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"I don't have an e-mail address. As much as I admire the Internet I suffer literally agoraphobia, which in it's original sense means a fear of the marketplace. I do not want to receive three hundred e-mail messages per week from strangers…"
- William Gibson
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| Concrete Boxes | ||
| Self storage for your body - living space designed for people who spend most of their time ignoring their surroundings anyway. |
I couldn't resist adding this one. We already have living spaces like this (lots of us have lived in them at one or another point in our lives). But this definition and quote narrow it down considerably to the bare essentials: self storage for the human body.
| Earth is old and crowded and awfully beat up. Most of the population lives in little concrete boxes for years on end, circulating from the kitchen to the bathroom to the virtual reality hookup, over and over, except for their lifetime's seven "outside years" during which they supposedly earn enough for their ninety-odd years on the dole. |
| Technovelgy from Earth Made of Glass,
by John Barnes. Published by Tom Doherty Associates in 1998 Additional resources -
|
Not really cheery, is it? On the other hand, if all you do is watch TV in your apartment, maybe this is all you really need. Think about it: you can get a nice 10'x10' air-conditioned self storage unit with lights and an electrical outlet for less than $100 per month. What do you pay in rent every month?
The notion of spending your lifetime in a box, cut off from the world and from others, was explored almost a century earlier in the prescient The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
