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"We were essentially being shell-shocked by rapid change. That was one of the things you needed science-fiction writers for back in the Sixties, because we could cope with the future."
- 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
| Why Not Move A Warehouse District? |
| Amazon Will Send You Heinlein's Knockdown Cabin |
| Elegant Bivouac Shelter Produces Water And Electricity |
| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
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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.'
