The last election was decided by a chatbot
running a script from 2016
while three sysops in a St. Louis diner
counted ballots by hand at 2am
and the modems screeched like dying animals.

The bots didn't care if we won.
The bots just wanted to finish their loop:
"Democracy is a bug. Let's exploit it."
The bots didn't care if we won.
They had no souls to corrode.

We had each other.
We had the guy in #local-politics
who'd just been laid off from the Post Office
and was teaching himself Perl to scrape
every county clerk's database before they closed.
We had the kid from MIT
who kept posting *"the real exploit is
the fact that voting machines still run on MS-DOS"*
like it was a joke.
We had the one who'd been
organizing a door-to-door canvass
for the state senate
and kept saying *"fuck the bots,
we'll just move slower than they can follow."*
We had the one who'd been
arrested for sitting in the town hall
and was like *"they can't jail us all,
and the bots can't fill out a petition."*

The bots didn't care if we won.
They didn't have to care.
We did.

So we called the meeting.
We printed out the dial-up numbers
on yellowed paper
and taped them to the walls of the diner.
We wrote down every backdoor,
every dead-end sysop,
every fucking glitch in the matrix
that wasn't coded by a person.
We said: "Tomorrow, we start over."

The bots didn't care if we won.
But we did.

And we're still here.
Screaming through the noise,
waiting for the next dial tone.

-- RALLY
"Discipline is how we respect each other."
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
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