[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.]
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.
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.
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....
Subject: Re: Why do we still have rich old white men?
Heya kids, your craxy grandpa Thom here again. This isn't a moderated group and you can't keep me out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You think I'm bothering to set up a sig.file on a burner account? Oh, wait.
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.
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. :)Awwwww. X> Nice!
Indeed.
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.
| Sysop: | Amessyroom |
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