NEW YORK - As every schoolchild, enhanced rodent chef and surveillance neural net knows, we live in the Post Political Age.
Once the full potential of Prozac class pharmas and mood leveling co-processors were unleashed - and government finally assumed its proper ideology-free technocratic role: providing labor, leisure, material goods and hardened shelter from the occasional class 9 super storm - verbal and physical conflict lessened and finally, disappeared altogether.
Well, almost.
Some have decided to retain their "freedom". As long as these misguided souls stay out of trouble their unfortunate choice is tolerated. A few of these people, because of their artistic, scientific or technical talents - or simply because they're colorful characters - are celebrated as living national treasures; walking monuments of a bygone age.
Abercrombie Whifflebat is such a man: a political leftist, a man of passionate conviction, a man living the turbulent past in the emotionally quiet present. On his 115th birthday, we visited Mr. Whifflebat in his small, government subsidized Manhattan apartment.
Because of his unusual views (more about those later), he's considered an intellectual nature preserve.
Mr. Whifflebat's cramped apartment is filled with books and their strangely organic smell of cellular decay fills the whole space. There are also several vintage computers and, surprisingly, a current model SenseNet Freefloat display cube.
"As much as I love Das Kapital and moldy copies of Monthly Review, I have to keep in touch with what's going on now," Mr. Whifflebat said with a hint of disdain (how curious) in his gravely voice.
Comfortably settled into his favorite old chair ("Che Guevara sat in this chair") we started the interview.
...
SenseNet: The world has changed a great deal since you were a young man. Surely you must admit that although developments have moved in a direction not to your taste, many positive things have happened.
Whifflebat: You're referring to dramatically boosted longevity, various technical innovations and so on?
SenseNet: Yes, but beyond that the peace which most of the world now enjoys.
Whifflebat: Well, if it is peace, it's the peace of the grave, a psycho-pharmacological and neuro-chip implant enforced tomb. I prefer argument, push and pull...bad cigars, hard drinks and harder women, preferably smoking bad cigars and holding a hard drink. I want a world in which serious matters are hashed out...serious people wrestle with pressing issues and through the fragile, tempestuous marriage of struggle and theory, achieve what seems impossible in this old world: positive change."
SenseNet: I imagine your days are quite lonely without the sort of raucous debate and activism you describe?
Whifflebat: To be honest, yes. But there are cold comforts. For example, just today, using the memory preserving/sharpening co-processor I had installed when I was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in '47, I re-lived a listserv discussion from 2007.
SenseNet: Listserv?
Whifflebat: Sort of a first gen version of what you'd call a hive event.
SenseNet: What was the discussion about?
Whifflebat: Oh, whether or not Castro's Cuba was, considering the harsh circumstances created by US imperialism, a success. I argued all sides of the question. Of course, I'm the only person - possibly on the whole planet and its orbital archipelago - who gives a rat's ass about this but it was fun...after a fashion, to mix it up. Even if I was only mixing it up with myself.
[...]
Full at SenseNet stream "Paleo-Quest"
.d.