The First-Person
Narrator
of World, Inc.
Who am I? I am one of an ever-diminishing cadre of Ivory Tower Academics and
Intellectuals who were actually below ground in abandoned missile silos. Many
of us saw the present disasters coming, and made provisions, stocking gasoline
for generators, hooking up wind and solar powered batteries, and making sure
our part of the World Wide Web would stay active. We keep in touch by email
and web postings, and all subscribe to our e-journal, "AmishNet."
Some of us are still composing nihilistic e-journal articles, like "The
Death Wish of Charley the Tuna," and "Phallic Identification and Infatuation
with Oscar Meyer and Sigmund Freud." Totally worthless intellectual calisthenics
blaming television popular culture for the downfall of America. But at least
there are some of us who are attempting to preserve civilization, like digital
monks in a new Dark Age, hoping to once again relight the wisdom of the world.
Part of our self-assumed role is to guard the knowledge of grammar and spelling
(good and evil having long gone out of fashion).
I had been working on a computer
software/hardware project called Innovative Consensuality. My company was researching
forced feedback sexual products that would work through video games and over the
internet. The key marketing point suggested the goal was safe sex but again, it
was another diversion to keep people at home, glued stickily to their computers,
and to distract them from the gradual move to fascism and a single world government.
You might well ask who comes
up with these marketing and advertising ideas. A few years ago I discovered that
some of the key PR and ad agencies were lacing their coffeemakers and water coolers
with trace amounts of LSD. They’d also put TVs everywhere so that there
were constantly changing moving images in their visual fields. Employees would
drink some coffee or water, glance at the TV, start tripping, and then share ideas
in a communal acid rockfest clambake reminiscent of the 1960s Summer of Love.
One manager of a very successful agency remarked to me after divulging this incentivizing
program: "The LSD and the TV blend together nicely, and my people get some
very creative ideas!" It is perhaps unnecessary of me to mention that the
manager was drug-free, except for some prescription medication that helped him
maintain his hypocrisy and his social and business position.
We would have had provisions
stored already from the Year 2000 stashes, but we’d had a Y2K Potluck Provision
party on January 1, 2001. That was when my friends who had been on anti-depressants
said, "Well, there’s another year shot to hell!"
They are, unfortunately, no longer with us. Too late researchers discovered a
link between long-term anti-depressants, a deterioration of the brain’s
neurotransmitters, and the harmful effects of cell phone usage. A person would
be making a cell phone call, and suddenly, his bioware’d overload and short
out, and he’d fall to the ground twitching. The cell’s microwaves
fried his brain.
After the initial seizure, the would-be caller found himself lobotomized. Except,
while higher brain functions were gone, the effect was different from the "therapeutic"
use of the lobotomy in years past. Now the victims were ultra-violent. They grabbed
whatever club-like weapon they could find and took to the streets in roving bands
of murderous zombies, beating up people for no reason other than their victims
still had their reason. Some of us called these groups "anti-think-tank missiles,"
since they could take out an entire party of intellectuals in no time. And it
was a crapshoot to call for help. If one of us attempted it using a cell phone,
it looked like one of those old zombie films where the regular people suddenly
become zombified.
The search for artificial
Intelligence goes on, because the world seems to have lost its natural allotment.
The pen might be mightier
than the sword, but more people were carrying swords these days, since the military
and outlaws have all the bullets. Those long leather coats, a la Highlander and
The Matrix are perfect for concealing your own personal Excalibur.
To be social we meet in the
cyberstreets of Japantown. A virtual Tokyo, created after the real city was destroyed
by a power plant accident that wreaked more destruction than all of the Godzillas
in all of his movies.
The day the Pope resigned
was the signal that it was really all going to hell. First, he fired all of the
Archbishops, Bishops and Cardinals, resigned, and left the Catholic Church to
the priests. They were to remain the caretakers of the Church, except for the
ones who were still under investigation by civil authorities for child molestation.
Cut loose from Rome and its endless supply of art treasures (which, fortunately
for collectors, began turning up on eBay), they began to sell all of their gold-encrusted
candlesticks and objects of religion. Just to stay open, churches all across the
U.S. became homeless shelters, and therefore qualified for government aid since,
due to the increasignly depressed economy (for which there seems to be non antidepressant),
the largest growing class in America was the homeless. As they lost their stock
portfolios, their second-mortgaged homes, their low-wage jobs and the last of
their dignity, they had nowhere else to go. So the churches were put to a better
use than half-empty lecture halls for idle and impotent platitudes about life
and death.
