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Alongside Night on the WWW [long]
The following article is the foreword to the new edition of
_Alongside Night_ by J. Neil Schulman, available for download in
HTML format from http://www.pulpless.com/nite.html . Permission
to cross-post in appropriate newsgroups, mail lists, and file
bases granted. Copyright (c) 1996 by J. Neil Schulman. All other
rights reserved.
Pulling Alongside Night
The Enabling Technology is Here
by J. Kent Hastings ([email protected])
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.
##
J. Kent. Hastings is co-director of the Agorist Institute
(http://www.agorist.org), a partner in the Pulpless.Com online
publishing venture (http://www.pulpless.com), a long-time
cypherpunk, and radical activist.