The Ludic Revolution (2)
"I thought I was supposed to be unfrozen in 2502," I said, hoping I could finally start getting some answers. "Ah yes," she said, still not yet catching her breath. "You see, nobody wants to maintain the facilities anymore. They decided to unfreeze everyone. They called my family and asked if we'd like to meet you when you were unfrozen. Naturally, I was chantified, um, excited by the opportunity to learn about you and your times." "What do you mean, they didn't want to maintain the facilities? Dr. Mendel paid them to keep me frozen until 2502." "Yes, that's a part that I'm most chant...intrigued by. Your concept of payment. Martin Mendel gave them dollar papers and in return he was assured of your staying until 2502. You see, we no longer trade dollar papers." "Dollar papers?" I asked. "You're talking about money." "Ah yes," she said. "That word fell into disuse after the Ludic Revolution. We began calling them dollar papers, because money isn't really meaningful. It's not really a tangible, physical thing. Dollar papers made much more sense, because that's all money really was." "Was? Whoa, slow down," I said. "Do you mean that there's no such thing as money anymore, or dollar papers, or whatever? And what's this Ludic Revolution?" "I'm sorry," she said, "I had intended to give you a history lesson before we discoursed, but I was so excited to meet you. I should explain all that had happened since the Millennium." "Yes," I said, "that would be great." That was, after all, why I had myself frozen in the first place. I wanted to hear the story. "It's hard to pin-point the exact date that the Ludic Revolution started," she began. "Like the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution before it, the Ludic Revolution got its start in several places at different times. One of the earliest known ludic manifestations is attributed to the Sudbury Valley School, formed in 1968, a school which was based on fun, instead of work. However, it wasn't until much later, after many other ludic manifestations started cropping up, that ludic education began to gain popularity. The kids in the ludic schools grew by leaps and bounds, and the traditional schools simply couldn't keep up. By 2025, the only schools that existed were ludic. "The next known ludic manifestation was the Free Software Foundation in 1984. Their project was called GNU, and its goal was to build a complete open source operating system. One of their first creations was a compiler called GCC. Of course, nobody thought much of this at the time. They thought they were just getting together to write some software, but it had subtle ripples in the economy. Before this, the compiler industry was huge. Companies spent thousands of dollar papers for compilers. Then these GNU people came along, wrote one for fun and gave it away for free. Why spend all these dollar papers on an inferior product when you can get a better and more standards-compliant compiler for free? The compiler market all but fell apart. "Less than a decade before you were frozen, the Internet was gaining popularity. The Internet was the new media. Many in the Millennium times knew that it was a revolutionary technology, but it didn't just have technological ramifications. Every new technology subtly alters the culture and economy, but never redefines it. People of the Millennium times assumed that the Internet was no different, and they tried to apply the old economy and culture to the new technology. This was very hard to do. Many tried and failed. "Their failure, of course, was in not acknowledging that this technology was not like those before it. The media before it, like the printing press, television, and radio, were all expensive and therefore could only be undertaken in order to acquire dollar papers. The Internet was a community-based medium, where anyone who owned a computer could publish. This is not to say that it was impossible to acquire dollar papers using the Internet, just very difficult. There was too much competition with people who are willing to do things for free. "Now with a medium with which programmers from all over the world were able to collaborate easily, free software began to spread more quickly. The next industry to be replaced was operating systems. Linux, created in 1991, and FreeBSD, created in 1993, all but destroyed the Unix industry by 2012, and ended the operating system market altogether by 2028, when Microsoft announced that it would use Linux as the kernel for its ubiquitous Windows interface. Once this happened, free software began replacing commercial software across the board. Since computer software was starting to be used by absolutely everyone, people began getting used to the idea of using free products which people made for fun. They had no idea that this was subtly changing their values, and increasingly, the values of the entire culture. "In the meantime, the entertainment industry was facing its own turmoil. At the time you were frozen, entertainment was a huge industry, monopolized by Hollywood corporations. At first, the dispute was over illegally-traded sound files. There were several court battles as the old media tried to find its place in the new media, but as software and education started approaching a ludic model in the 2020's, entertainment started following suit. Individuals found ways to publish and promote themselves as good as or better than the traditional radio-based labels. The Internet created a community-based atmosphere that the labels simply couldn't compete with. The labels resisted by trying to place artificial costs on the Internet, but all they were doing was delaying