If you haven't yet read Alongside Night, this is an Afterword which gives away plot points.
Go to Part One. If you've already read Alongside Night, this is the new Foreword.
Isn't hypertext wonderful?
Pulling Alongside Night
The Enabling Technology is Here
by J. Kent Hastings
J. Neil Schulman is a prophet.
Two weeks after his twenty-third birthday, on May 1, 1976, J. Neil Schulman finished the
first draft of Alongside Night, a novel that accurately discerned the outline of 1996 reality. He finished the final draft in 1978, for publication on October 16, 1979.
Alongside Night describes things that weren't
around in the '70s but arrived later, or are becoming commonplace
now. "Citizens for a Free Society" could be the populist/libertarian source group for today's Patriot movement. The "TacStrike" division of the novel's Revolutionary Agorist Cadre could be recruited from today's militias, revolutionaries, and mercenaries, while today's
cypherpunks could form the basis for the novel's "IntelSec."
In the future of Alongside Night as in our own 1996 -- but not in the 1970's when it was written -- panhandlers and the homeless are omnipresent due to economic hardship, professional
youth gangs roam the streets of New York freely while big-time drug and people smuggling are ubiquitous; videophones are hitting the consumer market and computers are in use everywhere.
Schulman's "First Anarchist Bank and Trust Company," a Swiss
bank subsidiary, uses accounts denominated in gold, linked offshore --
a dream of today's cypherpunks. He predicts re-prohibition of gold, with TV actors
warning "that just one little
ounce of gold bullion can put you away in a federal penitentiary
for up to twenty years."
Transportation to one of Schulman's
"Agorist Undergrounds" shields against all transmissions to prevent
discovery of location aboveground,
including heartbeat detectors being put into use in 1996 by the Immigration and
Naturalization Service at the Mexican border. Weapons, cameras, recorders,
transmitters, and radioactive materials are checked in transit.
Security at the A.U. uses non-lethal weapons. Guards disarm guests upon arrival,
then return their guns on their way to the trading floor. One shop is called
"The Gun Nut," and "Lowell-Pierre Engineering"
sells nukes. Rental per-square-foot calculates any risk of a government
"G-Raid" against the costs of security measures.
Cadre General Jack Guerdon, also the builder of some A.U.s including "Aurora,"
explains how the location of a large complex could be kept secret
from the construction workers:
"They were recruited from
construction sites all over the world, were transported here
secretly, worked only inside, and never knew where they were.
If you think security is tight now, you should have been here
during construction; a mosquito couldn't have gotten in or out."
Thinking about it now, robots with telepresence may achieve the
same security, with even less risk, since only Cadre equipment
would be inside.
TransComm's smuggling of contraband predicted
marijuana traffic expanding into the sort of operation done in
the 1980s by the cocaine cartels, small airports and all.
Aurora's
trading floor offers non-prescription drugs, marijuana, cocaine,
heroin, and LSD sold in defiance of DEA and FDA regulations, but
with voluntary warning labels.
Dialogue in Alongside Night decries smoking prohibition
at the time of the story. In California today, you aren't allowed to smoke in restaurants,
workplaces, airports or other public buildings. The U.S. FDA classified
nicotine a drug this year, so it's just a formality to prohibit
delivery systems (cigarettes, cigars, and pipes) nationwide as well.
Classroom video intercoms exist in the novel, even before consumer
VCRs were a hot item. One of Alongside Night's characters,
Chin, uses a video capable laptop in a sequence written years before IBM introduced the first PC,
and more years before anything you could call a laptop.
Consumer electronics? "Aurora's library had a fair collection of books, videodiscs, and holosonic music cassettes" -- years before DAT was introduced.
All trading and billing is
done by computer with access controls, a projection made before
most banks even had ATMs, much less telephone bill-paying..
Elliot chooses a pass phrase like today's
PGP requires, and the Cadre contract assures authorized disclosure
only. Aurora's hotel room keys are computerized in the novel, but it wasn't
like that at hotels in the 1970s. Also in Aurora, computer terminals are in each hotel room.
The electronic contract used by the Cadre in Alongside
Night is imitated today by digital forms used millions of
times daily on the World Wide Web, including Schulman's own site
http://www.pulpless.com/.
