"MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES" PART II
In the United States of America, the disparity between the amount of information being processed
when measured against its tangible good had entered the realm
of absurdity. Until the 2030s the country's most pressing problems
were still identified as variations on the have versus have-not
theme, spawning numerous hand-wringings on the "gap" between riches
and poverty, which by the turn of the century had been modernized
to hand-wringings on the "gap" between "techno-peasants" and "data
barons" or "hackerlords." The greatest controversy continued to
be focussed on the distribution of wealth, whether financial or
intellectual; no one (or nearly no one) had suggested that there
may have been too much wealth to begin with. George Case wrote Silence Descends You can also buy this book online right now.
Thus what lighted the initial fires of the Second American Civil
War was, at least in part, a smouldering resentment on the part
of millions who felt ignored and disenfranchised by the network
nation they lived in. It was not so much that they wanted more
information for themselves, or a bigger share of the prosperity
it generated-they simply could no longer tolerate the blatant
division of inescapable reality and tantalizing image, of painful
experience and utopian ideal, of dreary truths and glittering
lies. The Atlanta Uprisings of 2036 were of course borne of long-simmering
"racial" tensions that had split the land along ethnocentric lines
(European, African, Asian, Latino), but it was the abject failure
of the world's most Information-opulent society to seriously address
the real-life misery within its borders that may have been their
true parent. As more violent unrest spread to city after city
throughout the republic-eventually to coalesce after the killing
of Luther Brown T*R by government agents on January 1, 2037-the
less the conflict seemed motivated by long-standing blood feuds
as by raw frustration with Information's broken promises.
Some of this only became apparent with hindsight. Two years of
death and destruction gutted many communities of the nation, during
which most foreign observers saw only a horrendous tribal war:
like so many other emergencies of the time, the Second Civil War
ostensibly was a predictable climax to the turbulence of centuries
past. This was a reasonable enough analysis (the Civil War of
1861-1865 was also fought over issues of race), yet when the fighting
finally died more complicated interpretations began to come forth.
In RageRoots (2041), Arthur Hong asserted that:
. . . the hostilities might not have happened to the degree that
they did had the networks not so blithely insisted that they were
not happening at all; conversely, there may have been more interest
in averting them had their first skirmishes not been reported
as titillation comparable to VR erotica or the latest antics of
Teesha Gonzales. . . . Perhaps the war was ultimately the act
of a nation "getting back to basics," reminding itself in the
most vicious way of the fundamental things that Online and the
RAN had obscured for years. . . .
In other words, the social, economic, political, and environmental
causes of the Second Civil War were obvious enough, but the cultural
ones, the suffocating triviality of electronic amusement and the
clash of televised fictions with concrete facts, were just as
important; "I want my MTV" is now as notorious a gesture of ignorant
callousness as "Let them eat cake" was long ago. Information,
in the end, had to share the blame for a strife that fragmented
a country and left one million of its people slain.
While the United States was being rent by its domestic carnage, international rivalries on the other
side of the globe were approaching a crisis point. China and India,
each densely populated, each beset with ecological and biological
disasters, and each vying with Japan and each other for economic
dominance of continental Asia, had raised their respective military
forces to hair-trigger levels of alertness. Both adversaries had
stated their intentions to use nuclear weaponry if provoked, and
other governments either could not or would not interfere. By
2039 "Helter Skelter" (the colloquial name for the Second Civil
War) had burned out the heartland of North America, and the European
Community, the Federal Russian Republic, Australia, and the Latin
American Union had assumed isolationist stances: Asia's two strongest
war machines were left alone against each other.
Neither the Chinese nor the Indians were as swamped with Information
as Americans and Europeans were, but their networks were advanced
enough and monopolized enough to stir up jingoist, chauvinist
fervour among hundreds of millions-British Prime Minister Vankata
remarked that each state was "fostering First Millennium hatreds
through Second Millennium means." Indeed, the media-induced belligerence
that infested both populations was reminiscent of the nationalist
manias of the previous century, manias which had inevitably been
preludes to war.
