By 2040, the combination of fear of Authority AI censors and the easy accessibility of Authority-approved digital publications from yotta-byte servers led most people to give up buying paper-based books or zines. Many people had long since stopped borrowing materials from public B&M (bricks and mortar) libraries when it was learned that records of what materials members borrowed were regularly examined by the authorities, purportedly to ensure homeland security. As a result, the paper publishing industry collapsed and most B&M libraries closed. Tragically, many people also destroyed the paper printed books in their home libraries. These days, due to the very high cost and rarity of paper, only religious tracts like the Bible, Qu-ran, and the Book of Mormon are still printed on paper.
And so, we now live in a dystopia that ironically blends the worlds described in two “subversive” 20th century books: 1984 , in which “Big Brother” is watching us and Fahrenheit 451 , in which books and magazines are burned as being subversive
Perhaps the most frightening issue regarding the ubiquity of holopods is this: how do we know that the holographic images we are seeing when we holocom with people, say in the great City State of Paris or the Federation of Oceania are real? Isn’t it possible that government N&I (news and information) agencies around the world are employing highly sophisticated VR (virtual reality) technologies to show a distorted propagandistic picture of the lives of their citizens? And that these agencies might even be intercepting the communications of ordinary citizens, digitally altering our words and superimposing false holographic images? How do we know that what we’re seeing and hearing is real? These are questions that my great-grand children first asked me some twenty years ago and that have been haunting me ever since.
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