Schulman wrote the first chapters of the book in 1974, describing his fictional economist
"Martin Vreeland,"
winner of the Nobel prize for economics -- two years before Milton Friedman actually won his in 1976.
And while Schulman did fail to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union,
his description of the almost casual fall of the United States government over the two week timespan in his novel parallels
the bloodless coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1992, which completed the fall of the Soviet Union.
Neil predicted Chinese Norinco handguns and rifles being imported into the United States:
Elliot Vreeland carries a ".38 caliber Peking revolver." Such imports were legalized after Alongside Night was written and, after becoming popular items, imports of Chinese firearms
into the U.S. are now banned again.
The Cadre are armed, but not on an aggressive revenge mission
against the feds, as a "drive-by" with a non-lethal,
temporarily-blinding magnesium flash, used to evade a FBI sedan,
demonstrates.
Foreigners with hard currency buy relatively cheap U.S. assets
in Alongside Night, before Rockefeller Center or major portions of the entertainment industry were bought
by Japanese conglomerates. Schulman predicts the "mall-ization"
of America because of fear of crime on city streets, and police replaced with
private patrols such as "Fifth Avenue Merchant Alliance Security
(FAMAS)."
"Air Quebec" indicates Schulman's prediction
of Quebec secession, which seems likely soon after a fifty-fifty split in the last election to test the issue. The secession of
Texas doesn't seem as far-fetched these days as it did in 1976. Just think of the
Montana legislators who introduced a bill to secede a couple of
years ago.
Schulman's novel is set during the final two weeks of a catastrophic
"wheelbarrow" inflation. Confiscatory taxes have forced
people out of aboveground jobs and into either working "off
the books," or unemployed on the dole. Gresham's Law has
Americans using blue "New Dollars": "More than anything
else, it resembled Monopoly money"; and fixed-value coins disappear so fast for their metallic value that vending-machine tokens fixed daily to the price of the "eurofranc" are just about the only real money in circulation.
The President complains about the U.S. being treated like a banana republic
by the "European Common Market Treaty Organization, a combination of the European Common Market and a U.S.-less NATO," the U.S. having been kicked out for no longer being able to afford keeping overseas troop commitments. The Chancellor of EUCOMTO informs the White House, "Mr. President, even bananas do not decay as quickly as the value of your currency these past few months." In the 1970's, the European Union was not yet negotiated and NATO was still almost entirely controlled by the United States.
In Alongside Night, political dissidents are arrested on secret warrants,
and the FBI gulag they're stuck in (codenamed "Utopia")
is blown up by the feds as a cover-up. Of course, nothing like
that could ever happen in real life, right?
Schulman's account of a Federal Renovation Zone rebuilding Times Square in N.Y. predicts today's sweeping federalization of lands, opposed by the sagebrush rebellion.
Future conflict between militias and the feds seems inevitable today since both sides see the other as a fatal threat and neither side is backing down. An Oracle
headline in Alongside Night: "FBI Chief Powers attributes
last night's firebombings of bureau offices to outlaw 'Revolutionary
Agorist Cadre.'" The recent FBI raids in Colorado and West
Virginia against militia groups supposedly planning terrorism --
not to mention Waco and Ruby Ridge -- demonstrates that anti-federal
sentiment isn't laughed off as harmless anymore.
The FBI chief in the novel keeps copies of "confidential" enemies lists
at home, long before Filegate. In the 1970's when J. Neil Schulman wrote his novel, the
general image of the FBI was Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., on The FBI. Today's FBI is better
characterized by the paranoia of The X-Files, where higher-ups are usually in complicity
with dark forces.
The Emergency Broadcast System in Alongside Night extends
even to telephones -- using the phone system during the crackdown
requires authorized beepers -- while radio and TV programming simulates normality
while the government collapses. Today's FBI digital wiretap law will provide capability
for millions of simultaneous wiretaps and the major broadcast networks have
accepted official explanations uncritically of everything from who started the fire
at Waco to the cause of the explosion that destroyed TWA Flight 800.
In Alongside Night, we learn that a New York Times front-page
story headlined "Vreeland Widow Assures Public Husband Died Naturally"
is disinformation. Echoes of Vince Foster and the Arkancides?
An "Oracle" headline in Alongside
Night predicts military dissent: "TEAMSTER PRESIDENT WARNS
POSSIBILITY OF ARMED FORCES WILDCAT STRIKES IF PENTAGON DOES NOT
MEET DEMANDS..." And when -- due to a busted budget -- an absence of
government paychecks combines with the latest government scandal, a
two-century-old superpower collapses like a house of cards.
