPt8/s1600/%D0%A4%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE-%D0%B4%D0%BD%D1%8F-%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B0-%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%81-904493.jpeg" height="320" width="243" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The picture is cropped, focused, sized, <br />
and tells a story - but what happens next?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Narrative is a form of linguistic expression that tells a story. It really is this basic. It need not be constrained by the mores of chronology, or the strictures of a particular point of view, tense, tone, setting, or any other thing. Narrative, however, IS about change. There is a beginning, and there are points in the narrative which come after the beginning, and there will be an end of one sort or another.<br />
<br />
Narrative's purpose is to be told - whether to oneself, or to others, or to some undefined audience which may or may not include various listeners and authors. And a narrative remains untold until it is finished; it is an inherent frustration of this linguistic format to leave a narrative unfinished, untold. This does not necessitate a climax or denoument, or any other "standard" narrative format for the end of a story, but rather so long as there exists the possibility for the narrative to continue, there is some unfinished aspect to the character of the narrative - and to some extent, this is an aspect of narrative common to all stories. Wherever an author or authors might think to end their story, whether by design (here's the conclusion, etc.) or accident (the author died before the work was completed, etc.), the audience may well ask "what next?" and it is an intelligible, reasonable question to ask of the story so long as a continuation can be imagined and articulated. Narrative, it seems, cannot fulfill its own purpose.<br />
<br />
So narrative is <b>linear</b> in format if not in content, restrained in this way as are all things bound by the rules of our four-dimensional existence. Through that sequence, the presence of <b>change</b> makes the transition from one part of the sequence to another intelligible by allowing differentiation. Narrative also has a <b>purpose - that of being told</b> - and by its nature <b>it <i>seems</i> that purpose cannot be completely fulfilled</b>. Even from these basics the morality of narrative seems to arise for me: It is imperative (good) that the narrative be told, but it is to be understood that its telling will never be complete. Striving for completion is not necessarily bad insofar as it does not impede the good (which right now is just the imperative of actually telling the story), but it is also essentially nonsensical. And there are other, even more elemental goods that arise: change is good. We cannot at this point say how much change is good, but that it exists is good within the framework of a narrative; it is existentially good because it allows the narrative to be told, splitting up an indistinguishable linear experience into segmented, differentiated parts with relationships to one another (at the bare minimum, the relationship of being included in the same narrative by their author or authors).<br />
<br />
The knowledge of these goods sheds light on another facet of narrative that, it quickly becomes apparent, is necessary to the good of the narrative by virtue of its effect on the purpose and change of a narrative: the narrative focus. Like change, linearity, purpose, and incompleteness, focus is a fundamental aspect of any narrative. It arises from the nature of language: without going too far afield into linguistics as opposed to narratology (which is the proper topic of this screed), a word spoken is also every other word not spoken. Language, the substrate of Narrative, is inherently focusing. Narrative focus cleaves that which is part of the narrative from what which is not part of the narrative - that which will be told, and that which will not be told. It is not a clean delineation: from what a narrative explicitly includes, an audience may deduce the probable existence of some aspects of the narrative not explicitly told (the plot of a mystery depends on this principle, for example). This ragged limn is the happy playground of the close reader. But at some indefinite point there would seem to be a limit to the determinations that can be made from a finite narrative, and this limit is helpful to the telling of a narrative because it limits what the author must complete in order to approach (but, remember, never quite attain) completeness. Focus is a good insofar as it aids the completion of the narrative; it would seem that it is possible for focus to also be a bad thing - too much of it, and we lose all sense of meaningful change. Like change, then, focus is good, but it remains unseen <i>how much</i> focus is a good thing. Probably, change and focus - and their proper amounts - maintain a delicate yin and yang (possibly also forming a tripod with linearity, in that too little time spent on a narrative - or too much - compresses or dilutes the focus and change contained within its limits?), and it is this good tao which is so ineffable and indispensable to a "good" narrative. But this is not an investigation into the proper qualities of good narratives. It is a simpler task taken up here; to simply identify what is fundamentally imperative (good) for narratives. A narrative without focus is everything, which is an unchanging totality. It is not a narrative. Focus is imperative to narrative, and good.<br />
<br />
For a narrative, being told is the purpose, and therefore good. Its focus, its changes, its linear duration - these are the fundamental aspects of a narrative which are imperative for its telling, and therefore their existence is also good. If one were to derive one's own morality from the morality of narratives at this point, it would not be so hard to make a start:<br />
<ol>
<li>It is good to tell the narrative --> it is good to act, to live life, to exist, as opposed to inaction and non-existence.</li>
<li>Acting, living life, existing: these are accomplished by focusing, by changing, by enduring - though to what degree one must do these things is somewhat unclear. </li>
<li>It is impossible to complete - to do all the good there is to do. </li>
</ol>
<div>
