Today's thoughts.
Apr. 19th, 2007 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolven7“Did you ever wonder if…No. Nah. Never mind.”
“What? Did I ever wonder if what?”
“Well, did you ever wonder if, maybe… If maybe the urinals moved around, when you weren’t looking?”
“…”
“See? Never mind.”
________________________________
Disillusionment:
I used to think about graduate school as this big awesome place where everything had a place, and you could study whatever you wanted, however you wanted to, as long as you knew how to phrase it. And, to some extent, that’s true.
But I also used to think about having a mentor, or being paired with someone who’d be interested in the same things as I was, and who would help me out, while I did research for them, and who would eventually become my trusted friend and colleague. And then, maybe someday they’d betray me, and steal some of my best research, and I would spend the rest of my life making their lives a living hell, and destroying their hopes and dreams, forever, as their arch nemesis. Because obviously any school with a religious studies department, and a philosophy department would have at least one person (hopefully tenured) interested in the occult, right?
Not so much.
But now that I have that expectation out of the way, I can move on, and build the things I need, to get where I need to be. Because I know the rules, and I know that I’m going to have to finish this section, without anyone really understanding what I’m doing, or why I’m doing it. Luckily for them, they only need to know how it “helps the discussion” and “provides a fruitful field of inquiry.” And that I can do.
That’s easy. Or so it would seem.
________________________________________
“It was March, when they disconnected Seattle.
“You see, the big telecoms weren’t happy with the continuance of the smaller start-ups, and the growth of what they saw as ‘independent operators.’ So, they realised that something had to be done, if they were going to retain majority control of what people saw, heard, felt, and bought and, more importantly, how they saw, felt, heard, and bought it. In order to do this, they first had to sever the phone lines.
“This process started months before the final disconnect, and no one spoke about it, no one doing the real work even knew what the hell they were doing. To them, it all looked like routine work orders. They had no idea what kind of software and hardware they were putting in place, and they had been taught, long ago, not to ask. You did the installation and repair, you got paid, you went home. Anything other than that got you fired or, worse, transferred. So the plugs went into the wires, and no one thought twice.”
I looked at him, for the first time, since he started this story—another apocryphal tale of “How We Came To Be”—and I asked him, “Wait, so nobody said syl one about this? All this fucking burst work, and nobody knows nothin’ about it?”
“No,” he said, takin’ a lot of pull to work his mouth around every syl. “No One Knew AnyThing aBout it. This wasn’t Monitor days; this was ‘People-In-Power-Say-Boo-I-Scream-Ahh’ days, even the self-confessed machete-makers. The kind of thing where we could have run over three to four net systems in a day, as long as we had the right codes, and didn’t set off any ding-dongs.”
I whistled my amazement.
“Now,” he said, “are you gonna let me fuckin’ finish this story, or are you gonna keep interuptin’ me? Thank you.
“So, after the implants were set, around the coast, around the boarder, they sent out a broadcast. Real fucking snarked-assed thing, too. Somethin’ to the effect of, 'Dear Washington State: We have decided that your use to us was limited to coffee, creative intelligentsia, and breathable, if moist, air. We have your coffee-makers. We have bribed your best and brightest, with promises of fame, recognition, and a place from which to change the world. And We are fairly certain they have just figured out how to make more air. In short, We no longer require your services. Have a nice day.' And they shut the fucker down.
“Now, the flow of information was not so central that people couldn’t get along without it, right? I mean, they could always just… Leave, yeah? But the tellies, they’d thought about that part, first. Every exit point from the city was choked with construction, or debris, and any refugees, outside the city, were so scattered as to not have any real power, to speak of; no way to organise, if you get me. They were run down. With the dampers in place, and all the hardlines cut, nobody could really call anybody for help, and there were so few people willing to walk the street. They’d just been… corralled.
“It wasn’t long until the city started eating itself, scrounging together some kind of half-dead technological existence, based in extremely short wave, within the limits of the dampers. Worshippers of the signal weren’t long in coming, after that; people who found a way to listen to the bits of information they could get through the field, if they hooked up enough wires to people’s heads, headgear, and let them dream it…But, by then, more Corps had sectioned off more city-chunks, and more people were.. trying to evolve a new way to live.”
He coughed three or four times, spat out something brown, and drank some more. I waited to see if he was going to say anything else, and when he didn’t, I put some credit into his glass, and moved to leave.
He called after me, “Hey! Listen, kid.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Stay the fuck away from the boarder, okay?” He coughed, again, and his eye twitched, a little, showing the first signs of I/O corruption. His hands were crusted a dark reddish brown
“Yeah… yeah, okay. I’ll… I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Sure. Later kid.”
I scattered his data around the UnMonitored ‘Net, like he would have wanted.
©Damien Williams. All Rights Reserved.
“What? Did I ever wonder if what?”
“Well, did you ever wonder if, maybe… If maybe the urinals moved around, when you weren’t looking?”
“…”
“See? Never mind.”