Where did a prediction of revolution in the U.S. come from, if
not the fevered dreams of a militant paranoid? Young Schulman, a student of
Austrian economics, just "followed the money," determining who
would earn it and who would control it.
During the 1970s, hippies dropped out and moved to communes,
while tax and sagebrush rebels fought to keep the government out
of their pockets and off their lands. California's Proposition
13 and the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan were the results
of the establishment co-opting anti-government positions.
Despite
this, the current political situation in the U.S. is more volatile
than ever. Job security doesn't exist for anybody, so leftists
are forming new parties out of disgust with the Democrats, while right-wingers
who believe Republicans indistinguishable join militias.
But perhaps the most revolutionary development
is the Internet and the World Wide Web, which threaten government
currency controls, tax collection, and media restrictions.
Alongside Night predicted revolutionary cadres organizing
to resist and replace the State with an "agorist" society.
Agorism, according to Samuel Edward Konkin III,
who coined the term, is the integration of both libertarian theory
and counter-economic practice, neither inactive "library
libertarians" prattling on with their idle complaints, nor
simple criminals preying on society.
Agorists insist on both civil
and economic liberties for all individuals, encourage efficient
restitution for contract and rights violations, yet oppose a monopoly
of coercion from even a limited "minarchist" State.
From Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto: "Coercion is
immoral, inefficient and unnecessary for human life and fulfilment."
This is not pacifism because defensive violence is not coercion.
Coercion is the initiation of violence or its threat. You
can't morally start a fight, but you can finish one. ...
"When the State unleashes its final wave of supression--and
is successfully resisted--this is the definition of Revolution."
Most citizens go along with the government, whether "right
or wrong," to preserve order, defend freedom, and more recently
to assist the poor and protect the environment. When it becomes
obvious that the government is hostile to these purposes, many
of its subjects will no longer feel guilty about joining the radical
opposition.
A rich, slave-owning, dead European white male cracker
named Thomas Jefferson (sorry, he's not "the Sage
of Monticello" anymore), wrote similar things about King
George III in the Declaration of Independence.
I'm sure T.J.'s writings would be found in Aurora's library, along
with the following titles, most of which are specified in Alongside
Night. Productive workers will "withdraw their sanction,"
according to Ayn Rand's 1957 magnum opus, Atlas
Shrugged, and this will lead to "the collapse of the
Looter's State." Rand also described an underground "Galt's
Gulch" of black market revolutionaries in her classic novel.
Murray Rothbard hinted at stateless defense in Man,
Economy, and State (1962). Robert Heinlein portrayed
a stateless legal system and revolution in The Moon Is A Harsh
Mistress (1966). Rothbard describes stateless defense services
fully in Power and Market (1970), echoing Gustavus De
Molinari's 1849 essay "The Production of Security."
Molinari was an economist in the original French laissez-faire
school of Frederick Bastiat. Molinari concluded that justice
and defense were goods like any other, best provided in a competitive
market rather than political monopoly. Konkin's New Libertarian
Manifesto (published in 1980, based on a talk given in February
1974 which influenced Alongside Night) inspired the creation of The Agorist Institute, "symbolically
founded on the last day of 1984," now with a web site at
http://www.agorist.org/.
That's all fine for free-market supporters, but wouldn't "progressive"
groups try to impose their own one-party dictatorships? What's
in it for the masses?
Despite their famous friendship with Newt
Gingrich, Alvin and Heidi Toffler are active in labor and ecology
circles. They point out that telecommuting is 29 times more efficient
than physical commuting in private cars. If 12% telecommuted,
the 75 million barrels of gasoline saved would completely eliminate
the need for foreign oil and future Gulf Wars. Real estate now
used for office space could be used for local housing. The Tofflers
believe traditional factors of production such as land, labor,
and capital are being dwarfed by the growing importance of information.
Information is inexhaustible, it can be shared but still kept.
Widely copied software brings more user suggestions and faster improvements.
It puts scarcity economics on its ear. Expensive bulky production
methods are being "ephemeralized" (to use a term coined
by Bucky Fuller), replaced by flexible cheap computers to satisfy
local consumer tastes. More people can afford access to computerresources, with less damage to the environment.