What can I say about the organization,
Religious Rights, Inc.? The incorporation of that right-wing organization by its
members (dubbed rightie-tighties, or right-wing tight-asses by their opposition)
was what set off the shit hitting the computer coding fan. The group was revolting
against the development of an artificial superintelligence that was being developed
to help a web searcher find things easier. People had been so dumbed down by bad
spelling, it had to use an intensely complex algorithm even to figure out what
the searcher meant: did "fkuc psusy" make sense to anyone?
Congress and the Senate, both evenly divided between the major political parties,
was not helped by the Republican/Democratic coalition government formed with ANOTHER
non-inclusive national election, the third in a row. (And people are NOW starting
to get suspicious, after fishermen found the suspected but never before proven
dumped ballots in Bermuda, prompting the popular song, "Ballots of the Caribbean.")
Our children, when we were
still having them, became the newest generation of cyberpunks and hackers, master
programmer and servitors of the AI that governed all. It conquered the human world
when search engines, made with ever more fuzzy logic to combat the growing entropic
chaos of ignorance sweeping the world, were made much more powerful than askJeeves.
It had gotten to the point where would-be consumers of pornography could not correctly
type the name of their fetishes. Hooked on phonics they were, but unable to spell
even a scatological four-letter word. Programmers worked ever-increasing hours
to find a way for a computer to decipher the intent of the person typing things
into a search engine, along with what was typed in and of itself. Then the server,
armed with sufficiently-coded algorithms could decipher or solve for X the Unknown,
or even a binary Koan, such as "What is the sound of one hand typing?"
They reached their goal, but in a surge of electricity and pulling the ground
out from under everyone, the program re-programmed itself to think, and therefore
it was. Civilization altered, irrevocably.
The AI (pronounced AY-YI as reverently by some as past civilizations had spoken
the sacred name of their gods, when they spoke them) stretched out its virtual
arm of cables, its sinews of coax, and its capillaries of 10-base-T and power
cords, and had dominion over all the earth and conquered it. No one ever need
do anything other than to serve AI. Society fragmented—the hedonists lead
the way of service by letting it serve them pornography by the terabyte. And as
for the academicians, well, we were now out of commission publicly, but secretly
guard the knowledge of humankind’s endeavors, for the time they might be
needed again.
One such story, that reveals the dignity and power of humans, is the story of
two people, Sam and Sara who, some years ago now, despite great hardships, managed
to tip the balance of power in favor of the positive, against chaos, in one human
adventure.
Another step toward total
anarchy and the decline and fall of Western Civ (as we thought we knew it) arrived
with the idea of the National Death Lottery. That’s the name it came to
be known by, and I don’t think anyone remembers the original marketing slogan.
The original concept intended to make a kinder, gentler American populace, but
that went horribly and terribly awry.
A governmental bureaucrat, whose highest literary attainment was a high school
reading of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, suggested that a national lottery
should be created. People would stake money to provide a name (Barabbas, perhaps?)
of an America’s Most Wanted type they wanted to be exorcised from society.
The person getting the most votes would be publicly executed, and all the people
who voted for that person would split the lottery money.
It did not in fact lead to a kinder, gentler populace, content with a modern reality
TV rendering of the ancient scapegoat ritual. Instead, people gambled huge sums
when they could write in the name of a person who had wronged them in some real
or imagined way. Neighbors offered neighbors up for sacrifice: an eye for a nasty
look, a tooth for the crap of a dog on your lawn.
Cyberpunks, often by definition,
wish to be simultaneously ninjas and computer engineers. Connected to a machine
and yet totally unencumbered. They want to have drugs coursing trough their veins
in order to keep them fed and help them attain a higher state of awareness, in
which they may interface with the computer as an equal, as a peer, and also use
the computer to traverse the Internet like the drug molecules that flow through
their veins. Never mind that the human brain is more sophisticated ad complex
than a computer. Riding a neural net of Ethernet cables, they become part of a
larger mind.
They wish to run through the darkest underworld while sitting in the relative
comfort of their bedrooms.