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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Paid Avoidance Zone | ||
| An area where the inhabitants agree, for a government-paid fee, to live without sophisticated services. |
It's expensive to provide elaborate services (technical and social); so, what if you designated particular areas of the country and paid people to live there? The payment being less than it would cost to provide the infrastructure that we all expect as part of modern life.
| The paid-avoidance areas were created as a way of economizing on public expenditure after the Great Bay Quake. It was cheaper to pay the refugees to go without up-to-the-minute equipment. Which they couldn't have afforded anyhow.
...settlements created by refugees from Northern California after the Great Bay Quake. Literally millions of traumatized fugitives had straggled southward. For years they survived in tents and shanties, dependent on federal handouts .. afraid to enter a building with a solid roof for fear it would crash down and kill them. ...One of the best thing about a paid-avoidance area is that you can still get manual cooking. |
| Technovelgy from The Shockwave Rider,
by John Brunner. Published by Harper and Row in 1975 Additional resources -
|
The left-handed benefit, of course, is that you don't have to deal with all of the "conveniences" of modern life, like leaving a data-trail everywhere you go.
Paid avoidance zones are listed as technovelgy because, far from having no technology, they are sometimes showcases for ecofast building and other techniques that make maximum use of minimum resources.
"What we don't have is veephone service. The feds have been on at us for years to link into the data-net on the same token basis as the other paid-avoidance communities, but to satisfy their computers yu have to have veephone-sized bandpass capacity... we prefer to stay out and solve our own problems."
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Shockwave Rider
More Ideas
and Technology by John Brunner
Tech news articles related to The Shockwave Rider
Tech news articles related to works by John Brunner
Paid Avoidance Zone-related
news articles:
- Information-Free Zones Future Vacation Spot
- We Could Downgrade Puerto Rico - And Thereby Save It
- California Gets Shockwave Rider-Style Avoidance Zones
| Solar House Concept Unfolds Solar Panels Like A Flower |
| San Fran's Tiny Homeless |
| Rotating House in Bosnia |
| Voyager Luxury Space Hotel Launches In 2023 |
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'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'If you surf over a bump... If you surf over a pothole...'
'Then the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and they stood an instant transfixed...'
'Noiselessly, on rubber-tired wheels, they journeyed...'
'...copy two of the original document no longer can be superimposed on copy one.'
My prize robot, tall, dashing would speak and act for me...
'A palm lock must be keyed to one individual's hand shape and palm lines.'
'I have transferred the ego of a dog to a synthetic dog brain in the skull case of a robot dog.'
