SK: Can we talk about the Microsoft Wars now?
JS:
Orwell was right. Everyone was forced to read his book and yet, it
still happened. In reality, that is all anybody needs to know.
SK: Orwell?
JS:
<sighs> Back in 1949, an author by the name of George Orwell
published a novel titled 1984. It was a look into the future and
basically created the concept in society of Big Brother. This Big
Brother was a government, any government really, which would watch over
you like a child. Your life would be monitored and controlled 24 hours
per day. The dictionary would not grow in size, but shrink, as words
and thoughts were continually restricted. Anyone who possessed a
thought against the government, system or the way things were being run
would be turned in by friends/family/neighbors as a thought criminal.
One
by one, various ministries were set up to control every aspect of life,
all for the betterment of society, and most had some plausible excuse
bringing them into existence. There would be monitors installed
everywhere, so you were continually watched and controlled. It was one
of the best- selling and most widely talked-about books of all time.
Many movies were created showing various flavors of the book.
SK: Well, if everybody knew about it, then it surely didn’t happen.
JS:
Not in 1984, no. The final vehicle for control wasn’t chosen until
the early 1990s and it took a while to roll out globally. Sometime
during 2010, the governments around the world achieved 95 percent of
what they wanted. The vast majority of citizens carried with them a
24-hour monitoring device, which could be accessed remotely and would,
via GPS, give a complete picture of their travels. Each one had a
unique ID. Best of all, the devices were marketed in such a way as to
make people think they were nothing unless they had one and kept it with
them at all times.
When
it became apparent that some portions of society simply couldn’t afford
the devices—yes, each citizen paid for their own, and gladly…they even
paid to customize them—most governments came up with some kind of
ministry or program to ensure each and every person falling into the
“cannot afford” category was issued one under some plausible story as
“medical need” or “neighborhood watch.” This removed the
poor-person-rejection-of-charity problem. Nobody felt insulted to
receive the devices, since the devices allowed them to communicate with
anyone at any time, as long as they knew the other person’s unique ID.
SK:
Do you honestly expect me to believe that everybody stood in line to
get a unique ID for the government to monitor them 24 hours per day,
seven days per week?
JS:
No. They didn’t see it like that. They stood in line to get the latest
and greatest cellphone with video camera, GPS, speaker phone, Internet
access, and every other buzz phrase marketing could think of. If you
don’t know what any of that is, it doesn’t matter. All you need to know
is the more applications, called apps, it had, the more people wanted
it.
Each
phone had to have a phone number, which was globally unique so anyone
in the world could call anybody else in the world, no matter where they
were at the time. It was that “anywhere, anytime” communications
capability that was a major selling point. A system of assigning phone
numbers to allow for international calling had been in place for many
years due to the older land line system, so it was simply leveraged.
Everyone
proudly carried and used their government monitoring device. There
were even crime shows on television showing how law enforcement agencies
could track a cellphone as long as it was turned on. What they didn’t
tell you was that the phone would periodically report in even when
turned off, and if certain instructions were waiting, it would turn
itself back on, silently, so full monitoring could continue without the
owner being aware.
The
only thing that could truly stop monitoring was to remove the battery,
then turn the cellphone on to drain the hidden reserve. When you did
that, however, the phone was of no use.
SK:
So let me get this straight—you’re saying that there was a
communications network that could monitor every person in the country?
JS:
No. Before the middle of 2011, thanks to some production cost
reductions, it was every person on the planet living in any civilized
country and even many third world countries. A basic cellphone could be
manufactured and sold for under $20 retail, which put the actual
production cost at about $6. Those countries too poor or with terrain
too rough used the satellite phones, which cost a bit more, but
leveraged cellphone components to reduce costs. Both networks were
monitored by government agencies, even though commercial companies were
providing the services to the cellphone owners. Even children in third
world countries who didn’t have food to eat or a bank account in their
name had a phone so they could be tracked.
“John
Smith: Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars” is one big interview.
It is a transcript of a dialogue between “John Smith” (who, as the
title of the book implies is the last known survivor of the Microsoft
wars) and the interviewer for a prominent news organization.
Genre – Dystopian Fiction
Rating – PG
More details about the author
Website http://johnsmith-book.com/
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