Literate Machine

What do you do when the authorities have been compromised?

If you enjoyed this please tell someone about it, word of mouth is how projects like this grow.

Bibliography and Further Reading

• More general information about abolishing the police: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/abolish-police-instead-lets-have-full-social-economic-and-political-equality/
• Still don't think the police need replacing? Consider this report from the inside: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759
• Think prison is necessary? Here's some information about that: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html
• PBS Newshour article on how white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement?fbclid=IwAR36X2ZT3-B499frCjRcHXraTK1kaLmOhUx31T0uYH5oObim_Vo3f2i96iE
• New Republic article about police taking the side of white supremacists: https://newrepublic.com/article/157981/police-take-side-white-vigilantes?fbclid=IwAR2omP9SMnAqJTv1Fzi8vI7o1OhIzRUgA5X4Mo2JqtP_dPVJgo1QsS8OizA
• Report on how trying to file a complaint about the police will get you followed and harassed (at least in Florida): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJ5f1JMKns&feature=youtu.be
• How riots can lead to social change: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/30/8518681/protests-riots-work
• Actual Context episode 1 about the police's unhealthy obsession with the Punisher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcrxePK1sno
• Some More News' piece about how the police are trained to murder you: https://youtu.be/tuzQrbio2Qw
• Compilation of police brutality during the protests: https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1266917228752056320
• Officers talking about calling in sick in solidarity with officer who beat a student with a baton: https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-police-beating-temple-student-joseph-bologna-protest-20200605.html?__vfz=medium%25253Dsharebar
• Officers cheering for the Buffalo officers who pushed down an old man at their court hearing: https://mobile.twitter.com/Acyn/status/1269322620316442625
• How Adrien Schoolcraft reported his fellow police and was harassed and forcibly committed for his trouble. It was only because he taped his superiors discussing their crimes that he was believed. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/nyregion/officer-who-disclosed-police-misconduct-settles-suit.html
• New York Times article about defunding the police: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/george-floyd-police-funding.html
• The Guardian article on how the implicit bias and de-escalation training in Minneapolis did not work: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/31/the-answer-to-police-violence-is-not-reform-its-defunding-heres-why
• The End of Policing, now a free ebook from Verso: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
• How Dallas has been dispatching social workers to some 911 calls: https://www.lightworkers.com/dallas-dispatching-social-workers-to-some-911-calls/

• The latest numbers on the Coronavirus in NYC
• The New York Times reporting on the effect of Covid-19 in Queens
• My last episode on the Doctor Who episode "Kerblam!" and its problems with a terrorist being told "the system is not the problem"
• The insane story of the cult leader who spread Covid-19 to thousands of people in South Korea
• Trump's Covid-19 response, or lack of it
• How the White House is confiscating PPE from States
• And handing it over to for-profit companies
• To sell to the highest bidder
• Maryland hiding their Covid-19 tests from the Federal Government
• Ted Chiang's piece about how we wouldn't believe this story in a book because it's an "idiot plot"
• People having a positive opinion of Tiger King characters for some reason
• Conditions on the Stimulus Checks
• Farmers dumping produce while food banks run out of food
• Printing money now unlikely to cause hyperinflation
• About Universal Basic Income and how we can afford it
• Or the superior Universal Basic Assets
• Medium Essay about how the corporate interests are going to gaslight us

In the 2018 Doctor Who episode "Kerblam!", something is killing workers off at a far future Amazon analogue. Is it Capitalism? Or is the system not the problem? In this episode, Doctor Who is used as a lens to understand the history of technological unemployment and what it means for our automated future.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won reelection in a landslide and one man responded the only way he knew how: by channeling his horror into a video game. My favorite video game. So let's leap through time as the artificial intelligence Perry Sim and see what A Mind Forever Voyaging tells us about our present moment.

Bibliography and Further Reading

I could not have written this piece without the website The Digital Antiquarian and its many excellent articles about Infocom and Interactive Fiction by Jimmy Maher

See in particular his series of posts on A Mind Forever Voyaging, beginning with this article.

This post also draws on Jason Scott's documentary about text adventure games, Get Lamp, more information about which can be found at the official website.

See also "A Mind Forever Voyaging - Interview with Steve Meretzky", EUROGAMER.de, 2013

If you'd like to play A Mind Forever Voyaging for yourself, you can play it online, or you can legally download the game file on Github (click on "COMPILED") which can be played with numerous interpreters that can be found cataloged on the Inform Fiction website.

For this piece I played the game again on my Mac using the interperter Gargoyle.

In the premiere episode of Literate Machine, a look at the so-called "Golden Age" of Science Fiction through the lens of one of its finest practitioners, C. L. Moore. Her story (and the story of her husband, Henry Kuttner) in the science fiction mills of the mid-twentieth century is the story of America in the gig economy.