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Saturday, May 03, 2008
Illiterate Little Brats
Category: Issue 12Once upon a time there was a TV set, and typewriters with white-out, and then suddenly there was the internet. And then there was e-mail, and then there were things called websites. It went relatively fast.
At first the illiterate little brats thought that they would be able to get away without learning anything, but then it turned out that in order to communicate, they would have to learn to type in order to use things like cell phones, which had been invented by older people who knew how to type. Annoyed, but fooled by no one, the younger people learned to type—but only to type things like LOL and 
.
This was a far cry from Shakespeare, but a closer cry to literacy than the adults with the white-out had been expecting.
In fact, soon the little buggers had figured out how to write CODE. How could they do that, when they could not spell simple words like “expelled”?
The older folks gave up and died. (Not because they had given up, per se, but only because they were old.)
The middle-aged people who had carried on the whole thing continued to mess around with what had been started. Panoramic VISTAS were invented with lots of cool new options. Lots of money was waved around. The money-waving went on and on and on, but as the days and months and years went by, so much money was being waved at so many people that most people stopped paying attention and just stuck to his or her own favorite recipe or facebook site.
Google (or something like that) set out to rule the world. No one cared who ruled the world. No one had been reading Marx, since no one had any education due to playing the latest games on video and the internet. Everyone was ruling the world VIRTUALLY. Who cared about the actual world anymore? There was nothing to be done about it.
Since no one but google (or whoever) ruled the world (by this time Microsoft [or whoever] was in a slight-but-who-cares decline), google (or whoever) ended up ruling the world. Being reasonable, google (or whoever) decided to hire people who were, um, cheaper to hire. Google (or whoever) was not the first to do that.
Slowly, the world, which had at one time been somewhat overbalanced in favour of the pasty-white west, started to tilt back over. Marx came true. Everyone had the same amount of money as everyone else. Eventually, everyone intermarried, and all the children under the extremely hot sun were beige.
In their caverns, the nerds, descended from the adults with the white-out, huddled, pasty-white as ever, trying to figure out where they could get cheaper labour. There wasn’t any left on the planet, as the entire planet had been kind of overtaken, like a Risk game. A pirated one called “Attack”. Who knew?—that was ancient history. People still played “Attack” on Facebook, but no one really knew what the point was. It was like the way it had been, trying to play “Pong” in the late 80s. It was cute.
Where to get the labour? The nerds, in their caverns, were realizing that they needed to come up with new labour fast. The operating systems and computers would last forever unless new software could be invented that was incompatible with them. Another problem was that no one could any longer afford new software or hardware. Everyone who could possibly be milked on the planet had been and was being milked.
In fact, everyone was beige. They’d all eventually met each other during Spring Break, Fact-Finding Missions, Missionary Travels, Exchange Programs… they’d met so many of each other and fallen in love so much that everyone was now beige.
Everyone on the planet was making $3.00/hour. There was a lot of corruption, but it wasn’t official. As usual, there was a government, but it was run by the corporations, and there were only a couple of those, whose directorships were entirely joint. There really wasn’t much to be done.
The nerds, pasty-faced, ate pastries and scratched their balding heads. They thanked their lucky stars that their great-grandparents had taught them how to type.
LOL
Old Comments
Mary,
That was really cute and funny. Great job!
Sonja
LOL! Very witty! I think we are practically there: 3 bucks per hour while corporations earn who knows how many hundreds (or thousands, or millions) per day.