Monday, May 12, 2008
Also: Google closes its digital library doors, and Dennis Kucinich's blog rocks your world. Salon's technology and business predictions for 2005.
Jan 3, 2005 | Bush solves spam
During the first year of George W. Bush's second term the situation in Iraq will become increasingly graver, the Palestinians and the Israelis will escalate their conflict, the United States' nuclear standoff with Iran and North Korea will grow dangerously tense, China will come precipitously close to attacking Taiwan, global warming will wreak devastation across large swaths of the planet, and Osama bin Laden will roam so freely in Afghanistan that Al-Jazeera will offer him a weekly talk show. But defying the predictions of all political analysts, Bush's job approval ratings in the United States and across the globe will soar to record levels, with even the blue states turning red. Why? Because he'll have managed to rid the world of spam.
Sometime this summer a well-connected friend of Bush's will send him a coveted invitation to Gmail, and while Bush will become instantly enamored of the service's friendly interface, he'll find himself spending too much of his time writing "No thank you, make no mistake, Laura is quite satisfied as it is" to unsolicited offers that come in via e-mail.
Notwithstanding the warnings of his closest advisors, who believe that tackling spam will be more difficult than putting down the insurgency in Iraq, Bush decides that something must be done. ("Karl," Bob Woodward will later quote Bush as telling Rove, his political guru, "maybe you don't mind being sent the phone numbers of all the lonely housewives in your neighborhood, but I don't think the American people feel the same way about violating the privacy of our nation's lonely housewives.") Bush convenes a historic summit of the world's top tech leaders and brightest academics at Camp David, and refuses to let the brains leave until they've hammered out a solution to the spam scourge. In a few weeks, they come up with a plan, and Bush authorizes Donald Rumsfeld to divert the billions intended for missile defense to this new anti-spam Manhattan Project. The plan is a phenomenal success -- by year's end all unwanted mail has been stopped, and Congress unanimously passes legislation drawing up plans for Bush's bust to be carved into Mount Rushmore.
Google deletes digital library
Just weeks after announcing ambitious plans to digitize millions of books from five major libraries, Google burns down its electronic Alexandria before even really starting it.
The problem isn't the anticipated copyright headaches. It's the readers -- or lack thereof.
"When news of our plans broke, we were flooded with e-mails from college students begging us to make more term papers available, not books," says a Google executive who asked not to be named. "The kids told us that they have plenty of access to books on paper that they don't read. What they really need is someone to do the reading, thinking and writing for them."
Convinced that absolutely no one wants to read most of the tomes they'd just begun digitizing, Google decides to divert the tens of millions designated for the book project into hiring underemployed Ph.D.'s to build up the world's biggest virtual term-paper library.
Virtual world economies suddenly go south
The once-thriving economies of MMORPGs -- massively multiplayer online role-playing games like "The Sims Online," "Ultima Online," "Everquest" and "Second Life" -- plunge on reports of accounting irregularities and cooked books, prompting a call for stricter regulation on the activities of virtual crony capitalists. While fat cats like Julian Dibbell -- a writer who, very suspiciously, managed to make about $47,000 during a year of trading in the virtual economy -- insist that the scandals are just the work of a few bad apples and that in general virtual executives are as honest and ethical as any other business people, Americans erupt at the outrageous disclosures.
Investigators uncover shady extraworld entities that virtual firms set up in order to escape taxes, or complex financial instruments established to artificially inflate the bottom line, and we all recoil at the tales of extravagant habits of virtual CEOs. "While these slimeballs spend 100 million Simoleans to build their garish mansions in gated communities in 'The Sims Online,' others in these virtual worlds live hand-to-mouth, constantly worrying about where the next meal will come from," Arizona Sen. John McCain scolds from the Senate floor. "This must stop." McCain then authors legislation to create a Securities and Exchange Commission task force to closely monitor the freewheeling capitalists of MMORPGs, but though the law passes Congress by huge margins, the president will vetoes the legislation, explaining that the bill would unnecessarily restrict the freedom and creativity of virtual business people. Reformers, though, remain suspicious of Bush's motives, noting several large contributions to the GOP denominated not in dollars but in Simoleans.
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