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Year Zero (our year 2022, the year the United States is 'reborn') was (and will be?)(is?) a dystopian vision of a future in which your government worked against you.
...or... a game and technology and music...
...or a technological Easter Egg hunt...
...or ... a concept album that i would call brilliant!
September 2006, Trent Reznor (THE guy of NIN unless touring) decided to shake things up a bit. He decided that music and marketing would work brilliantly together if worked in a fun, interesting and puzzling way (not marketing, but an "artistic concept"): what he got was a thriller and marketing he couldn't have expected.
He hired a company called 42 Entertainment to help promote his coming album by giving out clues to a larger puzzle.
The first piece of the puzzle were tour t-shirts (the With Teeth tour) with highlighted letters that spelled out "I am trying to believe".
"This phrase was registered as a website URL, and soon several related websites were also discovered in the IP range, all describing a dystopian vision of the fictional "Year 0"."
---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(album)
USB keys were left in bathroom stalls at tour venues. Clues left on web-sites, clues leading to web-sites, phone numbers, email addresses, videos and mp3's.
Phone a number found from one of the clues and you are left with a message telling you "By calling this number, you and your family are implicitly pleading guilty to the consumption of anti-American media and have been flagged as potential militants."
Another clue told fans to not drink the water because the government had drugged it, but other clues led to a phone number that when called, a message said simply "I am drinking the water, so should you".
Leaked songs gave clues: The Great Destroyer, when played in mono, gave clues saying "Red Horse Vector". Was there a website for it? You betcha!
Finally at the release of the Year Zero album, fans discovered that the black CD cover when warmed, exposed a string of binary numbers that when translated into ASCII read "exterminal.net"
###
0110 010 1011 110
00011 101 00011
00101 0111001 00110110
1011 010 010
1101110011000
010 11 011 0
0 0 01 0 1 1 1 00 110
1 1100 1100 1 01 01
11 0 1
0 0
###
The Year Zero story takes place in the United States in the year 2022; or "Year 0" according to the American government, being the year that America was reborn. The United States has suffered several major terrorist attacks, and in response the government has seized absolute control on the country and reverted to a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. The government maintains control of the populace through institutions such as the Bureau of Morality and the First Evangelical Church of Plano, as well as increased surveillance and the secret drugging of tap water with a mild sedative. In response to the increasing oppression of the government, several corporate, government, and subversive websites were transported back in time to the present by a group of scientists working clandestinely against the authoritarian government. The websites-from-the-future were sent to the year 2007 to warn the American people of the impending dystopian future and to prevent it from ever forming in the first place
It's an interesting 'total package' concept, and there's 2 more years to go: but has this dystopian vision already arrived?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 24 2019, @09:33PM (5 children)
This is the *real* moral relativism we ought to be afraid of...
You know what? Fucking right I believe my "standards" ought to be hegemonic, because the only "standards" I have are to keep engaged with reality and not to cause unnecessary suffering. I am a left-libertarian in exile, someone who believes the role of government is to, as it is written, "provide for the general welfare of the people" and no more, and do it as simply as possible. A Herculean, ever-shifting task like that may still require a tremendous amount of machinery and regulation; "as simply as possible" may be very complex indeed.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @04:04AM (4 children)
You now understand the necessity of a hegemony if standards are to be universal. The next step is to realize such a hegemony must also be capable of protecting itself from parallel systems attempting to displace it, or else it wouldn't be much of a hegemony.
Your system that is designed to "provide for the general welfare of the people", what provisions does it make to protect itself from being changed by the very people it was designed to serve? How does it manage dissenters? How does it deal with political crises (ideally this stage should never be reached)? What about external threats?
If it cannot do that, then something more stable would replace or change it, into one that you might not agree with.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 25 2019, @04:51AM (3 children)
Define "stable." And don't patronize me; part of my constant cynicism comes from knowing that everything is a battle with entropy, that about 1 in 90 people are sociopaths, and that "against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
The best way to defeat your enemies is to make them friends. Failing that, the next best way is to remove their will to fight.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @05:56AM (1 child)
A system is stable if it is able to do what it was designed to do without interference. A more stable system is a system that can do exactly what it was designed to do longer than a less stable system.
A system is no longer considered stable if it cannot do what it was designed for, it is only a matter of time before it is replaced, whether acknowledged or not, eg turning from "provide for the general welfare of the people" to "provide for the general welfare of the *right kinds of* people", or maybe even "provide for the general welfare of the people while supplies last". Whether through corruption, subversion or physical constraints, it changed, its founders might not even recognize it anymore or see it as a bad parody. Battling with entropy is good way to put it.
How far are you willing to go to make friends? How far are you going to go to keep them friends? How far are you willing to go to "remove their will to fight"? Are you willing to go as far as your enemies?
It is for this reason I believe humanity should be scattered forever, preferably out of Earth and across the universe. You get to make your utopia, the theorcrat can make his. It is not stable, as it is only a matter of time before it becomes too crowded again, but at least it'll take longer by kicking the can down the long long road.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 25 2019, @09:53PM
Yes...I too believe that we have to go into space if we're to survive, if only because this poor planet has been ravaged so badly. But it may be too late. And if anything, if we can't even maintain our natal world, how are we going to terraform a hostile planet? We're decades or centuries away from that.
Nothing guarantees we'll make it. We may very well blow ourselves back to a pre-Industrial-Age civilization, and be stuck there until extinction, not having any more cheap energy left in the form of fossil fuels to have another one. We may actually be looking at the answer to Fermi's Paradox as we speak, and find out that it's Death, riding on a pale horse, the name of which is "Stupidity."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @02:52PM
You give yourself too much credit. The gods will defeat you soon enough.