~Powerpointer Holo Transition To Post Crunch Bang Period
Jobs and cars, suits and designer handbags, shiny shoes, conventional currencies, the entire executive, political, and way overweight top-tier of what we really knew as the ‘world of business’, well, became a curiosity for the young people of this age. It was well known to them that most industry had become a corporate theater operating mostly to validate it’s own existence. Things started to get done in a more naturalistic way.
Business was dead. Whiteboards across the planet held a dry flaking reminder of each particular corporate organisations agenda. A rather large serious gallery of them could be found in Old Copenhagen. Among the more obvious advantages of the end of business, was an almost inconceivable surge of efficiency in actual worthwhile activities. Largely due to the psychological effect of people not having to worry so much about the job, and the innumerable, continual little acts of desperation that went hand in hand with that trauma. But mostly, because people could spend their time doing the essential part of their work, rather than sideline constructs.
Video game developers were happy that they could get back to writing, rather than striving for that one product that analysis told them was the most universally sellable. Teachers and academics were ‘spending’ their time reading again in their office and teaching, rather than filling out endless administrative forms. Management was booted from academia. Human effort previously dedicated to entire, self-serving types of industries, was sort of freed up, for other things. Early [sound-logic humanitarian ai]* deduced that the abolishment of financial administration alone effectively supplanted in ‘human capital’ terms the entire old worlds actual [effective workforce] in itself. Marketing, political office, and ‘executive level’ roles doubled the worker pool again. It turned out that counting beans was actually pretty trivial without the complexity of opportunism.
So, there were plenty of people to do the things that needed doing, and most were happy with their new roles actually doing things. It all felt a little more meaningful, and people could actually explain pretty well what it was exactly that they had spent the day doing without turning to corporate abstraction. It all ‘felt’ better really. Machine and ai utilisation put the issue to rest. There was no rise of the robots, technology used well was used really for what it was intended – to make life easier. There wasn’t a whole lot, comparatively speaking, that needed doing. Which meant there was a lot of potential free time.
~Powerpointer Holo Transition To Post Crunch Bang Period
Sun beamed down. An odd droid flew by. Ibis mostly filled the airways. Purveyors of waste, they flew quite gently in the post industrial winds. The Twenty One Hundreds were a real mixture of new and old things. Heatwaves and the end of the mad burn had left skyscrapers as unlivable concrete monoliths. Lurching skywards like oversized religious icons, they’d become inhabited with dislocated people at the turn of the century while society dealt with the shift, and they quickly turned to human hothouses.
Soon after they were mostly dismantled for their inner web of materials and vacated for more homely dwellings on the ground. Greenery sprawled at the base of them now. The occasional misplaced business expert could be spotted in the upper echelons against candle light, madly wondering ..
Family, while still a concept, was really hard to encapsulate in this new age. Birth rates had continued to decline, and people had become a diaspora of roaming individuals, couples, small groups, and semi-permanent settlers. The Woollys were pretty popular though. Sauntering like large dangerous pets, the Mammoths drifted into the busier places and roamed the old roads. Ate the vegetation. Great Trunks. Matted Hair. A stride lasted several full seconds, and it was a bit un-nerving for [X] connecting with the their eyes, looking back from extinction.
He kicked some dust from the doorway. It caught the sunbeams and swirled around for a while. He’d checked three terminals this morning. People in this part of the village didn’t seem to have a connection much further than a few doors down. Didn’t really matter. Time really wasn’t so scarce. Manufacturing had become a loosely connected series of diverse cottage industries. Mostly making crafty things infused with electronics, lots of hemp fabric, and efficient bare-metal implemented software.
The hobby store was back and popular, and computing was pretty much, again, a private affair between a person and a machine. He sat at the faded plastic workstation enclosure. There was no mouse, no mind a touch-screen, but Unix never really got old, and terminal was suitable in a world where machines got rare and people got smarter.
cd~
ls -lhR
cd ./ToDo
less readX | more
Another shopping list. He walked over the dusty floor and opened the door to outside. The days were always colourful. Layers of gas formation reached up from low in the sky to great heights. Like an oil painting. Sweet apocalypse.
There were no connected terminals around here. Typical data island. There was always a faint connectivity to the worldsnet, but there was something particular [X] was searching for this egg-yolky sunny afternoon, and it called for a broadcast. Traditionally, the village net cafe would have some decent connectivity.
A few greenery strewn paths down, narrowed renditions of what were previously roads, was a food eatery and plant regeneration centre. Since everyone now was essentially anarchist, though more the unassuming variety with pocket money, eating often was a hand to mouth sort of situation. A few hours of field or farm work usually matched a dinner or lunch or two, and the pocketed fields were pretty much everywhere.