________________________________
Disillusionment:
I used to think about graduate school as this big awesome place where everything had a place, and you could study whatever you wanted, however you wanted to, as long as you knew how to phrase it. And, to some extent, that’s true.
But I also used to think about having a mentor, or being paired with someone who’d be interested in the same things as I was, and who would help me out, while I did research for them, and who would eventually become my trusted friend and colleague. And then, maybe someday they’d betray me, and steal some of my best research, and I would spend the rest of my life making their lives a living hell, and destroying their hopes and dreams, forever, as their arch nemesis. Because obviously any school with a religious studies department, and a philosophy department would have at least one person (hopefully tenured) interested in the occult, right?
Not so much.
But now that I have that expectation out of the way, I can move on, and build the things I need, to get where I need to be. Because I know the rules, and I know that I’m going to have to finish this section, without anyone really understanding what I’m doing, or why I’m doing it. Luckily for them, they only need to know how it “helps the discussion” and “provides a fruitful field of inquiry.” And that I can do.
That’s easy. Or so it would seem.
________________________________________
“It was March, when they disconnected Seattle.
“You see, the big telecoms weren’t happy with the continuance of the smaller start-ups, and the growth of what they saw as ‘independent operators.’ So, they realised that something had to be done, if they were going to retain majority control of what people saw, heard, felt, and bought and, more importantly, how they saw, felt, heard, and bought it. In order to do this, they first had to sever the phone lines.
“This process started months before the final disconnect, and no one spoke about it, no one doing the real work even knew what the hell they were doing. To them, it all looked like routine work orders. They had no idea what kind of software and hardware they were putting in place, and they had been taught, long ago, not to ask. You did the installation and repair, you got paid, you went home. Anything other than that got you fired or, worse, transferred. So the plugs went into the wires, and no one thought twice.”
I looked at him, for the first time, since he started this story—another apocryphal tale of “How We Came To Be”—and I asked him, “Wait, so nobody said syl one about this? All this fucking burst work, and nobody knows nothin’ about it?”
“No,” he said, takin’ a lot of pull to work his mouth around every syl. “No One Knew AnyThing aBout it. This wasn’t Monitor days; this was ‘People-In-Power-Say-Boo-I-Scream-Ahh’ days, even the self-confessed machete-makers. The kind of thing where we could have run over three to four net systems in a day, as long as we had the right codes, and didn’t set off any ding-dongs.”
I whistled my amazement.
“Now,” he said, “are you gonna let me fuckin’ finish this story, or are you gonna keep interuptin’ me? Thank you.
“So, after the implants were set, around the coast, around the boarder, they sent out a broadcast. Real fucking snarked-assed thing, too. Somethin’ to the effect of, 'Dear Washington State: We have decided that your use to us was limited to coffee, creative intelligentsia, and breathable, if moist, air. We have your coffee-makers. We have bribed your best and brightest, with promises of fame, recognition, and a place from which to change the world. And We are fairly certain they have just figured out how to make more air. In short, We no longer require your services. Have a nice day.' And they shut the fucker down.
“Now, the flow of information was not so central that people couldn’t get along without it, right? I mean, they could always just… Leave, yeah? But the tellies, they’d thought about that part, first. Every exit point from the city was choked with construction, or debris, and any refugees, outside the city, were so scattered as to not have any real power, to speak of; no way to organise, if you get me. They were run down. With the dampers in place, and all the hardlines cut, nobody could really call anybody for help, and there were so few people willing to walk the street. They’d just been… corralled.
“It wasn’t long until the city started eating itself, scrounging together some kind of half-dead technological existence, based in extremely short wave, within the limits of the dampers. Worshippers of the signal weren’t long in coming, after that; people who found a way to listen to the bits of information they could get through the field, if they hooked up enough wires to people’s heads, headgear, and let them dream it…But, by then, more Corps had sectioned off more city-chunks, and more people were.. trying to evolve a new way to live.”
He coughed three or four times, spat out something brown, and drank some more. I waited to see if he was going to say anything else, and when he didn’t, I put some credit into his glass, and moved to leave.
He called after me, “Hey! Listen, kid.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Stay the fuck away from the boarder, okay?” He coughed, again, and his eye twitched, a little, showing the first signs of I/O corruption. His hands were crusted a dark reddish brown
“Yeah… yeah, okay. I’ll… I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Sure. Later kid.”
I scattered his data around the UnMonitored ‘Net, like he would have wanted.
©Damien Williams. All Rights Reserved.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 05:36 am (UTC)I was actually just thinking about you and your family, yesterday. How are you?
no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 05:30 am (UTC)I thought you would like this.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 04:43 pm (UTC)I hope now that it's out of the way that you can get something done. And that this doesn't make you too (much more) bitter.
Also, your paranoia-borne story=awesome.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 11:19 pm (UTC)And what else am I supposed to think when all information in and out of Seattle gets blocked, for several hours. Heh. Got a damn fine story out of it, though. ^_^