Obviously, this appears extremely general. It is the most vapid seed of a morality, almost totally undefined, but it also seems like it could be used as a general compass rose for a more complete map of human morality as derived from our favorite form of expression, the narrative. The fleshing out of this correspondence and its implications for our own moral understanding does not seem impossible, or even improbable. The foothold has been crossed, and ground found upon which to stand. It might even be a good and useful project; it seems like there could be a lot of use for a morality derived from the morality of the Narrative. These problems are not the issue. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The issue seems to be that Narrative's morality must be justified. Why is narrative so important to us? What does it do for us? These appear to be linguistic and cognitive questions, digging into Narrative's rich human substrate.</div>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-66787596757826843992015-01-06T19:02:00.003-06:002015-01-06T19:07:39.910-06:00My Child's Protolanguage<a href="https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/t31.0-8/10869358_10102470468498350_6746681718291076121_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/t31.0-8/10869358_10102470468498350_6746681718291076121_o.jpg" width="320" /></a>This is more of a documentary post than anything, though it might be interesting tidbits for those of us who - like Emily and I - are interested in language. Our new child, Joseph (our first), is <br />
approximately four months old at the time of this writing. We have discovered that he has several utterances/vocalizations which recur pretty exactly, according to a formula. These sounds do also seem to correspond very strongly to different kinds of emotional states and/or stimuli Joseph encounters. A brief catalog, spelled phonetically:<br />
<br />
"Ghee" - Used to express probable worry, concern.<br />
<br />
"Naing" - Used in the throes of a tantrum. Appears to express extreme dissatisfaction.<br />
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"Agoo" - Somewhat more mysterious. Seems to imply pleasant surprise? The first of these three to appear.<br />
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I will add more later, so this will be something of an ongoing effort to catalog all his "words" before he begins to make real ones.<br />
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<i>Sidenote: the meaning of these phrases was of course determined by Emily and I prior to Joseph's actually being able to articulate what he feels they signify. In the absence of a sufficiently robust theory of universal grammar, we may suppose that these are somewhat unique to this baby, though perhaps they share similarities with other babies of English-speaking couples in the 21st century. Nevertheless, the strong correlation with visible external states (crying, smiling, etc) seems to imply that we cannot be far off in guessing the import of these sounds. Considering the remarkable simplicity and ease of use inherent in these sounds (probably not </i>full<i> symbols - they are direct results of mental states, not communications thereof), it would behoove a science fiction author and worldbuilder to do research at some point into what extent such directness can be found in natural/synthetic languages.</i><br />
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<br />Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-12038529247214592872014-09-17T13:32:00.002-05:002014-09-17T13:38:33.884-05:00Narrative Morality<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">There have been projects to derive morality from science, but I view this approach to morality as poorly-suited to accept the facts of culture, as culture, being a dynamical system, is something science has traditionally shied away from as being too complex to render reductively to any degree of satisfaction. That may change in the future, but I think that once again it is plausible to suggest that liberal arts may be required to lead the way.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Whereas scientific morality sought to wring universal truths from scientific fact, my project is to find universal truth in human culture. Whereas human culture itself is fantastically diverse and might at first suggest the useless relativity of postmodernism, when understood as a dynamical system it can be conceived that the whole of human culture is in fact derived from simple starting mechanisms which are universal: namely language and narrative. Language, for what culture exists that does not use a natural language, and narrative, for this is the first and foremost thing humans do with language. Indeed, much scientific thought has gone into the apparent fact that humans think and understand themselves and their world through the narrative form. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Yet what can language and narrative teach us about morality? Can they even be the basis of a new philosophy? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">What do you think?</span></div>
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Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-85341715183577509232014-02-27T10:00:00.000-06:002014-02-27T10:00:34.562-06:00A Comment from RogerHub, Metastasized A comment I began writing on <a href="http://rogerhub.com/blog/1695/">a great post over at RogerHub</a> kind of became too long-winded to politely dump in that man's comment section, so now it's going to live here. It even fits in with the focus of this blog!<br />
<br />
<b>Comment Transcript:</b><br />
Just to add to this article from the point of view of someone who was educated in the liberal arts: technology is a sort of odd binary in the minds of most people: it is seen as savior and satan simultaneously. As in this blog post, anyone who stops to think about it long enough must inevitably conclude that technology's moral standing must necessarily be a reflection of its users.<br />
<br />
That's where a lot of the fun in Science Fiction is - when technology is used in a plot to elevate the moral quandaries of characters to epic heights, or to make moral issues that seem unimportant to us now more concrete and pressing. When technology is presented as inherently good or evil, that's often when we lose interest in the story; such technologies seem like too much of a crutch propping up a certain decision (stories are always problems, and problems are always decisions).<br />
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Humans like verisimilitude in our stories (our "virtualizations" of other's lives, as you term them in another post). You can be as fantastic as you like, but on some level - literal or metaphorical - you have to jive with reality. So it should be no surprise we like it when technology simply magnifies the decisions of people (or other sorts of moral agents like intelligent robots, aliens, etc.); that's because this is basically how technology works in the real world.<br />