The escalations which culminated in the nuclear attacks on Shanghai
and New Delhi, therefore, were the fateful product of geopolitical
friction, reckless sabre-rattling, and Informational incitement.
Chinese Premier Zhao's decision to launch an atomic strike against
the Indian capital on May 16, 2039 was probably engendered by
ill-founded skepticism of his enemy's retaliatory capability;
similarly, Indian Prime Minister Singh's position was dictated
by bullying from her own countrymen as well as from the Chinese
themselves. Miraculously, no further warheads were exploded after
China's first punch and India's response. The staggering casualties
of the blasts-over two million human beings killed in thirty minutes,
more than the death tolls of the Volgograd bombing and the Second
American Civil War combined-had stopped each nation's military
command systems cold. Less than an hour in duration, the Sino-Indian
exchange was the worst injury inflicted by the Asian people on
themselves since the Second World War, yet the relative mildness
of the wound was frighteningly ironic. Luis Ison (2002-2043) eventually
compared it to "a man falling from a high precipice only to land
in water instead of against stones, scraping his knees rather
than breaking his back." To be able to speak of only two million
people annihilated, as opposed to the billions who were in fact
at risk, underscored how much the Exchange had held doom in check.
Worldwide, the reaction was one of mute horror, much as had followed
Volgograd's destruction a generation before. But this quiet was
also a sign of other nations' exhaustion from their own problems;
cross-border pathways of Information were not as well-travelled
as they had once been. Network grids still operated, and news
and entertainment and data were still sent quickly from continent
to continent, but violence, disease, and all manner of upheaval
had severely diminished Information's accessibility. A colossal
story it may have been, the obliteration of Shanghai and New Delhi
nevertheless was described awkwardly, peripherally, in Vancouver
and Johannesburg and Sao Paulo and Frankfurt. Recalling Volgograd,
journalists and their audiences together sensed the Exchange was
beyond the scope of everyday telecommunications-and now there
was added the competition from local calamities that seemed altogether
more urgent than a pair of distant firestorms. Insofar as "Information"
meant intelligence sent artificially from faraway places, it was
commanding less and less attention. The sorrow of the Sino-Indian
Nuclear Exchange of 2039 was not just in the number of lives that
were lost, but in the rest of the planet's numbed, vacant comprehension
of it.
It was some time after November-December 2043 that the events of those months were summed up as the "Pacific
Catastrophe." History does not present itself ready-made, as serious
historians have always sought to remind us, for it is usually
only in retrospect that the countless actions on the world stage
shape themselves into a salient pattern. That said, however, it
did not require much perspective to recognize that the havoc wrought
upon the earth between Tuesday, November 10 and Sunday, December
6, 2043, was indeed a single, unspeakable historical milestone.
The Pacific Catastrophe was the last, and worst, disaster to befall
mankind in the scarred twenty-first century; it also marked the
end of the primary stage in the decline of the Age of Information.
In 2048 the newly organized World Parliament enlisted its statisticians
to tally the number of casualties left by the Catastrophe. Their
figures of nineteen million dead and six million injured were
soon denounced as far too conservative-unscientific estimates
ran up to twenty-one million injured people (including those bereft
of adequate housing, nutrition, and hygiene) and a tenth of a
billion people killed. Economic losses were in every sense beyond
calculation. The twentieth century's Second World War and Cold
War, and the Second American Civil War of 2036-2038, had likely
incurred only a fraction of the Pacific Catastrophe's financial
damage. Eventually the magnitude of the debacle was deemed by
Congressional Officer Ernestina Storig to be "without measure
and blasphemed by number-crunching."
Briefly, the Pacific Catastrophe was the series of seismic shocks
which struck at several points along the western coasts of North
and South America, at the Japanese home islands, in northeast
Asia, and at Oceania, during a three-week period in the fall of
2043. These earthquakes-as well as attendant volcanic activity-set
off widespread devastation from collapsing structures, fires,
chemical and nuclear leakage, and a general breakdown of social
order, and these in their turn were aggravated by conditions of
overpopulation and internal decay that were already extant.
