Distraction - Bruce Sterling [158]
This media campaign was especially useful in finessing the severe image problem presented by Captain (once General, once Corporal) Burningboy. In person or on video, the prole leader looked impossibly crazed and transgressive. However, he had a deep, fatherly speaking voice. Over the loudspeakers, Burningboy radiated the pious jollity of an arsonist Santa Claus.
It was a misconception to imagine that the Moderators were merely violent derelicts. The roads of America boasted a great many sadly desperate people, but the Moderators were not a mob of hobos. The Moderators were no longer even a “gang” or a “tribe.” Basically, the Moderators were best understood as a nongovernmental network organization. The Moderators deliberately dressed and talked like savages, but they didn’t lack sophistication. They were organized along new lines that were deeply orthogonal to those of conventional American culture.
It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.
It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave. They gathered to publicly burn their licenses, chop up their charge cards, and hit the road. The proles considered themselves the only free Americans.
Nomadism had once been the linchpin of human existence; it was settled life that formed the technological novelty. Now technology had changed its nonexistent mind. Nomads were an entire alternate society for whom life by old-fashioned political and economic standards was simply no longer possible.
Or so Oscar reasoned. As a wealthy New Englander, he had never had much political reason to concern himself with proles. They rarely voted. But he had no prejudice against proles as a social group. They were certainly no stranger or more foreign to his sensibilities than scientists were. Now it was clear to him that the proles were a source of real power, and as far as he knew, there was only one American politician who had made a deliberate effort to recruit and sustain them. That politician was Green Huey.
Having pacified the Moderators, Oscar’s second order of business was reconciling the Collaboratory’s scientists to their presence. Oscar’s key talking point here was their stark lack of choice in the matter.
The Collaboratory’s scientists had always had firm federal backing; they had never required any alternate means of support. Now there was no federal largesse left. That was bad, but the underlying reality was much, much worse. The lab’s bookkeeping had been ruined by a netwar attack. The Collaboratory was not only broke, its inhabitants were fiscally unable even to assess how broke they were. They couldn’t even accurately describe the circumstances under which they might be bailed out.
Morale at the lab had soared on the news that the President had taken notice of their plight. The President had even gone so far as to send a prepared speech for the lab’s Director, which was duly recited by Greta. However, the speech had a very conspicuous omission: money. The press release was basically a long grateful paean to the President’s talent for restoring law and order. Financing the Collaboratory was not the President’s problem. The Congress