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"Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together."
- Ray Bradbury
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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. |
| 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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More Ideas
and Technology from The Shockwave Rider
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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
| Driverless Hotel Rooms Predicted In 1828 |
| Humans Could Take Up A LOT Less Space |
| Oh Yes, We're Building The Rotating Tower In Dubai |
| Real-Life Macau or Ghost In The Shell |
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'The world ... is drenched in unfamiliar information all the way to the horizon.'
'He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna...'
'It may be organic damage. It may be permanent. Time'll tell, and only after you are off Substance D for a long while.'
It's the polite thing to do, and has been the polite thing to do for about four generations.