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So when you say "Progress exists indifferently: the problem is mankind. Science moves forward, yes, but humans don’t. We don’t mature. We just don’t learn, and this is why we have problems with technology." it is crux of the issue. The user is the reason technology seems two-faced. But what does it mean that the power technology grants us is being put into the hands of a proportionally ever-more inept species? You do not give a rifle to a child, because although the child may choose between right and wrong, they are not as good at it as an adult, and most think the consequences too severe to risk allowing them to make a bad decision with such a technology. Some other people believe that even an adult is in no position to make proper moral choices with a firearm, and this debate rages in our society these days.<br />
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There is no technology for improving human moral decision-making; it's extremely doubtful that there ever could be, given how much of a premium we place on free will. Human beings seem to think that the good life can only be lived when they are free to make their own choices; look at the plot of Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. This is considered dystopian fiction; a picture of a world in which technology is used to subjugate and control humans - drugs and epigenetic engineering are used to create individuals with certain moral capacities and inclinations. Few mature people would conceive of that world as ideal, yet it is essentially the gist of what any attempt to improve humans would look like - a removal of choice, of free will. A subversion of the good.<br />
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Technology isn't going to get us a solution to our moral quandaries; neither is Science. There is nothing particularly new to be discovered about what humans find moral and immoral; only changing fashion. Basically, however revolting it might at first seem to some, a technological society is in need of something like the solution in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End - something paternal, that is, which comes very close to being - perhaps even is - a religion.<br />
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However, we are in the process of abolishing religion from society, it seems - in part because of what it has to say about how technology should be used (stem cell research, abortion, etc.). Potential irony aside, there's only one further resolution to the conflict. When humans are removed from the equation and there's only mindless technology (true AI would just be a repeat performance in silicon), then technology will have at last had its apotheosis. Most people don't like the sound of that either; so conflict it is for us. We will never be at peace with technology, because we cannot be at peace with ourselves and our choices.<br />
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<br />Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-31333301586027735432014-02-19T14:59:00.002-06:002014-02-19T14:59:15.375-06:00Semantics, Language, Cognition, and ScienceThis probably counts as more of a muse than a full-blown blog post, and I'm not going to go through the effort to link justifications, but there is a worm of a thought in my head that has to do with words and concepts like this:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>System</li>
<li>Organism</li>
<li>Taxonomy</li>
<li>Species</li>
<li>Category</li>
<li>Delineation</li>
<li>Group</li>
<li>Individual </li>
<li>Discipline</li>
<li>Narrative</li>
<li>Metaphor</li>
</ul>
<div>
Even a crappy amateur of a Philosopher of Science such as myself knows that these words don't relate to any reality at all; that they mean nothing in the scheme of the universe. When we are talking about these words, we are talking about mental constructs - purely human, purely conceptual, used for the way they simplify our thinking about something that resists cognition by pretending to unify and define a certain segment of the unbroken swath of the fabric of reality. That metaphor is important to me - the fabric itself is essentially unbroken, but we look at the crest of a wrinkle in the cloth, which from our perspective looks like a line separating one part of the whole from the rest, and we say "ah, on this side the cloth is different from the other side." You can nitpick about it. You can say "well, the wrinkle itself is a real aspect of the cloth, so we are talking about something real after all." But it happens in science (and in bed-making) all the time: the closer you get to the wrinkle (the better to inspect it), the less and less it looks like a wrinkle as your perspective changes. It might as well be an axiom that the better you understand a subject, the more and more it starts to look like a part of other related subjects - until, in the final estimation, it all comes down to brute physics, and perhaps even math. </div>
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It also goes without saying - but is worth reiterating for effect - that this goes very deep. Down to the most infinitesimal aspects of our understanding of physics: everything is energy, made only apparently different by entropy and space. Up to the grandest cosmological viewpoint: Our universe may well be part of a single infinite multiverse. Difference is purely the cognitive short-cut our minds take in order to perceive the world in a timely fashion. </div>
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So what. So reality is actually an un-individuated, atomic totality - who cares? We seem to be able to actually learn a semblance of truth about the universe from flawed perception; science delivers repeatable results; God's in his heaven and all's well with the world. Yet I think some fascinating things follow from this line of thinking. More trivially: it reinforces the notion that what we discover through science is not reality per se, but rather a stochastic revelation about a certain perception of reality, given other perceptions. This was already essentially made clear via quantum physics at the latest (but could have perhaps been arrived at earlier had more attention been paid to the philosophy of science). It's trivial because it has little to do with what we care about (i.e. we only care about adequately predicting that which we can perceive to begin with), but it does serve to set us on the right path about what we expect science to tell us and how it will tell it to us. </div>
