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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
 |
| 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. |
| 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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