Telecommuting
is safer than driving, which currently kills a Vietnam War's worth
of fatalities each year, without requiring "strategic"
resources to fight over. Silicon comes from sand, which is plentiful.
Because programs like PGP protect users from both evil hackers
and a fascist global police state, traditional leftists embrace
the new technology, and even build their own web sites.
Karl Marx wrote of objective and subjective conditions
being necessary for Revolution. "Objective" in this
case means the physical ability to overthrow the current regime.
"Subjective" means the desire and mass support to do
it.
The 1960s arguably provided the subjective conditions: an unpopular
war, a vicious police crackdown on agitators, and hundreds of
thousands of protesters marching in the streets. But these subjective
conditions weren't perfect. The economy was still robust, not yet weighed down with the debts racked up in the 1970's by
the Wars On Poverty and Vietnam, and no stagflation and oil crisis
yet. The objective conditions were bad. Individuals and small
groups could not do much mischief without being overwhelmed by
Chicago police or National Guard troops thrown against them.
Today, a single troublemaker can afford to sign up for Internet service
under a pseudonym and use anonymous remailers to post messages
in widely read "newsgroup" conferences, distributed
to more than 135 countries without identification.
The Rulers and the Court Opinion Makers won't let their ill-gotten
monopolies collapse without a fight. Every day we hear about the
Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: Terrorists, Pedophiles, Money-Launderers,
and Drug Smugglers. Defenders of privacy and free speech on the
Internet get smeared for "fighting law enforcement"
just like the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre in Alongside Night.
Restrictions on the Internet are likely to be passed for "crime
and security" reasons and to hold users "accountable."
Civil libertarians complain that such pornographically-explicit
words as "breast" are being filtered by online services
fearing prosecution, with the "unintended consequence" of forcing breast cancer survivors to choose euphemisms like "tit".
Critics of data censorship
say these restrictions are like trying to stop the wind from crossing
a border. For example, when France (in anti-laissez-faire
fashion) blocked some newsgroups, an ISP in the United States,
http://www.c2.net/, made them available to French users via the
World Wide Web.
Next there's the problem of how to make a living underground.
Schulman watched Anthony L. Hargis found a "bank that
isn't a bank" in 1975, with "transfer orders" instead
of checks, denominated in mass units of gold. ALH&Co. survives
to this day, despite IRS inspections, hassles with the Post Office
and local authorities, and ever-tighter banking restrictions against
"money-laundering."
Hargis explicitly forbids (by voluntary
contract) his account holders from selling drugs, which suggests
how proprietary communities can choose to be drug-free within
a future agorist society. Hargis is sincere in this restriction,
not just playing clean to fool the authorities. Unfortunately,
Hargis is not enthusiastic about encryption or the Internet. "Honest
Citizens have nothing to hide."
Rarely does the weed of government research bear anything but
the bitter fruits of mass destruction, disinformation, and bureaucratic
disruption of innocent people's lives. Exceptions may include
public-key cryptography, spread-spectrum radio and the Internet
Protocol.
Programmers such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)'s Philip
R. Zimmermann are using the government sponsored RSA algorithm
to thwart the efforts of every State's security agent. In Myanmar
(formerly Burma), where PGP is used by rebels fighting dictatorship,
the mere possession of a network-capable computer will bring a
lengthy prison sentence.
In 1995, David Chaum announced the availability of untraceable
digital cash ("Ecash"), denominated in U.S. Dollars
(Federal Reserve Units, or "frauds" as Hargis would
call them) from Mark Twain Bank in St. Louis, MO.
Ecash can be
withdrawn, deposited, and spent without fee anywhere on the Internet.
The only charge is when exchanging Ecash for a particular currency.
Chaum lives in Amsterdam, the location of the "secret annex"
in The Diary of Anne Frank.
During World War II, the Nazis
seized the government records in Amsterdam before partisans could
burn them, and used them to track down and kill Jews, including
members of Chaum's own family. Perhaps this explains his desire
for computer privacy.
In 1985, David Chaum described his invention
in an article as "Security Without Identification: Transaction
Systems To Make 'Big Brother' Obsolete." Ecash protects privacy
yet thwarts deadbeat counterfeiters. Similarly, software filters
against "spam" and other unwanted messages obviate a
State crackdown against anonymity.
