Palm Beach, Tower D

You likely know already that the Four Towers, in which the great majority of my readers pass the days of their lives, were also made to host, in the early years after the Revolution of 20**, the four most critical Ministries of the Revolutionary Council. Over time their presence there not only enabled them to fulfill their vital roles in building our Revolutionary society, but also gave the inhabitants of the different Towers their own distinct traditions, distinct points of pride, and you might say, by now, distinct cultures. There are of course multiple skyways passing between the Towers, and we all must go from the one to the other each time we need an unlock for any petition to a Ministry other than the one whose Tower we inhabit (a “non-resident unlock” or NRU as it’s called). Officially speaking it’s all one unit, now as the day after the Revolution. But everyone knows that whenever we pass through a skyway we are at least unofficially passing into foreign territory, and we both delight in, and are somewhat intimidated by, the strange mentalities and customs we encounter when we undertake, for administrative purposes or simply for pleasure, to travel extraturrally.

Tower A, as you know, houses the Ministry of Transportation. That is where you must go whenever you wish to leave Palm Beach, for far Syktyvkar, say, or Jigalong just three Quads away. Extraquadral travel requires an unlock, of course, which can only be got by a petition to the Ministry. So you go to Tower A for your NRU first, and if you’re lucky you manage to set an appointment to ride out on a parfitron beam within the same day. As you wander the hallways of the NRU office on the eighth floor, waiting your turn, you may spend a few seconds before one of the many beautiful images along the walls, showcasing the vivid and colorful productions from years past of the old-fashioned drone operas for which Tower A is famous, and which they still put on once a year in the night sky when the aurora borealis is itself at its most vivid and colorful. The program is always varied, but within the distinct culture that has grown up in Tower A over the past few generations, far and away the most cherished of the drone operas is the one they call Airline Safety Video. And the old-timers always laugh upon seeing the ever new, ever earnest surprise of each new generation at the discovery that this great work of art has its origins in a pre-Revolutionary practice that was not initially an art-form at all, and that was repeated without fail each time an airplane was about to take off. The preeminent scholars of Tower A always rush to add, superciliously, that much of the emotional depth and almost all of the narrative complexity for which Airline Safety Video is justly treasured are but superadditions, totally absent throughout all of the aviation era and even well into our own Revolutionary age. For example, they remind us sternly, as if ready to subject the overexcited youth to an iris-scanning pop-quiz, that in the early years one could not have expected, by the end of the performance, to see that dear waif known as “Air France Flight Attendant” finding her match in the square-jawed “Delta Pilot”. In fact they say these two characters did not even belong to “the same airline”, and thus could never have so much as crossed paths, let alone fallen in love, in the old days. But of course the youth do not listen, and have only the vaguest idea of what “airlines” even were, and really just long to witness, once again, the innumerable luminous drones in the night sky that make up these composite beings, like so many of Cyrano de Bergerac’s swarming volatiles on the surface of the Sun, as they go in for their juicy kiss.

A nine-trillion-drone still from Airline Safety Video (© Ministry of Transportation)

But let us continue our tour. Tower B, you will know, hosts the Ministry of Education. It is to the dreaded 11th floor of that Tower that every 18-year-old must go for their comprehensive exams on the philology, hermeneutics, and moral philosophy of The Love Boat, and to the 12th floor, two years later, for their capstone eye-saccade performance of Nell Carter’s most profound monologues —in their original Italian!¹— from Season 5 of La piccola grande Nell… though there is always a steady stream of criticism from those reformers who maintain that these were “just shows”, with no relevance at all to the lives of our youth here in Palm Beach. Sure, the Ministry always responds, with that bureaucratic deadpan so effective in foreclosing any further appeals, there’s no relevance at the outset, when the little tykes are first exposed to these classics at the age of four or five. But they become relevant through mastery of them. Whatever your view of the Ministry’s approach to education, when you visit Tower B, and you see the youth cramming for their exams, and perhaps you also see some older people, right up to the cut-off age of 75, petitioning for an unlock to retake the exams they failed in their own youth, you cannot fail to be struck by the beautiful images in this Tower’s halls of the annual School Shooter Safety Drill festival. Beloved by non-residents and residents alike, today the festival is attended by upwards of 35% extraquadral revelers. Naturally it is every youth’s dream to be chosen as “the Shooter”, but inevitably each adapts to their own assigned role, and plays it with such gusto that none can come away, not even those beamed-in visitors from Swakopmund’s Tower B to whom they are often compared, without discovering a deep admiration for the richness of popular tradition as exemplified here at Palm Beach. The very apex of the School Shooter Safety Drill festival is reached when “the Principal” is shot in the heart at point-blank range, after which the Shooter turns the gun on himself, and all the pupils’ slain corpses rise again and perform a silent ring dance around him as you might once have seen around a Maypole, or a funeral pyre for victims of the plague. Most agree that School Shooter Safety Drill richly deserves the top spot on the list of the greatest treasures of cultural heritage of the Palm Beach Revolutionary Council, where it has sat, without any really serious contenders, for over half a century now.