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Less trivially, I think it teaches us to look at our language and its semantics as a potential source of difficulty in doing science. In English and Spanish at the very least (the two languages I know the most about), the very structure of the language works by using "systems thinking" to represent aspects of the reality it is trying to describe; that is, it breaks reality up into chunks that are used in the language as though they were discrete units, separate from the rest of reality. For example, I talk about my ingrown big toenail as though it can be understood separate from my body; it is part of a discrete limb. But this toe is only being discussed because it is causing the rest of my body pain, for it is connected to my body by my leg, and because my body is connected to a world in which various forms of infectious disease live, because it also contains enough living things in it to sustain populations of these diseases, because it has an environment that can sustain these living things, and so on ad nauseam. How does it make sense to call it a toenail, when you can't even understand everything about it unless you consider it as part of a larger system, which itself must literally be infinite in scope before the toenail can be understood completely?</div>
<div>
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<div>
More seriously, think of ants and humans as a biologist would. There are biologists out there who would call an ant hive a superorganism; that is, it is an organism that is composed of smaller pseudo-organisms. Pseudo-organisms, they might argue, because a worker ant or a queen ant by itself does not actually fit the definition of an organism - it cannot maintain homeostasis or reproduce without its compliments in the ant hive. Nobody calls a human a pseudo-organism that is just a cog in a superorganism, though - even though humans as they exist today cannot, for the most part, maintain homeostasis or reproduce without society for help. A tiger could - tigers need no tiger friends. But then even a tiger is unable to reproduce or maintain homeostasis without some help from at least a few unfortunate goats now and again. Or from another angle still - what would the tiger be without his eye cells? What would the tiger's eye cells be without his brain cells or his gastrointestinal cells? Well, the tiger would certainly not be an organism; perhaps a superorganism, though. So? So this is all semantic; so what! How we break it down is arbitrary; where the line between one word's meaning and another's is wholly arbitrary so long as what we mean is conveyed properly! </div>
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"So long as what we mean is conveyed properly." That is the kernel of the whole problem. It is very, very difficult to keep track of all the things we mean when we use "systems thinking." We talk about an organism as though that word allows us to think of it differently from a solar system, but both maintain a certain kind of homeostasis, and both grow, reproduce, and die (not necessarily in that order). So what if, in our false conception of separation between the notions of galaxies and game birds, we lose out on a revelation for one that is perfectly applicable, yet not applied because discovered in "another" discipline? </div>
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But Adam, I ask myself, why did you belatedly tack on "narrative" and "metaphor" to the list of words that lead you here? Because these are more tools we use to simplify our perceptions for ourselves; a narrative is a pattern that we use to break up chunks of time into discrete units with causal chains running from their beginning to their end, and a metaphor is a way of understanding something by simply saying that it shares properties with another thing, as if it were possible for two things to be actually <i>different</i> from each other; devoid of connections that influence both ends of the metaphor, however raggedy and attenuated, like some literary form of quantum entanglement. </div>
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Basically, humans do science in spite of all the most-used tools in their language toolkit, near as I can tell, yet it's not clear that any science could be done without language (at least, no science of any use to us!). That paradox is fascinating, but it took so long to arrive at that any further consideration will have to wait until another post. </div>
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Of course, if anyone has gotten so lost on the internet as to wind up here, and they think they can add to the idea, then please do. This is the current limit of what I have consciously perceived.</div>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-24858712195630257102013-09-10T14:08:00.000-05:002013-09-11T09:46:42.566-05:00The New Mysterian Myth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://priceonomics.com/the-science-of-snobbery/">"Our internal computers are powerful but unknowable."</a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Read this on an unrelated site, coming from the mouth of a reporter. Is New Mysterianism actually a popular "pop" neuroscience hypothesis these days? I find it inane to conceive that the brain somehow is incapable of understanding a system as complex as itself - when has that ever been the case in any other discipline - who would say that the endocrine or the lymphatic systems are too complex for the brain to understand, for example? What is the objective measure of complexity, really? And even if the complexity of the brain is such that human scientists had difficulty understanding it, can't we summarize our knowledge of portions of the brain such that we can preserve knowledge of all its essential functions using models that are simpler than the natural reality? </span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Of course I may be putting words in the mouth of the author of this line. Maybe they mean that the brain is unknowable for other reasons. It would be more plausible to think that the brain is unknowable because of the <i>type </i>of thing that it is, perhaps. One could argue that there are sorts of things in this universe that the human mind is not particularly suited to understand, and it could be a cosmic irony that our own CNS falls into one of those areas. Still, the power of metaphorical thinking is vast, and everywhere we look with science we seem to make progress. Perhaps these areas of expertise which are not amenable to human understanding are also unknown unknowns, so that even our ignorance is hidden from us, but human research is driven not by sighting down the easiest avenues of pursuit. Rather, our engine has always seemed to be necessity, as the cliche goes. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I realize now that this post is actually somewhat tangentially related to its prior. We could conceivably measure rate of evolutionary change via changes in the complexity of organisms, but that would get us nowhere for a variety of reasons - the most pertinent of which is that complexity has no measure. Complexity can manifest as a function of the scale of inquiry - a simple baseball seems complex on the atomic level. Complexity can manifest as a function of the sort of inquiry - the baseball is chemically simple, but the physics of its trajectory and attitude from the pitcher's hand to the catcher's glove appear to be dynamical. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><b>(Probably Unoriginal) Hypothesis</b>: complexity is not so much a property of things as it is a property of inquiries about those things. The brain is not complex, it is the degree to which we want to know it that is complex. Didn't Glieck say as much in his book on chaos, <i>Chaos</i>? </span></span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Granted, that's chaos, but then chaos is intimately related to complexity. </span></span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">This much I </span><i style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">do</i><span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"> remember about that book. One, perhaps <i>the </i>one, objective way to measure the complexity of a <i>thing </i>(not the inquiry into it) is to look at how well you can reproduce the thing using abstracted patterns that describe it. This is not possible for all things; measuring how well a thing is reproduced is often only discernible by means that, it immediately becomes obvious, are essentially qualitative. Yet it is possible for some things; you could measure the complexity of a statistical model that way; by how closely its abstracted pattern reproduces an observed distribution. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">How you could ever measure the brain's complexity using that metric is beyond me. And how much of what we understand as humans is the same as the brain in this way? We don't understand the actualities of our surroundings; we don't have objective, un-biased/skewed/anthropocentric knowledge of our existence. That much (and only that much) of postmodernism is true. Yet we do science, and even beyond that, we execute simple heuristics that somehow tell us when the patterns and metaphors we use to represent our existence are close to the mark. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">The reason for that kind of bizarre ability is kind of simple, probably. And I think I've already touched on it here: The complexity of the universe we interact with is tamped down by our physical size, our mental limitations, etc. The arbitrary facts of our existence determine a sort of baseline for us to work against, which has made it much easier to apply metaphors and patterns to the universe that model it (the way we experience it) pretty well. Think how much more intuitive newtonian physics are than quantum physics. It's when we are able to gain insight into scales and ways of looking at things which are not normal for humans that it gets difficult; our pattern-making and metaphor-jumping starts to get messy. Not impossible, but a more difficult grade. It would be a mistake to call this hill a cliff, as the New Mysterians do.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I have no idea of the worth of this concept, but one thought does now occur to me. It serves the wonderful purpose of making epiphenomenalists look silly. They seem to have lost their ability to fight with the pantheists in their effort to exclude consciousness from the Great Causal Chain, as it were. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><b>Postscript</b>: While I'm on the topic of the brain, I might as well write down something I was thinking about. My head is exploding right now, which is not a good sign (it's another one of those subtle indicators that tells me I'm far out of my depth), but I wonder whether it is wise to confine attribution of sentience to living things only. A rock is not alive; how do we know it has no experience? Nagel asked "what is it like to be a bat?" I want to ask "what is it like to be a rock?" Isn't this something practically religious and unscientific? Well it may be, but then the skeptics, so abhorrent of the unproven that they revile conscious sentience as an "epiphenomenon" are basically giving this illogical idea a helping hand. To call sentience consciousness an epiphenomenon only strengthens this pseudo-religious idea of "pan<span style="font-size: x-small;">sentienc</span>e," let's call it. If it has no effect on the brain, conscious experience could just be something that all matter does, stuck in a non-causal loop off to the side of everything else, generated by, but not itself generating, anything at all. Maybe we're just the only lumps of stuff in this big lump of stuff we call the world to emergently gain the ability and the will to communicate our consciousness and make it known to others. How would a rock do that? Would it even <i>want </i>to do that? Does this mean that when we die our conscious experience does not go away, but rather undergoes a transformation? Was our birth into this world the opposite reaction? </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Seems to have at least one good use going for it - pansentience makes the epiphenomenalists look like goobers. When you completely sideline conscious experience, you make it impossible to find evidence of absence in something like a rock. That rock might be experiencing things, but you'll never know, because its experience never has anything to do with anything you might observe!</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-9474888623822889732013-02-12T14:58:00.001-06:002013-02-12T15:01:03.075-06:00Google+ Post Becomes Worthy of Archival<div class="tr_bq">
After writing this post on Google+, I felt the need to publish it here, as a sort of archive so that I could come back to some of the ideas within as a mine for fiction, non-fiction, or simply a good line at a cocktail party:</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Rate of evolutionary change is a complicated concept because, at some level, you're trying to collapse a variegated gene pool into a single entity that can then be measured by the amount we perceive it to be different from its predecessors. Is that measurement to be phenotypic? Genetic? A combination of both? If you just measure genetics you end up ignoring the fact that a whole lot of change can occur to "junk DNA" or mitochondrial/commensals DNA without noticeably changing the organism. If you just do phenotype then you're going to miss changes that might result in speciation without phenotypical changes. Doing both requires you to come up with some kind of weight distribution that basically, as far as I can tell, is determined by your arbitrary bias. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">A species can go a very long time without experiencing noticeable change or significant speciation if it experiences no bottlenecks or separations, but this is not to say that its gene pool is not diversifying or converging greatly. Similarly, a species at a bottleneck event may very quickly speciate, but its difference from the progenitor who survived the bottleneck may be little.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">At the root of this problem is the issue that we don't have a clear definition for what "species" means. Reproductive compatibility isn't a binary equation, genes intermingle in an astonishing number of ways, and in general the problem is just very difficult: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem</a></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Speciation is, after all, a human attempt to define a natural system that could not possibly care less. From one extreme point of view, everything on earth is a single species, while from another extreme each genetically unique sibling is a separate species from its fellows. The need to keep researchers employed and the improvement of measuring technologies ensures that science will continue to tend toward the latter extreme, allowing new species to be discovered all the time. After all, it's ultimately just a question of how minutely you wish to split the hairs on evolution's hoary back.</span></blockquote>
Needless to say, the same may apply to all cultural artifacts (language, technology, etc.), and of course even to the strata of the universe (differentiation of matter, energy, vacuum, etc.). This kind of cuts to the heart of science while preserving the usefulness of the body, in an odd sort of way.Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-740018993922848692012-11-12T14:31:00.000-06:002012-11-12T14:32:52.724-06:00Politics of the Science-Fictive Future: Or, what a "Futurist" Wants from the RepublicansThis election year, many have been quick to note that Romney and the Republicans lost at least in part because they are no longer speaking to a demographic (white males) capable of winning them the election. I think these pundits may be on to something, but I don't think the same will be true four years down the road, when that party will be presented with a far more equal shot at the White House. The pundits reason that the conservative values held by white males aren't views shared by the growing majority of america that is not white or not male or both, but I think these commentators don't get that it's not the whiteness or the maleness of the demographic that gives it its conservative bent.<br />
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The white male gets his generic conservative attitude from working in a system that supports him. He doesn't want it to change because for him, it works. Instead of innovating the government's policies, he would take the more cautious approach of working within the lines as they already exist, because they seem well-drawn to a cohort that has benefitted from their delineation (such as him). That, not fiscal responsibility or religiosity, is the core of the conservative ideal. There is actually much to like in such an ideal, even for people whom the system has not thus far made ascendant: stability, assurance in the knowledge that it has worked for others and could be made to work for you, the advantages of familiarity, the perpetuation of rightly-honored traditions, etc. These aspects will <i>also </i>appeal to the section of the majority that also sees itself as on top, as working within the system they were given to rise to the point they are at. It would be foolish to think that just because of race or gender they will somehow find the conservative ideal unattractive. </div>
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They will not vote conservative, however, unless the party redefines itself by reimagining their take on this core value and abandoning some of the traditional trappings of that stance.</div>
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In the arena of social policy, they will need to eschew publicly-religious-based moral decision-making. This is not because basing moral choices on religious beliefs is wrong. In fact it is probably the only truly legitimate way to do it. The reason they need to avoid this, though, is that in a non-white male majority, they can't count on establishing a unifying religious vision; the new majority is going to be made up of a patchwork of nominal Catholics, a whole bunch of vying protestant sects, and ever-increasing number of the irreligious who are trying to base their morality on some kind of scientific ground or another. Thus, candidates wishing to appeal to this majority of minorities will need to appeal to the one thing most of them will have in common - the belief in a separation of church and state. It will be fine to mention that a candidate is religious, and to in actuality make decisions based on that candidate's own religious integrity, but the party and candidate must have a wholly secular justification thought up as well. It can be done; you can convincingly argue that abortion is wrong not just from a religious standpoint, but also from a scientific/philosophical standpoint, for example. The other basis for social policy in a new conservative party should be economic - a language of dollar bills that every American intuitively understands. Take a cue from the growing libertarian sentiment in this country - if weed and other drugs could be legalized and taxed to turn a profit, then they should be. Let the individual decide what is right for them if it only hurts them - a true conservative sentiment if there ever was one. This coming change is as inevitable as Prohibition's repeal was in the 30's - don't let the Democrats get the jump on this message. Couch it in terms of reacting to the situation as history dictates you should, thus enshrining the move as a move from the heart of your conservative ideal - the idea that we should act based on what we know already works. This will steal the show from the Democrats for the young electorate and truly move the debate about the war on drugs, our border, and the national debt forward into new and fruitful territory - all in a way that preserves your conservative ethos. </div>