the inevitable. By 2036, any artist which refused to give their music away for free was simply ignored, and in 2041, the last Hollywood entertainment corporation closed its doors. "There was simply no way to compete with this fun-based model. You can't pay enough dollar papers to make something better than what people are willing to do for free. The people you give dollar papers to won't do as good as people who do it for fun. Fun is simply not something dollar papers can compete with. "All along, the underlying values of the entire culture were slowly changing. As people started having fun, they didn't care so much about commodities anymore. I don't mean offense, but the people of your time were sick. They were obsessed with commodities. This was because they weren't having any fun. Once they began to have some real fun, life took on a whole new meaning. Instead of trying to acquire commodities, they started to become more interested in playing. "Like a set of dominoes, once you tip over a few, it takes on a life of its own and the entire set comes down. This is what happened with the Ludic Revolution. One by one, entire industries slowly began to be replaced by their ludic counterparts. This took a long time, over a century, and there were many bitter court battles, too many to list, but like a flood, once it started, there was no way to stop it. By the 2110's, there were very few non-ludic industries left. The economy didn't so much fall apart; it was just transformed. Instead of being based on work, it began to be based on play. Instead of being based on products, it began to be based on services. It's a good thing too. At the rate the people of your time were consuming the world, there wouldn't have been anything left to consume by the time you were to be unfrozen." "I thought that the commodities we were taking from the Earth would replenish themselves," I said. "Many of the commodities the people of your time were using," she replied, "such as lumber and fossil fuels, are produced by the Earth at a slow rate. They took millions or even billions of years to get there, and the people of your time were using them up in hundreds. The solution to this at the time of the Millennium was to just ignore the problem and hope it would go away. Most people nowadays think it's pretty funny, but only because we have the retrospect of 238 years. I'm sure it was no laughing matter at the time. "Anyway, the need for dollar papers was perpetually decreasing. People spent less time trying to get dollar papers and more time playing. Many of the things they used to need dollar papers for were now available for free. As the economy became less product-based and more service-based and as their values began to shift away from work and towards play, people became less and less used to trading dollar papers, and became more and more used to asking for things from people whom they knew enjoyed doing it. If they had a leaky faucet, for example, it became commonplace to call someone whom they knew loved to fix things." "Wait," I interrupted. "Do you mean that people fixed faucets and cleaned toilets and made food and everything for fun?" "Yes," she replied. "I know it sounds strange to you now, but please remember that 236 years have passed. A lot has happened since the Millennium. In fact, it seems very strange to us that people of the Millennium times actually enslaved themselves like that just for dollar papers. Our times are very different. After a few industries were transformed, the values began to change. Once a culture has different values, you'd be amazed how different things will become. By the 2150's, it was rare to even use dollar papers anymore. Eventually, the idea just died out. The old economy had been transformed, and the new economy seemed so natural that everyone was wondering how people could have put up with things before. The old economy just didn't make sense anymore. That's the power of values. "An interesting upshot of this is that many of the industries that existed at the time began to be considered redundant or useless. Marketing, sales, and advertising, for example, all ceased to be necessary. Nobody really enjoyed these jobs anyway. Now they were free to do more interesting things. This is also why you were unfrozen now instead of 2502. Your hosts didn't think it was very fun." I couldn't help but laugh. "You mean people just do things they think is fun and don't do things that aren't fun? It's amazing that anything gets done." "I'd actually like to ask the same question of you. I find it amazing that anything got done in the Millennium time. How could people of your time do things for dollar papers? If they don't get fun from it, why did they do it?" she asked. Actually, that's kind of a good point. "Well," I said, "I suppose people figured that they could use the money to buy stuff and then they could use the stuff to have fun. But they got bored with it pretty quickly, or they just found that the stuff wasn't as fun as they thought it would be, so then they just need more money to buy more stuff." She just looked at me oddly for a few seconds. Now that I see it from a future person's point of view, our way of life was kind of odd. "This has always been something I was chantified by," she said, again accidentally slipping back to her dialect. "Perhaps I should explain the ideas of Friedrich Schulz in 2109. It may explain why play is so much better than work. Schulz first explained that work, pain, anguish, and suffering were all aspects of a more general concept he called stress. He showed that the entire culture was based on stress. The roots stemmed from the Puritans, who considered