Tower C is where you will find the Ministry of Family Planning. It is here that all of us who have passed the age of 25 and submitted an unlock petition are, sooner or later, given an appointment to combine our gametes with those of a randomly selected resident of another Tower (extraturral pairings were always the rule; increasingly residents of Palm Beach are encouraged to petition for extraquadral mates instead, something that would have been unthinkable as recently as a decade ago, in the aim of reducing at least some of the effects of inbreeding across multiple generations in a total population of around 4,000,000). And no one has been through this rather arduous —but at moments very sweet and gratifying— procedure without participating in the Sexual Harassment Prevention Workshop. Most who show up in Tower C for their “big day” are already well aware of the deep historical roots of this particular custom. Most will likewise know that our gamete-mixing centers developed from what were once called “workplaces”. In the pre-Revolutionary era these had been specially designated buildings where many people spent a good portion of their lives engaged in tasks for which they were in turn provided remuneration, known as a “salary”, to keep themselves and their families housed, fed, and clothed. It is a well-known fact about these workplaces that towards the end of their long history they began to divert considerable energy away from work-tasks themselves, and towards the monitoring and regulation of the sexual behavior of their employees. This may seem hard to believe today, but for much of the final chapter of the long history of “work”, a general prohibition reigned on any and all mating displays in the workplace, whether symbolic or concrete. Today, of course, these same displays are the entire reason for being of the institutions that have descended from workplaces. Yet while their purposes are now exactly opposite to what they once were, some of the rituals that have survived to the present day in our mating centers still, paradoxically, retain the same features of the stagings of Sexual Harassment Prevention Workshop that had made this into such a dramatically compelling production well before the end of the work era. Some scholars believe that the formalized “approach” maneuver, which is now such a central part of the activities facilitated in our mating centers, was first developed in the context of a “role-play” exercise, as, that is, the gesture one must never perform outside of the setting of controlled play. Workshop attendees were randomly assigned to act out, in subdued form, the conduct of the harasser, whose gestures we can still see today, in socially tolerated and even celebrated form, in the performance of the Sire. Thus did the play-acted exploration of a taboo gradually evolve into a ritual consecration of the function overseen by the Ministry housed in Tower C — the function that alone maintains society in existence.

But what now about Tower D, which houses the Ministry of Communication? What are its distinctive traditions? Out of what more ancient customs did these emerge? And why, finally, do its inhabitants refer to it, with a perfectly inscrutable mix of affection and irony, as “Tower GiGi”?

Scholars have long puzzled over the several possible meanings of the famous graph (above) left behind among the collected Notes of our Great Leader, Gregg, which seems to indicate a clear primus-inter-pares status for the Ministry in question, even as it fails to make explicit wherein exactly this primacy consists — after all, there is plenty of circulation among the Four Towers, and in principle no reason at all why there should not be arrows clearly indicating the possibility of bidirectional traffic between all of them. Yet it is plain enough that for Gregg there had been some special role for Communication in the formation of our new Revolutionary society, and that in the end all the other purposes of human social life feed into it as thin meandering rivulets into some great watercourse.

We are also left to contend with the fact that, plainly, nothing about the Ministry under discussion worked out the way Gregg had envisioned in the earliest years after the Revolution. Scholars regularly remind us that back in 20** the primary medium of communication was Social-Media. This worked, they tell us, in ways that were aggressively incompatible with social cohesion and progress — the “algorithms”, they say, used to favor “posts” that stoked hostility towards a rival camp. Over the long run, it comes as no surprise, this medium exacerbated divisions and caused the gaps between opposing groups’ views to appear far greater than they ever in fact were. After Gregg came to power, he set up a Council to rethink, from the bottom up, what Social-Media might, at its best, be.

