Page 130 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Devil’s Lullaby

the controlling software and its servers, then why not have them
stealthily hack into Anodynamics and change the message? Instead
of ‘Everything is wonderful if you buy Brock’s Biscuits’, the lullaby
could be ‘Beautiful people can bake their own bread’. Presumably
the executives at Anodynamics are careful not to submit themselves
to the same propaganda being served to the public, so they might
not realize the replacement has been made for quite a while. Then,
perhaps, it would be time to organize a movement against blind
acceptance of the dictates of corporate puppet masters. Same
results, perhaps, Rutger, but fewer casualties.”
Schlager just shook his head.
“Once again,” intoned Perversity Tinderstack, “we have taken
imagination into the realm of the virtually impossible—not from
the viewpoint of science, but a conundrum so insoluble that no
reasonable outcome can be derived other than those more typical of
fairy tales than the genre in which we are supposedly working. Has
the history of the world arrived at a point where we can only posit
dilemmas both believable as slight extrapolations of the present
reality and incapable of believable non-pessimistic denouements? Is
it a false antinomy to set implacable mechanism against horrific
atavism? No moral there except children shouldn’t play with
matches, and no hope except for an outburst of rationality in
billions of brains conditioned to be anything but autonomous
thinkers. The idea of ‘the network is the system’ has to be realized
as a neutral means of information transfer; too late for that! Maybe
you could write a fantasy in which this does happen, people think
clearly, and the planet is saved. How? I would have the devil’s
lullaby produce an unexpected consequence: somehow tweaking the
recipients’ unconscious minds into that wonderful state of
cooperative intelligence and global awareness—effectively
accomplishing rejection of Anodynamics, regaining control of the
network for the common good and arriving at the Marxist withering
away of the state we already discussed in Leith’s presentation of the
Universal Human Interface. We are too often telling the same sad
story: sorrow that the Age of Miracles truly has passed.”

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