In 2006, in the story “Monetized,” I wrote:
One hundred seventy-five thousand new dollars isn’t really that much. Only about fifty thousand golden dollars, or twenty thousand yuan. People are still nervous about dollars whether they were new dollars backed by the government or golden dollars backed by McDonalds, even though the Big Dump was almost a decade ago, and that other golden dollar died when they started doing the nanoseparation trick on seawater a few years ago. I thought my friend Grigory, who had a real job in customer service, summed it up best: So people in the States went from a 5,000 square foot house and two vacation homes and a five timeshares and six cars in the garage to a single two thousand square foot house and one car, who cared, hell that was still livin large in Russia. A buncha whiny crybabies had to go without their Starbucks, was how I saw it.
A few weeks ago, in the novel “Wello Horld,” I wrote:
“On the surface, Marek’s doesn’t seem to be much different than a restaurant of, say, ten or twenty years ago. But they operated with highly standardized processes, overseen by a cadre of logistics specialists, supported by a production and shipping network with all the slop designed out of it, supported by big ads and promos and marketing gimmicks, all designed to keep the corporate entity growing at 5% a year forever. Ten years ago, a truck would pull up to the back of this restaurant, unload some highly-processed ingredients in brightly colored boxes, some of which came from farms in Mexico or China. Nobody had the time to say, ‘Wow, this really doesn’t make sense. Why would we ship things thousands of miles—or even across an ocean—to make a breakfast for me? Why would we spend all this money on an army of people whose only job was to run the numbers, find the lowest-cost solution, and use it, regardless of source or sustainability?’ And for a while, it worked. But when the downturn happened, and suppliers went out of business, and one day the exactly specified buns did not show up on time, and the patties were slightly different, there was no way to cope. You couldn’t make the products you used to. Some stores sat and waited for their corporate parents to make things right. But some couldn’t. And the stores that made it learned to make do with what came in on the local trucks, even if it changed from day to day. They relearned their flexibility. They learned how to do things at one-fifth to one-tenth the cost, where they needed to be in the viability trough. They did what we all have to do now. Or at least most of us. The big problem is the Rethink was never really finished.”
“Mad August wasn’t far enough?”
“Mad August was a blip. It was a fraction of a percentage point. It made good scary pictures of bankers hanging from streetlamps. But we never surfaced more than a few of them. In the end, Mad August did only one lasting thing: it made them scared.”
In the Monetized scenario, we had a currency meltdown. In the Wello Horld scenario, we had a long, slow bloodletting, combined with some emergent surveillance and inference technologies.
Which is more realistic? Probably neither. But it’s interesting to speculate on how this will play out—and how we’ll rebuild on a more solid foundation. Because we will rebuild.
And hopefully, in the process, some of the insanity of the current age will pass.
February 20th, 2009 / Comments Off