[The cover shows a vast expanse of occupied cubicles, not
unlike the Universal Office, but a cityscape can be seen outside
through the windows on the right side. "Where Did Our Fully
Automated Space Communism Go?" is asked in red stencilled font.]


//|| //^^\\ || || .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED PRESENTS
// || \\ || || --X---------------------------------------------
//====TIME=CAPSULES====== '|` ASH UNIVERSE: TIME CAPSULES #15
// || \\ || || "Same As The Old Boss"
// || \\__// || || Copyright 2025 by Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________

[Kaoru Spinoza's office - April 21, 2137]

Kaoru's handcomp pinged a notification. One of the other grad students who was specializing in archaeodata had been working on a reasonably
undecayed storage matrix from 2085. There'd been a big revolution in holographic data storage in the 2080s, but it took a while before people discovered that it was no more stable than older optical media, and a lot of records from merely fifty years ago had been lost already.
What made this particular archive interesting is that it had been made
by a member of a previous generation of computer archaeologists, one who had used it as a backup...and apparently needed it, because he died a few years later in a fire that had claimed his primary archives. Ironically, he'd had the holochip in storage with some old furniture that he hadn't bothered to retrieve after a recent move...into the house that had burned down. The contents had eventually been marked abandoned and sold off. There was an entire school of archaeology devoted to tracking down that sort of thing, but Kaoru was happy to leave the storage wars to others.
Anyway, the cache included a fairly extensive archive of the old
internet message board system, Usenet. This sort of thing was popular among data archaeologists, because the mostly text-based system took up almost no space by modern standards, even in 2085, even if you included the whole alt.binaries hierarchy. Anyone could find a bit of spare space to hold the whole thing if they wanted, or focus on subsets. Kaoru had been assembling
his own collection for the last few years, focusing on the Fourth Heroic Age
of course. The notification told him that his colleague had uncovered a few posts that were not in Kaoru's collection, and were relevant to his
interests. The vanishing of so many "get rich on the internet" people in
1998 had pushed back the birth of 21st Century social media by a decade or
two, so Usenet was still pretty popular until the 2050s, if mostly among academic nerds and media pirates. You could learn a lot about the first half of the 21st Century from old Usenet posts once you waded through the crap.
He skimmed the headers. Mostly mundane stuff that might be interesting
in the right context but didn't stand out right away. He already had an
expert system looking for connections, but there was something to be said
about using your own brain too. Sometimes the computer would mark something
as unimportant because it was a well-known fact, but a human might notice
that the perspective on that fact was worth further investigation.
"Bongo," he muttered aloud as he noticed a post that fell into that category....

* * * *

soc.gen-z.ethics #352366
From: Granpa_-_Thom <gonzo1991@independent.jour
Subject: Re: Why do we still have rich old white men?
Date: Mon May 16 08:12:44 EST 2022

Heya kids, your craxy grandpa Thom here again. This isn't a moderated group and you can't keep me out.

It';s good to see the generation born after it all went down growing up,
going to college (like, if you;'re still on Usenet, you're almost definitely
in college), and getting disillusioned by the world you find you're in. Especially those of you who are enjoying the slight reduction in censorship that happened recently, and are starting to find out how bad some things were in the TwenCen...and how they're not much different now.

Speaking as an old white man who had too many scruples to get rich, but who
did make a living being a nuisance to rich old white men, yes. Most of them did vanish in a puff of religion on July 6, 1998. I;m sure you've seen the statistics, the most desperately poor and the most overweeningly rich were
the most likely to buy ingo the so-called Godmarket, caveat fuckiung emptor. The poor because they were vulnerable and desperate, the rich and powerful because this was a full on advertising blitz and the gods made an effort to
get their hooks into anyone who could help them get an edge in recruitment.
The fact we hgad any tech sector left to rebuild was because the gods focused on traditional media and rich people, so they might've gone after the millionaire tech strtup CEOs, but they didn't really recruit much on the internet otherwise.

Now, the gods didn't get all the oligarchs and politicians and big time Hollywood types. Some of them were suspicious enough to resist making deals, or were trying to play gods off each other and hadn't gotten around to
picking one when the balloon went up, and a few even genuinely believed in
the monotheistic traditions in which they'd been raised. But a LOT of 'em
did just go away, so how come we weren't able to rebuild the kind of ideal system tghat everyone says will come after the revolution when the old guard goes yp against the wall? Like, we had full on divine guillotines on parade, shouldn't people have woken up on July 7 to a Workers' Paradise?

