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"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Credit Wake | ||
| The electronic trail of our transactions across the Net. |
This is a great metaphor, for anyone who has sat in the back of a boat and watched the wake of the boat as it extends into the distance.
| If our society ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove. |
| Technovelgy from Hyperion,
by Dan Simmons. Published by Doubleday in 1989 Additional resources -
|
Purists may argue that a credit wake is not a gadget of some sort, and therefore not a suitable subject for this site. However, a credit wake is a technological artifact. And we all make long ones, starting when we get our first credit card; sometimes when someone buys a pre-paid card for toys that is in our names.
Although this is an early mention of the term, I don't think Simmons was the first one with the concept, but I can't cite an earlier reference.
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'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