hard work to be noble, because idle hands were the devil's playground. The Buddhists claimed life was suffering. Mr. Schulz found that on the one hand, too much stress will kill people, but too little and they will become stagnant and depressed. People are most healthy when they have a balance. "It's the very nature of playing that you do it when you feel like it, and is therefore a more healthy lifestyle than the work-based lifestyle, which is excessively stressful. Friedrich Schulz claimed that the main difference is between living for some future reward versus living for the present. The Puritans and the people of your time were always working toward some future reward, ignoring the present. They considered it noble to live this way. We, on the other hand, live for the present. We don't try to accomplish something we don't already have, simply because we don't feel like anything is missing." "I guess I'm just surprised that things get done," I said, "that people will actually do things for free." "This is why things get done," she explained. "A lot more gets done now than in your time. No more clock watching. No more looking busy. People spend all of their time playing. The economy works because everybody enjoys different things. As for doing things for free, why do people do hobbies for free? Why do they play basketball and go sailing for free? Because it's fun. The only difference between work and play is whether or not you get paid for it. Nowadays, if something isn't fun, people just don't do it. You don't have to try to force somebody to do something they don't want to do; you just have to find somebody who wants to do it." "What if you can't find anyone to do something?" I asked. "Then you do it yourself. Again, you have to remember that our values and lives are very different than yours. We have a lot of free time, and we don't dread doing things. There's no such thing as a chore. If there aren't enough people in our territory that enjoy making food, for example, we make it ourselves. What usually happens is that all sorts of people in the village discover the joys of gardening and cooking, and there's no longer a lack of people to make food. "I can see how it may seem unlikely that the economy could have shifted this drastically, but remember, it didn't happen all at once. It took 236 years to get this way, and the traditional economy didn't give up without a fight. It tried to lobby the law-makers. All that did was stall things, but as values changed, the lobbyists and law-makers both began to change. Like the Agricultural Revolution and Industrial Revolution, this Revolution was not a bloody battle. This Revolution didn't involve ripping down the old world order. It was simply a matter of abandoning the old values and adopting the new ones. Nobody had to force this to happen. It happened by itself. "This is not to say that everyone agreed about everything. The global economy was based on the trading of commodities. By the 2140's, the global economy was no longer necessary. The economy started to become increasingly localized. One thing that became obvious was that this delusion that everyone on the planet needs to agree on absolutely everything can also be abandoned. Territorial boundaries began to be formed. The United States as you remember it no longer exists. It is now 397 distinct territories, each with its own laws, values, and economy." "The United States is gone?!" I exclaimed. "Yes. Does this bother you? People were very displeased with their country, yet they were frighteningly patriotic, as if they were trying to hold on to something they instinctively knew was doomed. It was a very odd combination, and it was bound to fall apart. Don't worry, there was no bloody civil war. A huge country was simply no longer necessary. The boundaries formed by themselves. The states have always served as imaginary boundaries, but as time went on, the boundaries became more meaningful, and eventually even those were too big. By now, the territories are so different that nobody would consider crossing the boundaries. This may sound like they grew apart, but in fact, they grow closer. In the Millennium times, people were very separated from each other, the sense of community all but demolished. As people got closer to their local communities, the need for a huge unified country simply disappeared." "So do all the territories hate each other?" I asked. "You have to understand that our values are very different from yours. If we differ on things, we don't find that a reason to go to war. To each his own. Instead of going to war when we disagree, we just do things our own way and let them do things their way. There's no one right way to live. The reason people don't cross boundaries isn't because they hate each other. There just isn't anything there for them. Everything they need is local to them. "Things work now. For centuries before the Ludic Revolution, thinkers tried to figure out how to make people live together on a huge scale. All these theories proliferated. Monarchy, capitalism, democracy, socialism, oligarchy, the list goes on and on. They were all wrought with problems. At first, they thought the problems were in their theories, then later they just gave up and figured the problems were with human nature. They reasoned that humans must be flawed if it was impossible to get millions of them to live exactly the same way, which we find somewhat absurd nowadays. Diversity cannot be stripped from any species. It's just not the way nature builds them. People were trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, then called themselves sinners when they failed. "People were ready