It is often forgotten that in those early Revolutionary years there was still at least some lip-service paid to the little-known 19th-century socialist thinker Karl Marx, and even to his predecessors in the yet more arcane tradition of German Idealism (these days what we call Gregg Thought is mostly only a simplified rendering of the philosophy of Derek Parfit, which was given a tremendous boost after the first successful proof-of-concept demonstration of a parfitron beam over in Tower A, plus some archaic fragments from O. K. Bouwsma that Gregg is said to have treasured for his own unknowable reasons). The members of the Council who had read G. W. F. Hegel in particular began to wonder whether, rather than configuring Social-Media so as to increase the gap between opposing viewpoints without any hope for resolution, it might not be preferable to approach opposition as a relationship, between any given propositions p and not-p, which the algorithm could then nudge users into resolving through a higher-order synthesis that simultaneously preserves and overcomes the original tension of the opposed pair. That is, why not set up Social-Media in a way that incentivizes working together towards “next-level” breakthroughs, rather than doing everything possible to keep opposed camps stuck in the trenches they have dug for themselves? Of course, some on the Council were quick to point out that it was not Hegel at all, but J. G. Fichte, who in his Wissenschaftslehre of 1795 proposed the triadic thesis-antithesis-synthesis progression from a pair of opposites through their higher-order sublation. A certain number of dissenters began setting their PERDs² with the slogan “It’s Fichte, Actually”, and soon it was enough simply to display the acronym “IFA” to let the world know where you stood on the matter. Some even had old fashioned “t-shirts” made with these three letters to help them express their dissatisfaction with the fast-emerging consensus that what Palm Beach needed most was a variety of Dialectical Social-Media, and that the conceptual forefather of this approach to inquiry was none other than G. W. F. Hegel.

Things seemed to be going great for a while after DSM went live. Posters almost instantly learned to recalibrate their posting strategies for a new system that maximizes engagement for posts that incorporate elements of the posts they are criticizing. And the enormous boost a user gets when they unlock an actual full-fledged Synthesis and get that little “S” next to their username — that was the prize that really made it all work. Political conflict was nearly done away with after just the first few months. With everyone rushing to find ways to agree, there was suddenly simply no market for antagonism. The incentive structure was the same as ever —to wit, self-advancement—, but the overall effect was identical to what you might expect even if human beings were a species of natural-born eirenists.

The end of political conflict was just the beginning, as the most remarkable transformations were in the realm of scientific discovery. It became evident soon enough that human beings chasing after that sweet Synthesis will consistently beat AI, and even the most sophisticated room-temperature qubit-processors, at detecting new solutions to the most intractable problems of theoretical physics, cosmology, and materials science. It was two previously antagonistic IFA units, recall, that in 21** managed to come up, through the gamified dialectical incentive structure of DSM, with a working ambient-pressure superconductor, previously the stuff of science fiction, in just under two weeks. And it was this breakthrough, in turn, that directly led to the development of parfitron technology — not to mention the DM/DE adjustment dials that have enabled us to fix the proportions of dark matter and dark energy in the known universe at the appropriate levels for permanently staving off cosmic heat-death, and for “tapping” black holes so as to speed up and slow down time to suit the cycles of our turral life (though of course the unlock procedure for such temporal modulation is a real pain). Nor, while we’re at it, would it have been at all possible without DSM to develop the It/Bit Switchers that we now use dozens of times a day (alright, I admit it: hundreds of times a day) to move back and forth between the physical and the informational “modes” of reality. Are the basic constituents of the world more like little pebbles, or more like words? You don’t have to choose anymore! Now you can simply switch between these different modalities according to your momentary whims. And it is this same new technology that also gives our own Towers their distinctive “Palm Beach” quality, even if they are not literally in Florida and are just three Quads away from another place with an equally vivid and unmistakable “Jigalong” quality. At least half of the residents of Palm Beach at any given time are not only not in Florida, but are in no particular physical location at all — until they switch their Switchers back from “Bit” to “It” and land, if they should wish to make their reentry the old-fashioned way, in a lounge chair with a margarita surrounded by a fake beach scene somewhere on the 6th floor of Tower A. (Of course these days you can just switch back and forth wherever you happen to be, and it is unlikely that those around you will so much as notice.)

The younger generations simply take all this for granted, but for us elders it will never cease to be a source of some shame and confusion when we are reminded that those great days of innovation are over, as DSM was discontinued abruptly in 21**. The official rationale given from the Revolutionary Council, in the form of one of their periodic “Gregg Betterments”, was that progress cannot continue indefinitely, that to allow open-ended innovation in any collectivity is the same as to permit that collectivity to vanish from existence — and not to do so explosively, in the form of the “tech apocalypse” that had been so widely feared in pre-Revolutionary years, but to do so gently, lullingly, to take us out in the same way a nursery rhyme puts a child to sleep.

