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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
- Larry Niven
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| 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. |
| Technovelgy 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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'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
'At the end of each appendage's eight fingers there are tinier appendages...'
'We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,' said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi.
