Editor’s Note: Marlow is on a similar bandwidth this morning. Second Republic got me going. Marlow’s E-USA sums it up nicely.
-Vic
Author’s Note: Your Second Republic phrase caused this harried pecking and blathering. John’s obit notice turbo’d it.
-Marlow
Dear Vic,
Let’s go internet surfin’ now
Everybody’s signing up now
Come on and internet safari with me
(Come on and safari with…)
Late in the morning we’ll be startin’ out
Some robos will be coming along
They’re loading up our Woody
With our boards inside
And headin’ out singing our song
Let’s go internet surfin’ now
Everybody’s signing up now
Come on and internet safari with me
(Come on and safari with…)
In Alexandria and Arlington
They’re shooting some pool
In Fairfax they’re maskin’ their nose
They’re going on safari to virus free islands this year
So if you’re coming get ready to go
Let’s go internet surfin’ now
Everybody’s signing up now
Come on and internet safari with me
(Come on and safari with…)
Surfin’ Our E-USA
(Written sometime in the not-too-distant future.)
I still wonder why we were so eager to have and believe that government could successfully take on America’s big problems, when we had to consent to their target tracking our personal lives as in sharing in real time all our cookie and personal preferences.
Seems we were on hair-pinned highway bends on a path to the western sea that would surprisingly careen inland now and then, leaving many to skid off the steep cliffs as the lucky fewer and fewer surviving cars following a thinner path towards a very few houses at the water’s edge. Of course, it was a gated community, but the gate was low — a picket fence — as if to prevent the few surviving off-the cliffs dunces from crawling back up into the street level houses.
Subsequent entrances filtered out unwanted visitors with old school blocking devices like railroad-crossing arms to make sure the select came with steely intent and the guts to brave being ear-holed by the ultra-stealthy and deadly Trains de Grand Vitesse.
Beyond the final high voltage electrified gates, there was an empty but preserved one room schoolhouse, and a few tiny homes that lined the ever-narrowing pipe stemmed drives. From where we were constitutionally speaking, we arrived dazed as our cars went faster and faster, as if to get in front of something that no one of us could see.
Within this gated community now lives the select men, women, their families, and a singular vision of the future as E-USA, a centrally coordinated governmental effort to run the country via transforming it from a state into a digital society.
New things like this ambitious recrafting of the state required new founding docs that included all of us and required us to become and follow members of the government and allow them to alter its citizens’ daily lives, thoughts, and feelings in real time.
The normal services that government is involved with — legislation, voting, education, justice, health care, banking, taxes, policing, and so on — are now digitally linked across a single platform, wiring up the nation. We are all served by small server robots — cooking, cleaning, shopping, selling, buying mowing, repairing, restoring, landscaping, dressing, bathing . . .
We sometimes feel that these bots have souls. Especially at parties, they get so close to people that none of us can tell the real from the robotic.
It just resonates — with large enough goals and benefits for the society to believe in.
E-USA residents display a liberated confidence, tinged with the irony of a roulette player who has a long winning streak of rolls and can afford to lose some chips, that conceals an ever-receding hairline which betrays a growing sense that he/she will be directed to go all in on a bad ball roll, thus ending their time at the table. Forever.
All citizens love voting from their devices and challenging traffic and parking tickets from home. They trust in the central system that gathers and protects their data no longer having to reassemble a loan package for each new house purchase. The government does it all — harvesting their income, debt, savings, and debt data pulled from elsewhere in various systems. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ real time medical histories and their implanted tracking sensor data feeds.
E-USA’s revolutionary system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous processes — such as doing taxes to quick work and insta-autopay (refunds take 9-12 weeks to process – legacy mainframe database issues still bedevil us). If a couple in love wants to marry, they only have to Zoom into a government robot and express their will. All of America’s previous bureaucratic processes must be done online. For our safety and protection.
You can and should call this parity and true equity since government digitization is a cost-saving efficiency and the supreme equalizing force. Digitizing processes reportedly saves the state ten to fifteen per cent of its GDP a year in salaries and expenses.
So, who needs borders when we got a digital and location-independent world? Residency, its privileges and services can only granted to properly logged-in users (I meant to type citizens).
With 6-month software and 12-month hardware update cycles, it makes it so that our country is always outperforming our competitors and peer countries — competitive governance with a twist in that the Red-White-Blue always wins. Our beloved government has become a perennial virtual #1.
(As I type this, I have started humming the Stones’ Under My Skin lyrics.)
Despite its light touch it’s not a restricted one, however, the guiding benevolent influence of government is everywhere.
Little known fact: before we had to change our whole way of thinking about society, we were already past halfway there thanks to Silicon Valley.
Our assembled at no-cost to us system pin codes just primed the whole process. It started with personal data from the Census Bureau submissions, then moved onto publicly available document numbers like phone numbers, e-mail accounts, then real estate, and due to the farsighted laws of 2021, all of our employment information. driver’s and traffic records, car, home and life insurance, state and federal tax bots, education attainment crawlers, and airplane, movie and concert ticket databases.
Even our pets’ info was digitally stored so no vaccine shortfalls or disease outbreaks ever occurred again.
A crossroad was successfully navigated when we were assured that all this data was no longer centrally held, thus reducing the chance of OPM or Equifax-level breaches.
A tenet of the E-USA system is that an individual owns all information recorded about him or her or it. It’s just stored by the government on their behalf. Peeping at another person’s secure data for no reason is a criminal offense. In E-USA, we don’t have Big Brother; we have Little Brothers. We can tell the Big One what to do and just maybe also beat him up.
The openness of the public info is startling. We can easily find the business interests of the rich and powerful with a moment’s research, because every business connection or investment captured in any record in E-USA becomes searchable public information The same foe traffic stops and so on. Polling-place intimidation is a non-issue since people may change their votes, up to the deadline — at home, online etc.
Here in the Coastal Empire, its 17th century capitol’s quaint, analogue past seems pleasantly preserved in time. Its daylight like its future is bright and thick; and, when a breeze comes off the Atlantic, its Spanish Moss laden live oak trees shimmer like glinting glass wind chimes.
Pay no attention to the creaking century plus old oaks during strong winded rainstorms. Nothing could possibly go wrong. E-USA is after all the best of all possible worlds.
——-
In the former USA 1.0, it was generally assumed that private industry led innovation. The most ambitious techies we now see are leaving industry to go work for the state. Should someone ask them today, “three years ago, could you imagine working for the government,” most now respond, “F*ck no.”
——-
While the E-USA now has ways of making all of us talk, this new E-way means there’s really no need. Paramedics access patients’ medical records, meaning that the team that arrives for your chest pains will have access to your latest cardiology report and EKG.
——-
So, in conclusion,
· They offered us a free, ubiquitous and secure platform, so we took it and let them run the country’s digital future.
· E-USA speaks of a future in which nationality is determined not so much by where you live as by what you log on to.
· All hail USA 2.O! E-USA! E-USA! E-USA!
· Let us move bravely forward as we chant softly “Robots, algorithms and apps, oh my.”
· Pay no attention to the screeching seagulls warning us from above as they ride the ocean shore surf breeze.
· Gaze out across the blinding shimmering midday sea and be constantly who you are.
-Marlow and W from somewhere secure out in the Carolina Smokies
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