Already, just as things are, if I may be blunt, we can hardly be said to exist in the way we once did — we pass back and forth between our old bodies and the code that structures them, we beam around from Palm Beach to Swakopmund to Nuuk, or at least that’s what we call these places even though we all know, other than the kitsch souvenir holo-image we get of ourselves in a lounge chair upon arrival, or on top of a Kalahari dune or mushing at the back of a dog sled, that these places have next to nothing to do with their namesakes and really look far more like one another than anything else. We contract and dilate in time according to the whims of the Council, and today the youth just take it for granted that if there is thought to be some legitimate turral or quadral reason, nothing should stop us from slowing time nearly to a standstill — at this particular moment in fact things are slowed down, if I recall correctly, to 1000 “Nights of Brahma” per second. All of which means we simply have, today, no natural sense of our existence as temporal beings. Call me old-school, but as far as I’m concerned a human who is yanked out of ordinary time is no longer properly human at all.

But at least we still have posting, and it is impossible to deny that this is one awfully beautiful point in favor of living in the present. After they scrapped DSM there was at least some talk of going back to the older Agon models that had wrought such havoc in the years before the Revolution. The idea was that now that so many of the precipitating problems of the Revolution had been worked out, our newer generations should be able to handle the antagonism more responsibly, and will likely just get a certain healthy dose of competitive “fun” out of it. As most readers will already know, it took less than half an hour, after the new Revolutionary Agon platform went live, for Vacaville simply and irreversibly to delete its quadral neighbor Akureyri.

So they discontinued both Agon and DSM. What then, today, is posting? There remain a good number of philosophers who insist that it simply does not exist in any rigorous sense at all. I will admit that whatever posting is today is something almost inconceivably abstract, with virtually nothing left of what that term had once meant. The youth now take it for granted that posting involves no sharing of word or image at all, nor even any requirement that you formulate a particular proposition even in your own inner “language of thought”.

Here is what you have to do instead, at least if you wish to do it “right” (which these days is by no means guaranteed). You go to the posting platform on the roof of Tower D. You stand on the platform and you look up at the sky (whether it is the season of its spectacular quickening by the aurorae, or not, does not matter here — we are not putting on a drone opera, but only posting), and you find in yourself what might perhaps be a thought, or just a feeling or mood or inchoate sense of vital spirit, and you take hold of that inner entity and you announce it silently to the worlds — the turral world, the quadral world, the extraquadral world, and the universe itself. You insert it into the order of things, as before the Revolution a prayerful man somewhere, perhaps it was in Cuxhaven, perhaps in Nacogdoches, might have placed a rolled up piece of paper, containing his most heartfelt petition to God, within the fissures of a specially designated wall. (Now that’s what I call an NRU petition!) From the outside it may look as if nothing has happened at all, while inwardly the poster cannot help but feel that there is no greater change possible, than just to “get it out there” like that.

That’s posting. It’s not the posting of our ancestors, and it’s definitely not the posting of the years of our DSM-induced Great Leap Forward. It’s so much more than that. Sometimes it seems to me it’s what keeps the very heavens turning, even if the Council is continually approving new petitions to slow them down to a cosmic crawl. I do it every day at least once. And I still prefer the old-fashioned way — up on the platform, beneath the night sky, silently petitioning, it now seems to me, the only One in a position truly to engage.³

1. Some of Tower B’s most well-known scholars have argued that the show in question was originally in English, first appearing on the American network NBC under the name Gimme a Break! On this theory La piccola grande Nell is only a later “overdubbed” version of the same show. But this theory remains controversial.

2. Personal Enhanced-Reality Displays.

3. I realize now that I have not yet accounted for the common habit of referring to Tower D as “Tower GiGi”. The full story will have to wait for another occasion, but it will suffice for now to explain that in the first years after the Revolution the old alphabet that begins A, B, V, G remained in widespread use. This lasted until the “Fourth Great Vibe Shift” of 21**, when the Council issued a Betterment reverting back to the Abecedarium for all official purposes. While this explanation at least enables us to understand how Tower D might once have been Tower G, the particular spelling of “GiGi” compels most philologists to conclude that the G in question was originally a voiced palatal plosive rather than a voiced velar one, and this speaks in favor of an original inhabitation of Palm Beach by speakers of a Romance language, likely Italian or Romanian, and not a Slavic one as the old alphabet would suggest. Clearly, further research is needed.