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In the arena of business and fiscal policy, the Republican party desperately needs to cease its big business protectionist tendencies and become the friend of the entrepreneur, the nascent Green Economy, and the Internet. Teddy Roosevelt was once a member of your ranks; this man is a ghost from your past whose policies are writ large in your political future. Nobody in America likes that we have businesses that are actually "too big to fail." Deregulate - stand for a more open economy so long as trusts and monopolies are not in play. Keep arguing for a smaller government - the nightmare of Greece's downfall is strong in our memories, or could be made strong - but be willing to compromise here (look to cut defense spending, foreign aid, and the postal service instead of healthcare policies, for example). The Green Economy will need some incentive to get started, but not as much or of the type that many Democrats think it will need if a conservative agenda of deregulating the economy and busting up the big players is successfully pursued. Focus emphasis on the improvement of American industrial infrastructure via our Internet - bust up the cable companies, make sure Google and the rest are keeping the net neutral, and ensure it remains the wellspring of entrepreneurship that has made it so huge thus far. Divorce the party from SOPA and the RIAA as much as possible given recent history and use the idea that an economy driven by information technology will boom on a glut of FREE information. Stand against regulation of this most important of business sectors, and be ready to disagree with Democrats on the degree to which governments should have oversight into network traffic and censorship. Some of this does constitute an about-face for the party, but characterize the party and the candidates as disparate instead of united; show that the party candidates who uphold these and other policies are united in ideology but are willing to try to realize it in different ways. This will give the party's image some vitality and dynamism. Liberals will be forced to pay attention to each candidate instead of dismissing them as "Republican." Conservative voters will find the party more inclusive.</div>
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Where foreign policy is concerned, Republicans should foster a revolutionary approach with roots deep in American history. Americans are psychologically ready for an era of political (but not economic) isolationism. We should be the country with open borders for immigrants of all colors, with little cause to be involved in foreign conflicts or peacekeeping operations unless called to do so by NATO or the United Nations. The War on Terror can be fought via cunning realpolitik diplomacy with other nations, especially China and India, and by an expansion of the CIA, as we did during the Cold War. Propose to lead the free world by example and not by fiat. Make it clear the USA is looking for profitable business opportunities regarding our planet's climate change and the dawn of Peak Oil.</div>
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That last point brings us to the Republican party's relationship with science. The future of the world is one in which science and technology will make an ever-increasing impact, which makes intelligent and coherent use of these tools an imperative for any political party. The reality of Climate Change and humanity's role in it must be acknowledged, as must the possibility that peak oil is upon us. These two events constitute an enormous problem for our developing worldwide civilization, and the Republican party's relevance must consist in engaging with these realities instead of denying them. There are valid conservative approaches to this: focusing on conservation and renewal of natural resources as opposed to major terraforming initiatives, for instance, or championing nuclear power as a tried-and-true green technology with downsides that can be mitigated at a later date by human ingenuity. Actually coming around to the fact that we will need to cut back and be sustainable instead of a forever-expanding industrial revolution. Democrats are lacking in this area because they aren't putting enough emphasis on conservation and sustainable growth, and they tend to wrongly link their strategies to unhappy social policies, such as various forms of population control. They are surprisingly unable to mobilize social responses that Republicans could happily adopt; for instance, the victory gardens and DIY projects which characterized America's incredible response to the stresses of the Second World War could be used to greatly improve sustainable living in America, as would initiatives to move the middle class out of sprawling suburbs and into more densely-packed urban areas that made use of the extra space to create "green belts" in which the ongoing green revolution could develop in close proximity to the people. An emphasis on at-home production instead of reliance on imports would help us avoid the inevitable rise of costs in shipping that will attend the oil crisis in the years to come. American agriculture, manufacturing, and information technology should be bolstered with improved educational outreach to the millions of new immigrants more open borders would provide - these people should be turned into the newly-revitalized blue-collar class of the twenty-first century, ready to actually <i>implement </i>what we have the know-how to do. It is one thing to promote science and technology in our schools, but businesses today know that America's true lack in human resourcing is in the blue collar area. Science and technology are changing what blue collar looks like, but our preconceived notions of its inferiority are unfortunately not. Republicans should make life easy for high-tech blue collar workers, and help resurrect that kind of practical middle class.</div>
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America could benefit greatly from a Republican party that stands for the entrepreneur, the individualist, and the sustainable lifestyle. Some party members already have inklings of putting their feet through this door; Romney was really a moderate defeated because of being backed by a rabidly right-wing party that in all probability was the driving cause behind him saying some very unsavory things that voters (like me) just couldn't stomach. I suspect the same was true of McCain, the last time I voted for Obama. Obama is a great president, but it would be great to see a new kind of Republican the next election competing with whoever is tapped to succeed Obama. A Republican prepared to be competitive and radical - only in the sense that they are rethinking what always has made the conservative approach appealing. That Republican could stir up the new majority and do major good for the country and its world. In a future that looks to change our lives so much, so rapidly, we could all benefit from a powerful voice for conservative nation-building philosophy. </div>
Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6636422447654352249.post-23649478802457761622012-04-09T11:37:00.002-05:002012-04-09T11:37:58.974-05:00The Constant: Story<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">This is not a poem;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Think of it more</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">As a poetic telegram from your future.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">This is not the future</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">With rocket cars</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Or FTL Martian Colonization</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">This is YOUR future</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And the future of your children</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And your nation.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The plausibility is high</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Because it is already begun,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And what is begun we will complete</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Whether because we know to</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Or because, too late</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">We are forced.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">So these words are telling you</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Warning you</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Notifying:</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The suburbs will die </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Along with the gasoline car;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Your children will inhabit cities.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Agribusiness will grow your things</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Industry will manufacture ideas</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And your neighborhood will feed you.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Everyone will be a designer;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">(Did you ever play with Legos?)</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Everyone will be a consuming producer.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Thus stardom will fall to earth,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Swamped in the morass of human experience,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Billions of us coming online.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Information technology</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Will destroy commerce in mass;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">It is creating commerce in ideas.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">So ships and trucks and airplanes</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Will ply fewer expanses,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Copyrights will combat human rights,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And human rights will conflict</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">With human needs and the future generation's</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Very existence.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Religion will die a slow, mistaken death</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">As "Science" learns to oppress.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The gentle will weep.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The classroom is the neighborhood</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The workplace is your livingroom</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Yet your reach is global.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Women will make children</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">For state money;</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Men will sex robots.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The natural world will recover territories</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The landscape dotted with panels</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And windmills and cellulosic fuel bases.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The population will contract and empty</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And grow old, demand will slacken</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The economy slow.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Life will also slow,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The new spaces will be enjoyed</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">With knowledge gleaned from free books.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Libraries will deliver hyperlinked books to your house</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">For a fee, and your sunglasses</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Will be imbued with 3D movie classics.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The word of rap will run</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Over the dubstep ground,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Through an ethnic forest, to your ears.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">You will grow poorer,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Happier, educated, </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">and forgetful, even of violence.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Medicine will oppress all of us</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If we let it define our standards of life,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And computers will take our jobs</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If we think of jobs</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">As they are thought of now.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Your children will thus actually want schooling,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Though education will not save them</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">From the press of their peers</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Around the world.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">All the specialized minds </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Will let their cars drive them</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Safely to only a few jobs.</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The rest of us must learn to be generalists,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Rennaissance "agriculturalists,"</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Cultivating in a strange, satisfying rennaissance. </span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Satisfying,</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Because it will at last</span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Seem strange, even to the young.</span>Adam Wykeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com2