Chaum's Digicash company now serves a number of banks in different
countries, and provides the "electronic wallet" software
for use by their account holders. With Ecash, items may be purchased
without identifying the buyer, even if the banks and merchants
exchange information, but the seller may be disclosed if the buyer
wishes to publicly dispute a purchase. As it exists, privacy is
compromised because of bank disclosure requirements, but it isn't
hard to imagine underground banks with unofficial ecash (as opposed
to proprietary Ecash), using their own currency or gold.
Respecting your right to be secure in the privacy of your own
home would let you advertise, send catalogs, take orders, send
processed data or tele-operate machinery (in other words, do your
work), then send invoices, collect ecash payments, and
deposit your unreported earnings scot-free in offshore accounts.
Using ecash and encrypted remailers, there would be no way for
tax collectors to tell if you made $100 last year or $100,000,000.
If measures such as mandatory internal passports and routine checkpoints
can't restrict who can work or determine accurate income taxes
due, they'll have to employ ubiquitous surveillance--a totalitarian
system will be the only way to protect the privileges of the tax
eaters. Although necessary for the future survival of the State,
a crackdown will provoke resistance. Private communications bypass
official propaganda, as the Committees of Correspondence did during
the American Revolution.
They'll be forced to bug your house. Don't worry, the automatic
image-processing (exists today!) 24-hour cameras will be labeled
"for your protection." Worse than Orwell's 1984,
they won't need humans to look through them, they'll identify
everyone and trace their movements with blessed convenience.
Couldn't
they just tap the phones? Sure, but with encrypted data to and
from an Internet Service Provider they wouldn't get much. Couldn't
they require back-door "escrowed" keys and outlaw strong
encryption? Not good enough, they need constant monitoring
(not just with a court order) to collect taxes.
Scofflaws might
send innocent looking images and sound files with steganographically
hidden data using methods designed to thwart detection and disruption.
In 1996, for real, any data collected about you can be shared
with the FBI, U.S. Customs, DEA, IRS, Postal inspectors, and the
Secret Service because the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
(FinCEN), located down the street from the CIA in Vienna, Virginia
pools the data. I guess anything goes to stop crime and protect
the children, right?
In Alongside Night, temporary relays and infrared modulation
of engine heat disguises communication signals. With enhancement
of spread-spectrum radios recently introduced, a channel wouldn't
be defined by a single radio frequency, but by a "spreading
code" of frequency hops with staggered dwell times, so that
jammers and eavesdroppers won't be able to predict where, and
for how long, the carrier will go next.
A hybrid with the direct
sequence technique would mix each bit of the message with several
pseudo-random "chip" bits, to spread the signal at each
hop. A transmitted reference in one band, of purely random thermal
noise in a resistor for example, can be compared to the reference
mixed with a message in another, so that the authorized receiver
correlates the two to recover the message.
Low-powered microwave,
lasers, unreported underground cables, antennas disguised as flag
poles and many other methods would insure that the email got through
during a blackout.
Today, when "rightsizing" has made a temporary placement
firm the largest employer in the U.S., and the President's own
budget projects a federal tax rate of 84%, not including state,
county, city and other local taxes, we can count on greater numbers
swelling the ranks of radical movements in the face of a hostile
establishment.
"Dr. Merce Rampart," the woman leading
Schulman's Cadre, offers advice to dislocated personnel in the
"New Dawn" of a proprietary anarchist revolution:
"With
the exception of those government workers who perform no marketable
service--tax collectors, regulators, and so on--we are urging
them to declare their agencies independent from the government,
and to organize themselves into free workers' syndicates. Shares
of stock could be issued to employees and pensioners by whatever
method seems fair, and the resultant joint-stock companies could
then hire professional managers to place the operation on a profitable
footing. I can envision this for postal workers, municipal services,
libraries, universities, and public schools, et cetera. As for
those civil servants whose jobs are unmarketable, I suggest that
most have skills in accounting, administration, computers, law,
and so forth, that readily could be adapted to market demand.
That's the idea. It's now up to those with the necessary interests
to use it or come up with something better."
In the 1980's, after Alongside Night was published, this idea became popular among libertarian-leaning conservatives. It's called privatization.
Alongside Night shows us a world where such ideas aren't merely a smokescreen for greater efficiency in the service of an ever more encompassing State.
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