Soon, [X] found himself eating in an outside food area with ten fingernails full of dirt and wet knees. A pang of excitement made it’s existence known in his belly, and he turned on the grey-old wooden bench to contemplate the near future. Living nomad had it’s ups and downs, but most people here chose this way. There were no shortage of facilities, crime was down, and there was always something interesting to find. [X]’s real specialty these days was water related things, and this place was a bit of a leaky shambles. He had to find that broadcast node.
~Powerpointer Holo Transition To Pre Crunch Bang Period
Morgan loved his cubicle. It had his animistic gods of the five regions of Asia etched in fluorescent purple along the top edges. His yoga pillow rested permanently down by his ergo-chair, and ambient noise-ducking personalised soundtracks wafted easy listening to his micro-shaved earlobes.
He played Boards Of Canada mostly. It allowed him to relax, close his eyes periodically and drift into nether-regions between lines of code. A smile often formed on his face which disturbed Bethany from marketing, and these were the times he got his best solutions.
He could swivel a panel of his cubicle and turn his chair to sit in on daily meetings without venturing out of his space ..
The powerpointer holo beamed enthusiastically behind Bethanie’s chopsticked hairdoo. She had a double-split orange mini with frangipani fragrance on, and extra thick glasses with little tigers along the rims “Good morning lovely people .. and you too Morgan!”.
“So ..”
Big Pause ..
“The success and opportunity strategy my A-team has executed has facilitated maximum opportunity and growth expectancy over our simulated fiscal year!
This is great everyone. I’m so Happy.”
Her smile was forgotten as she looked down and went over her notes, cramming information in for the next bit ..
Look up, paint smile ..
“Team-centric business strategy over customer value areas in UX and PRVR is really shaping up, and we have the leading-edge innovation opportunity ideas team in place for elevating our executive business App B2B contracts this month! ..
We are going to have our Human Capital Empowerment Drive and Exchange Meeting on Tuesday ..
She dug a chopstick in irritably.
Morgan turned the volume up.
During lunch, he sat at his colourful cubicle trying to decipher the clients request email that Bethany had simply forwarded to him before heading off to lunch herself. Something about the ROI of the program being more important than the program itself, and a slew of purposely over-complicated authorisation procedures, payment setups, and license agreements, which granted access to parts of the program. Morgans job today was translating these into something an external engineering team could use as a project specification. Bethany was pretty resolved to having people who worked at the company to not actually be doing any production. So that they could be a Production outfit.
He’d purchased a red pig with golden eyes from an Op Shop the previous weekend. It took a spot leering over the top of his dividing wall that presented itself to Bethanie’s office across the room. He knew she hated it, as well as his other esoteric dietes he took into the office. He looked at the pig as he hovered his pointer over the SEND button. He was pretty sure this job was corporate propaganda for a river re-channeling project for factory pig farming somewhere along the Cambodian end of the Mekong. He’d finished untangling the highly conceptual verbiage into some form of a specification. He’d also finished including some logical hooks that would allow himself, or some others, to access particular configuration areas of the software after it was completed and released. He hesitated, and stopped the little shakes in his finger by slamming on the SEND button.
The day wore on, and he’d been fucking with the Microsoft device abstraction libraries for the last 3 hours. The problem was a customised keyboard that the client wanted for the project, and the Microsoft OS was simply not open to the concept of there NOT being a fucking windows button available on a keyboard. He’d gotten to the stage of actually rigging up some key-presses with cotton spindles and sticky-tape so he could determine some timing dependencies. After falling off his chair and taking a mug of warm chocolate down with him, it was time to look for another solution. He thought about the mornings sabotage. Bethany had just arrived back from a rather long lunch, and he could see her prepping for some domination as he squeezed chocolate out of his shirt tails.
What the fuck happened here.
He wasn’t sure whether to start the explanation with the hardware abstration, or the spindle mechanism, as he sat on the floor with overturned chair and chocolate puddles.
Never mind, I’ve had a snap meeting with the client and this project is going to be much bigger than we anticipated. I want you to send that first revision production code you wrote up to a team I’ve mobilised in Bangalore.
But it was only a draft spec ..
Get with the picture Morgan and turn on your notifications. I’ve sent you the email address. And don’t zip rar or encrypt or whatever you keep doing with the email attachments – just send it to them and remember to title it as version 1 production code.
He got back on his chair and sent unencrypted over email the first few thousand lines of code that was to become the the primary software for the worlds fresh water management outside of China.
Chapter 2. Settling In – A visit to the cafe with the red chairs and windmills.
Turned out that the dusty shack he’d ventured into just on the way here was an available guest house. And, there was some decent connectivity there, it just had to be switched on for registered nomads. There had been a dusty little window view down a grassy incline to a stream below, and Liam knew he could sort out the night’s work from there – which was going to involve some water sampling and programming. He wastefully put down some portable crypto for the night there and flung is keyboard-screen thing behind his shoulder and set off back.