It come sdown to institutional inertia. Governments an dcorporations are structures designed to funnel power and money up into a few hands. That all
of those hands were gone was irrelevant to the systems. Plug in a new executive suite and those guys will find out soon enough that power corrupts. And yeah, every company or government worth its org chart had a robust successfion plan in place in case everyone in the top tier vanished, got murdered, replaced by alien shapeshifters, whatever. Those that didn't
tended not to make it all the way to 1998 in the first place. I mean, if I
had a nickel for every Silicon Valley startup in the 90s that succeeded in creating an Artificial Consciousness, then had all the C-suite replaced by androids because the AC decided it could run things better than humans could, I'd have three or four nickels. (A nickel is an old form of hard currency,
you might be able to find some in a colllector shop or left in a fountain somewhere. And you're probably not supposed to know ACs are still around,
just the tame AIs.) Corporate personhood also brought with it a corporate sense of self-preservation, and while most of the bastards in charge of large companies went to their eternal and hopefully painful reward, almost every large corporation survived. At least, long enough to be gobbled up in
mergers, but that's just the ducking circle of life in the corporate world. Ducking? Okay, turning autotcorrect back off, you get to live with my typos.

Keep in mind, if the corporations and governments had collapsed, those of us still alive right now would be in some sort of iron age reconstruction out of
a 1970s post-apocalptic sci-fi movie. There's no way we could lose two
thirds of our population AND all our institutions without losing another 90%
or more of what was left. As things stood, it was touch anf go for a while.
If you'd asked me in late 1998 if there'd be anyone who needed to worry
about the Y2K bug on their computers, I'd have given even odds. People?
Yeah, some. Working electricity and computers? Not outside of survivalist bunkers, and most of those got depopulated in 1998 too.

Anyway, back to institutional biases. It's like how the Civil Rights Act in the 60s didn't end large-scale racism, because even if you remove all the intentional racism (it did not), there's all sorts of stuff embedded in How
The World Works that wasn't even recognized as racism by those who benefited from it. In past plagues and wars and other depopulation events, workers
have gained a lot of power because suddenly labor was scarce and bosses had mostly survived and needed workers to boss around. But this time...ding dong the CEO's dead, everyone back to work, you there you're promoted because
that's what the disaster plan says. Everyone needed to work hard to keep society from completely collapsing, and no one seems to have noticed that the people who'd been promoted to CEO and COO and CFO and whatever were very
happy with this situation. They call it the Wage Slave movement, even though most of them are salaried. The system was geared towards squeezing as much work out of people with as little compensation even before 1998, and a nice
big dose of survivor's guilt threw a kinf of switch in people. I bet a lot
of you reading this know what I'm talking about. Even if you're going to college locally and living in your childhood home, you probably see your professors more than you see your parents.

None of this is NORMAL, it's just all you kids know. Not that NORMAL in the 90s was that great. The systems that saved humanity may have enslaved humanity. The Combine government is always talking about restoring rights,
but these are unalienable rights...no one should've been able to take them
away in the first place! If they can just slow the "restoration" down
enough, pretty soon no one alive will know that things were ever better.

Welp, time to bail and burn this account. The government's probably not
gonna send SPIRIT after my ass over this, but I didn't survive telling the uncomfortable truth thus long by being optimistic. Hope you got yhrough
rading this whole post before the AI sweeps cleaned it up or deleted it, although they don't seem to care as much about Usenet as they do video broadcasts.

Love and kicks,

Grandpa Thom
----
You think I'm bothering to set up a sig.file on a burner account? Oh, wait.

* * * *

"Grandpa Thom" was almost definitely Thom Sutton O'Ryan, a muckraking reporter and veteran of one of the last military actions of the 20th Century. He actually met the second Solar Max in the Autumn of 2023, so the government was probably not as interested in persecuting him anymore.
Although...there was a theory that the government was intentionally exposing Solar Max to influences that would help him develop a more mature ethical core, in the expectation that the young man or one of his friends
might end up ruling the nation one day. If that was true, O'Ryan might have been an unwitting pawn of the government he thought so little of. Or he might've figured it out and decided to play along.
Interesting how that all turned out in the 2030s.

=============================================================================

Author's Notes:

This came out of shower thoughts about "What happened to (prominent person) in the ASH universe?" Well, of course most people who are a big
enough deal now to be in the news regularly would have been ambitious enough
to fall for the Godmarket. Avoiding the use of many real people names isn't just standard comics-style obfuscation, it's because those real people
probably didn't make it to 1999 in this alternate timeline even if the fictional people hadn't displaced them before that.

Thom O'Ryan's meeting with Solar Max (JakZak) happened in ASH #11, "A
Kick in the Teeth." Are nickels really out of circulation in 2022, or was
Thom being sarcastic? Well, I'm not interested in doing a full search of the entire ASH directory to be sure, so this gives me an out. :)

I would like to note that leaving in all of those "I am typing this live and in a hurry on a burner account" typos was almost physically painful. I
did have to fix typos that made it completely unreadable, my typing style is something like 80 words per minute forwards, 10-20 words per minute
backspacing to fix the typos. But I made sure enough were left in for
purposes of versimilityde.

============================================================================

For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art,
and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH !

http://ash.wikidot.com/ is the official ASH Wiki, focusing on the Fourth Heroic Age, but containing some information about other Ages.

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