Like a cosmic game of chance, the huge tremors and eruptions seemed
to decimate at random. While the geologic boundaries of the earth's
crust and the "earthquake zones" that were strung across the globe
had been familiar for over a century, no reliable means of predicting
quakes had been devised. There could thus have been no expectation
of the sudden occurrence of so many massive disturbances in so
short a time (a blink of an eye, geologically): educated guesswork
had only deduced the "Ring of Fire" that belted the Pacific Ocean,
noted tectonic fault lines, and identified the locations of possible
future epicentres. Occasional instances of earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions, though they had killed many thousands of people, had
done so over many decades, so it was assumed they would continue
to do so at the same "manageable," irregular pace. Instead, what
happened in 2043 was simply a case of far too much, far too quickly.
Beginning-deceptively-in the modestly populated Aleutian Islands,
the gargantuan seismic spasms went back and forth around the ocean.
Earthquakes visited Guatemala next; then Bulusan erupted in the
northern Philippine island of Luzon; the terrible Californian
and Peruvian quakes followed, two days apart; Villarrica spewed
fire and ash over southern Chile; the Chinese metropolis of Tangshan
was rocked; the Kamchatkan Peninsula's Bezymianny exploded; and
finally the cities of the main Japanese island of Honshu toppled
in an earthquake of stunning ferocity. The scale of these was
apocalyptic. To those touched by them, they appeared to be nothing
less than the end of the world, and observers elsewhere could
barely organize a portion of the relief measures that were needed.
As well, the Catastrophe did not end with natural blows-later
World Parliament studies concluded that as many as two-thirds
of the dead were victims of "man-made" ruin. Industrial, military,
and corporate installations, power stations, transportation hubs,
medical facilities, and public works infrastructures were shattered
along with ordinary dwellings, magnifying the crises enormously.
In the places struck hardest, civilization itself had figuratively
and virtually fallen to pieces.
The aftermath of the Pacific Catastrophe-the "smoke, rubble, death"
of Li's song cycle-saw most of the world's people enrolled, in
some fashion or other, to provide aid for the helpless regions
bordered around the vast ocean. Emergency food, shelter, and makeshift
hospitals were delivered, and survivors of radioactive and toxic
spills-where there were survivors at all-were rescued. National
armed forces had to replace police departments in areas plagued
with crime epidemics; health and sanitation services, too, were
in desperate demand.
Prioritization was imperative. The tasks set before humanity were
formidable, and they had to be undertaken in order of greatest
necessity. First came the disposal of the dead, either through
burial, or, more commonly, incineration; then there was the restoration
of basic medical ministration and law and order; longer-range
planners set about-eventually-rebuilding communities and reclaiming
lost or poisoned land. Daunting as these projects were (and some
seemed plainly hopeless), there was one problem they were not
complicated by: the disablement of the information networks. Not
only was the repair of global communications systems not considered
of any urgency, many involved in the relief work-that is, many
millions of men, women, and children-believed that the lack of
intact systems was a help rather than a hindrance to their efforts.
The Pacific Catastrophe, and the catastrophes that preceded it,
had to be fully faced and fully remedied. A suspicion had developed
that Information was not a cure but part of the original disease.
This is not the story of the heroic healing programs that reshaped
the world for over a hundred years from the middle of the twenty-first
century, of names like Kamali, Dunn, Dadmanesh, Asaoka, or Mohan,
of the waves of emigration and resettlement that redistributed
the world's population to an extent unseen since two centuries
before; those sagas have deservedly been told many times. What
is relevant to us is not mankind's determined advance against
adversity, but its equally resolute retreat from excess. Information
was now to sink from being a symbol of unmet potential to being
an inducement of unmatched remorse.
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