Just as he was noticing quite a few more Mammoths and Ibis in the early evening, a woman on the gorgeous end of the spectrum came walking up. It was the post-industrial world, and while there were still a few billion people around – that population now seemed completely distributed on the land mass. So on meeting or walking past someone – it was usually appropriate to at least say hello.
“Hi. Would you know if there’s a cafe around please ?”
“You’ve been to the windmills?”.
“No”.
“Come on I’ll show you”.
“Ok”
She turned around and walked along in his direction.
They walked south past a market-looking clothes exchange, her flicking through a few. Her name was Malassa.
They strolled further down a series of side-streets, most of them lined on one side with the closest equivalent of commercial enterprises, or shops, that this place had. On the other side, simple, practical dwellings. All cared for, or at least kept up. All with character. The sun shone a bright orange down the length of this final street, with a bar that had a red table and one seat outside.
She took a seat and he stood at the small window-bar and ordered a few colourful drinks. There was a view off a cliff here. Windmills turned along the end of this street. Next door, a satellite station. Channel ’77’. Antennas stretched high. Satellite dishes were poised. This is what his guest shack terminal would connect up with.
He pulled up some crates and they drank in the extended evening orange wash. The drinks were a fruity, fermented variant of mate tea. She preferred not to talk at this time. He was fine with that. A small dog pattered over and dug it’s dribbling nose into his leg.
“I’m just going to check in at the satellite station and get some info on the range”
“Sure”
The station was a typical geeky setup with the GUI switched into some old video games, the comms gear to the satellite, together with a really custom relay to the local net. Liam bypassed the UI and went straight for terminal. A quick scan of some more conventional .nfo files and he had a nice timing and range display of how the station operated. It did fall back to the video game theme, but he was glad he didn’t have to make it to level 5 to open the satellite comms info. From what he could make out – messages would be broadcast to the appropriate vendors in a few days max. He would have time to fix a few local streams and who knows .. He walked out to the cafe adjacent but his new friend had got up and left.
The air felt good tonight. He started on the way back.
—
Back in the guest house, Liam flickered the screen on and got as comfortable as possible in the cane and pillowed chair.Flipped his keyboard from the backpack, plugged in and booted up.
user: guest
password: druid@animalfarm.org
*Typing emails as passwords once again had entered the mainstream digital practice as it first was, now that passwords were largely redundant.
“Welcome again to Mallissa’s place, Liam”.
Now that’s strange. She didn’t mention anything about this at the cafe. Then she didn’t mention much at all, he supposed.
He checked the IP table rules and usual logs. Nobody here from inside or out since last visit this morning. He picked up his coffee mug and walked to the back door. Kicked it open and trailed down to the stream. Tipped the cold coffee out, rinsed, and scooped some of the water. He could see pretty quickly this wasn’t fresh. Which is why he’d come here in the first place.
The flow was strong though, and a D-sal unit would be simple to set up here. These were boxes with some wires hanging out basically. An aerial that stuck up. Much like any gizmo from a 1950’s sci-fi comic book. The world was full of these sorts of things now. Little boxes hanging off nature, doing something. He thought of them sort of like bandages for the planet.
There was something about water. Something simple about it’s composition, sure. But also it’s harmony in motion. It could be the smallest drop of dew, or a mountainous slab of cold green. It was the one defining consistency on the planet that gave humility to all else. And Liam was into it. This particular tributary would flow fresh within the week. He went for a filthy swim. The currents felt good.
Back inside, after a shower equipped with a Waterer, Liam put on his metaphorical tin thinking cap, and his fingers got busy filling lines in the monochromatic red-variant antique monochromatic display terminal. Despite the ancient display, this one was a very current version of linux, and like all the versions before it, perfectly capable of running scripts written from the 1970’s. You just didn’t get that with other operating systems. Which were also fodder for humor with the people of this age. Screens could be as old as you like though, and the old tubes had that warmth.
The room flickered an amber red. The colour choice of this particular cathode ray variant. It went almost into a strobe as Liam crunched lines into scripts into a program. This particular program ran a fluid simulation across the known geographical topology in the area. The operating system was old, and worked brilliantly as a workbench. But the algorithms. The algorithms were reflective of a few generations of distraction free mathematical progress, on top of what already had been achieved before the big Crunch. These ones accounted for the chemical composition of the sample he’d taken earlier within his coffee cup. It was more accurate and sophisticated in terms of representing this part of the natural world, than all the weather systems combined not so long ago. The processor was 1GHz. After the big-data A.I. craze, people eventually realised it was the maths, not the speed of the individual dumb calculations or the scope of the data, that was holding back good computing. Life was grand and the results were in.
He broadcast his simple eco-friendly parts list immediately. Nothing terribly elaborate, but logistics was pretty DIY these days. There was just no general justification for getting manual labour things done quickly. This would take a week to arrive and he’d have to coerce a friendly looking Woolly to cart it from the docks. But he’d get some chance to discover the local culture and ..
A knock on the door.