Distraction - Bruce Sterling [204]
“Yes, surely, Senator—but it only took them a few days to put them up! If they go bust, they’ll just build more.”
“I hope you’re not expecting me to take personal responsibility for this. I sent you those plans, but I never expected them to be executed. Once I abandon my intellectual property to all and sundry, I can’t be expected to be responsible for other people’s exploitation of it.”
“Of course not, Senator! These were Emergency conditions, War conditions … you know, there is an upside to this. This isn’t permanent structure, and it isn’t in classic form, but it’s remarkably popular.”
Bambakias brightened a little. “Really.”
“The people who are living under these things … they’re not architecture critics. A lot of them are people who haven’t had much shelter of any kind for many years. They’re really impressed to see nomad architecture pushed to these mind-boggling extremes.”
“That isn’t ‘nomad architecture.’ It’s ultrascale emergency relief.”
“That’s an interesting distinction, Alcott, but let me just put it this way: it’s nomad architecture now.”
“I think you’d better listen to him, darling,” Lorena put in faintly. “Oscar always has very good instincts about these things.”
“Oh yes, instincts,” Bambakias said. “Instincts are wonderful. You can live off instincts, as long as you don’t plan to live very long. How long do you expect all this to last, Oscar?”
“ ‘This’?” Oscar said delicately.
“Whatever it is that you’ve created here. What is it, exactly? Is it a political movement? Maybe it’s just one big street party. It certainly isn’t a town.”
“Well … it’s a little difficult to say exactly where all this will go.…”
“Maybe you should have thought that through a bit more thoroughly,” Bambakias said. It clearly irked the man to have to discuss the matter, but he was taking it as a painful duty. “You know, I’m a ranking member of the Senate Science Committee. It’s going to be a little difficult explaining these developments to my colleagues back in Washington.”
“Oh, I miss that Science Committee every day,” Oscar lied.
“You know, developments here remind me of the Internet. That old computer network, invented by the American scientific community. It was all about free communications. Very simple and widely distributed—there was never any central control. It spread worldwide in short order. It turned into the world’s biggest piracy copy machine. The Chinese loved the Internet, they used it and turned it against us. They destroyed our information economy with it. Even then the net didn’t go away—it just started breeding its virtual tribes, all these nomads and dissidents. Suddenly they could organize in powerful new ways, and now, finally, with the President taking their side … who knows? Do you see my parallel here, Oscar? Does it make sense to you?”
Oscar was increasingly uncomfortable. “Well, I never said what happened here was entirely without precedent. The great secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
“You stole these ideas from Huey. You stole Huey’s clothes, didn’t you?”
“Time-honored tactic, Alcott!”
“Oscar, Huey is a dictator. He’s a man on horseback. Do I understand this ‘prestige economy’ business? It seems to run entirely on instinct. They spend all their time doing each other little volunteer community services. And they rank each other for it. Eventually somebody pops out of the mix and becomes a tribal big shot. Then they’re required to do what he says.”
“Well … it’s complicated. But yes, that’s the basics.”
“They really just don’t fit in the rest of American society. Not at all.”
“It was designed that way.”
“I mean they don’t have any way to properly deal with the rest of society. They don’t even have proper ways to deal with each other. They have no rule of law. There’s no Constitution. There’s no legal redress. There’s no Bill of Rights. They don’t have any way to deal with