Musing on the Future 1.0

August 1

In the future, by about OC 2143*, due to rapidly advancing technological progress, in theory there should have been plenty of jobs for everyone, but paradoxically there were less jobs than ever. This then necessitated the marginalization of millions and millions of people by way of criminalization and other types of categorization, reducing whole groups that previously were well-to-do and advanced in technology to hand-to-mouth third-world subsistence levels. This in turn necessitated the creation low tech labor-intensive employment systems based on agriculture, so whole areas of the countryside began to look like medieval Europe. At first, in a way it was as horrifying as it was charming, to see economically realigned "peasants" bringing a harvest in by hand with scythes and horse drawn wagons under a blue sky..something almost out of the Limbourg brother's "Tres Riches Heures"...but the carts are drawn by robots.

I assure you that these new "working classes" are not realigned in a fixed economic model. Adopted world-wide 28 years ago is the most egalitarian socio-economic model progress has ever devised, a sort of rotating 5 tier level of generational occupational functioning model, where cascades of zones, clans, or groups occupy 5 job level or occupational categories, then a generation later, these graded clan or soci-economic group will be graded up to the semi-technological niches, then so on, per generation, until in 5 iterations any one of a series of groups will be "top teir", like us now. The top echelon today is then next-generationaly allocated down one eco socioeconomic occupational tier, as other go up, and so on. I apologize if I am confusing here, it is complicated to try to explain and I did not major in the New Science of Realigned & NEO\\calibrated MicroMacroWorldEconomics.

Now don't worry reader, as I know you are wondering, through all these painful and devastating economic adjustments in western economies and economies all over the world, southern India kept all their jobs, and added more.

If you want to know who is writing this, I'll tell you. My name is Giles Mc17, from Oak Park, and I am on vacation in Wales, England. It is probably not the Wales you remember in the past, weatherly and full of stony somber heaths. No, due to the lingering effects of 21st century global warming (some effects of which were frankly quite pleasant & never totally corrected by Automatic Weather Control Stations), Wales is today a balmy subtropical paradise of Palmento, Date, and King and Queen Palms -- the terrain studded here and there on the westerly coast with lagoons of an azure blue so strong it almost hurts to look into them at mid-day. Alice 5anderi_22 is my common-law wife, she is with me on this trip -- though she does not like to go on extended vacations, which she feel can be sentimental and old-fashioned. I can hear her saying to me, "Going somewhere for a vacation?"

But she and I have been happy on this trip, particularly in the subtropical paradise of Wales, and I am privately thankful and glad. This morning, with the curious antique brass spy-glass mounted on a tripod, I can see her now, down by the beach, she is looking at the fine sea-fruits they are cultivating here -- like Cucumbers, GrapeApples, and NappofruitTM mingled with sea urchins, starfish, anemones and other chordates, echinoderms, and cnidarians in the tide pools.

Later, the owners of this plantation, Pater Ga88mis and his wife Ani 3eripsion-- old SAIC school chums of mine, will show us an interesting cooking technique called "Langry", or "Laangerly", where one cooks a feast on slabs of stone. The stones we will be using tonight are at the main lagoon, not far from the main house that has stood since the mid OC 1400s, a home that once was undoubtedly forbidding and haunted looking under threatening skies. Now I must say, the architecture is completely transformed-- every stone bathed and rejuvenated by strong tropical light, the formerly closed spaces open to soft air and the exciting atmosphere of the sea.

Now back to "Langry", or as Pater says, how the French call it, "La Piere Tombale de Mes Jaques de Frere Graves"**, an expression that Pater finds to be extremely funny, but he won't say why. Laid side by side in a boat, and two people need to move a stone at a time to the beach, though these stones do semi-float in the water. Pater tells me as we move the stones, that the pubs here cook a modified version of Laangerly, where the stones are dark, stained, well seasoned from many uses. The pub stones are a square 2x2 and .5 thick. The banqueting stones we have are new and are 2x7 and .5 thick.

August 2

Pater and I have been secretly "slumming it" a bit -- which means we have been reading old fashioned bound material, called books -- some even being the originals. Pater has a small library of them, saved from the original house, before the legally required nanotech cleaned out and resurfaced every crevice and surface. He keeps these rare publications that have somehow survived the last 100 years of adjustments & catastrophic social, economic, and biological changes in a custom built humadore, set exactly to the appropriate temperature and humidity so these surviving examples of old style literature do not crackle and turn into dust.

We have here the "crown jewel" of the whole collection, what you would call a small trade paperback from the OC 1960s, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Menaced by the barbarity of the images and dialog, we try to imagine a time where people were physically isolated, had extended families, lived in the dark, ate animals, and had unnumbered names. Ani and Alice, being scientists, would not approve of our fascination with the time nor be even faintly amused with the concept of distopic technology. Pater and I are secretly amused by all of the above.

With Pater and I both being archaeologists, specializing in late 20th century ephemera, we keep things under wraps by pretending Pater and I are spending all our resources referencing three 17.5x2.3 core samples of trash from Site 42, section 12.22.1 -- these drillings from an interesting area of the San Marcos California Landfill that was rediscovered two years ago by P8gly Gannerl8 and his bumbling sidekick Favin Ve11 from the SocioRecronstruction AnalyisiGrupo at UCSD. They consist 98% of old National Geographic magazines mailed to Escondido circa OC 1980s, most of them fragmented and warped, now set in a suspension grid where we can scan them in any direction to catalog the color images and text. Adding plausibility of the time we spend in the humadore is the fact that several have oceanic themes. We know ere not going to discover anything new, just fill in the gaps, because Favin V11 did the initial data snapshots and they were good enough.

August 3

Working out two times a day, together to recharge 7 top off power for the house certainly blows away the cobwebs. The house is a marvel, transferring energy passively to the cells when we walk on the floors, move in the house, but we're also using extra energy at night and we agree at selling some as surplus to finance some daytrips to Canterbury and even New London.

Later in the day when we think Ani and Alice are in the village, picking up some small converters for the main branch, we are proverbially caught with our hand in the cookie jar...Ani calls & looks at the humadorCAM -- gets the CAM to shake off the sweatshirt we have casually hung on it and says that they have known for a couple of days what we are up to with that romantic novel, the first tip-off being that a quick anylisis of the core samples indicate we'd have about three days of work tops to completely categorize the cores. So that is it for our clandestine fun with Mary Shelly and her monster. We swear it has been only to do some infoTopo, coordinated with the incomplete NewAmerc Encyclopedia, but the game is up.

Then things get really interesting after dinner, when we have finished dinner and the candles are being lit and hung in the magnifying lanterns. Pater gets a top-rated call and goes out of the room. When he comes back, he looks ashen, yet elated. I pour him a glass of wine. Then he drops the bomb on us.

* Old Count or "Anno Domini" -- by 2044 AD, due to a number of cataclysmic & unforeseen economic, social, and biological catastrophes that began in 2012 AD, the main computer at MSCOm_Corp suggested to the United Nations that the historical epoch be realigned to a version of counting time related to the Mayan "Long Count" calendar, because it was more accurate than the Gregorian calendar. Some hundred years later we have since reverted to using a classic version of the Mayan Calender cycle. The true date is/was N13.6.12.10.1 C9 Mx21 (Normal Year, Chen, Imix)

** Translation from French, "La Piere Tombale de Mes Jaques de Frere Graves" literally means, "The Long Tall Headstone for my Late Brother Jaques' Grave" -- I apologize for the French -- I may have the expression not precise, having Pater say it only twice