to just settle on the one with the least problems. They figured people are just flawed and they just need to pick the one that most caters to their flawed nature. But all along, there was nothing wrong with their theories; the problem was with the scale. Nothing works on a large scale. Pretty much anything can work on a small scale. People just decide how they want to live and they live that way. If it doesn't work, they change it. They don't have an entire continent to try to convince. There's very little need for compromise." "With everything so separate," I asked, "where does the Internet come into all of this?" "The Internet would be all but unrecognizable to you now," she replied. "First of all, it's not that archaic picture-based interface called a web that you probably remember. It has several interfaces. One interface may look to you like an invisible phone, but it's a little more complicated than that. There are also video interfaces to it. As for its uses, it's become a centralized database and global communication network, but mainly a community bulletin board. This bulletin board isn't just for notes. Everything is maintained on it. Anything you might need to find is posted on the Internet: announcements, black lists, voting (if the territory chooses to be a democracy), all public and private discourse of any kind uses the Internet." "What's a black list?" I asked. "Black listing is a concept that has evolved over a very long time. I can't explain it too completely without going over the entire history behind it. I'll try to describe it briefly. Black lists are basically a peace-keeping mechanism which many territories have adopted. If someone tries to thwart our excellent ludic economy to serve their own ends, they get black listed. It's somewhat like bankruptcy in the Millennium times. Nobody trusts you and won't help you out. Black listing is the worst thing that can happen to you in this economy because you have to learn to fend for yourself. For this reason, people do everything in their power to stay off the black list. It's hard to get on a black list, but nobody tries to push the limits, because the consequences are so heavy." "That sounds a little harsh," I said. "So you just let them die? Who's in charge of black listing? What if someone is black listed wrongly? "The government is in charge of black listing. People get black listed when the government receives enough complaints from citizens. In our territory, the last time someone has been black listed was 2203. He hated it and begged to be removed from the black list. The government worked with him over the next ten years to help him to regain the trust and take him off of the black list. Nobody is black listed wrongly, at least nobody has tried to argue that they were. If they are, the government would step in and mediate. "Remember, each territory does things their own way and has its own government. Black listing, for example, is a civics system that has evolved over a long time, and it works very well for many territories. There is virtually no crime in our particular territory. Our ways work for us. Some territories use black lists, some don't. Most territories are democracies. Real democracies, none of this fake representative democracy people in the Millenium times had to settle with due to the sheer scale on which they tried to implement it. Other territories would probably be considered fascist by Millennium-time United States standards. Some territories are practically anarchistic. Some are monarchies, some are oligarchies, some are socialist. Most are ludic, but I've heard that some have gone back to the old-style dollar paper economy. I don't really pay much attention. It's their life, not mine." "It sounds like you're just talking about the United States. What about the rest of the world?" "There is no United States. When I talk about territories, I'm talking about territories all over the world. They all do things their own way." "Funny," I said. "I always thought the Internet would globalize the world, not localize it." "There's nothing inherent in the Internet that makes it so cut and dried. It doesn't necessarily just lend itself to globalizing. If you think globally, it works for global things. If you think locally, it works for local things. For us it works for both, but mostly local things. Just because things are localized doesn't mean that everyone hates each other and doesn't want to communicate. For the most part, they no longer have as much reason to. They are no longer trying to take their commodities or control their territories. Even so, there is still plenty of inter-territorial communication. It's just not as vital as it used to be for the people in your time." I asked Dr. Mendel to show me some of the modern-day Internet terminals. I didn't really understand them. She interacted with them mostly verbally, but I didn't really understand much of what she said. She told me this was because she was using many verbal shortcuts which have entered the vocabulary over the last century or so. Using this new vocabulary, she was able to find anything she was looking for within a second or two. It was amazing. She also showed me some pictures from the legendary Ludic Revolution. I think I got what I came here for. I got to see how the story ends. The story we were enacting was a work story. Everything in our story revolved around jobs. What I came to find when I was unfrozen in 2238 is the end of our story: the end of work. Now all I have to do is learn how to have fun. --- For other stories and recommended reading, check out: http://www.prepense.org/
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