furtl

by Strobe Witherspoon

  “The Third Way,” Manny said.

  “That’s right,” Sorenson said.

  “Big fan. I tried to incorporate your theorem of pendulumism into our research and development model. The board shot me down.”

  In a whisper-quiet voice that was scratchy and timid, Sorenson responded, “Sounds like they put the ass in institutional morass.”

  “Yeah,” Manny said.

  “I apologize. I should not have cursed at your board,” Sorenson said.

  Fiona continued on, now standing next to a man she told Manny was Olaf Bergenson. Olaf was a lanky, Nordic-looking man with sharp features and thin blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Olaf is an economist, and his tutelage these past few months has been instrumental in shaping my thinking on public spending algorithms and asymmetric taxation models.”

  Olaf crossed his legs, leaned back, stroked his scraggly blonde beard, and nonchalantly broke it down for Manny in precise English with only a trace of a Norwegian accent. “This model is really quite a simple delineated quadrant taxonomy that can, if implemented properly, solve our deficit problems and reinforce and revitalize the social contract between the government and its constituency.”

  Over the next two hours, the group had a nuanced conversation about the current state of politics, economics, privacy, technology, Bhutan, about the folly of utopianist ideologies – ideologies that preach blind faith in mankind’s ability to engineer societal outcomes or blind faith in the wisdom of free markets and the benefits of mankind’s unquenchable desire to kill each other.

  Manny had been starved of this type of interaction for many years, since long before he left for Bhutan, and he now realized he missed it. Manny made every effort to adopt the patient, thoughtful tone of his conversation partners, but Fiona was still reluctant to completely welcome him into the fold, as revealed by her squinting prolonged stares at Manny when he was speaking.

  Dolores, on the other hand, had taken to Manny’s story. “You remind me of a young Jack Kennedy,” she said, “struggling to reconcile his own intellectual acumen, familial responsibility, and political ambition, a duel that would play out in the most public of stages when, on a cold Nantucket evening, the erstwhile…”

  During Dolores’s 35 minute anecdote, Manny’s mind wandered, and he walked over to the window to ponder one of Sorenson’s points about the intersection of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau in international relations. He got to the window just in time to see someone forcibly enter his car and drive off with it. The team told him that this was, unfortunately, a common occurrence and thus they all parked their cars blocks away at a FASTMART. Frank offered to give Manny a ride home. “How about you drive me to the bike store?” Manny asked.

  “I’ll do you one better,” Frank said. “I will give you a bike I have in my garage.” Frank said, still eager to win Manny’s approval.

  Manny accepted, and Frank drove him to his home, where he gave him a beat-up but serviceable 10-speed to ride the eight miles to and from his motel and the Mod headquarters.

  Over the next week, Manny integrated himself into the Mod operation, gaining Fiona’s trust in small increments along the way. As for his former roommate, Ruthie, she was now using her PhD in Central Asian history to help shape the team’s foreign policy platform. Her first few days off the sauce was difficult to witness for the team. The withdrawal shakes would usually set in after mid-afternoon coffee break, and twice she ROF’d during policy planning meetings.

  But she stood strong, dusted off the academic cobwebs in her brain, and regained a spring in her step and renewed sense of intellectual curiosity long since removed from her years-long descent into disenfranchised self-pity.

  Fiona was still not sold on Manny’s involvement. “We know that you know your way around a computer,” she said. “And you say you have some money for us. But you’re a loose cannon, and relentlessly competitive. Can the Mods really afford that kind of risk?”

  “Like I said, I will be in the shadows. This is about getting your message out. And to be honest, I think you could use the help. Your ideas may have merit, but you aren’t going to be winning over many people without focusing that message. Where is your communications team? What is your strategy?”

  “We’re all chipping in on the communications front.”

  “Getting mocked on the furtl network may not be a winning strategy,” Manny said. “What about the college campuses?”

  Frank chimed in, “They’re mostly disengaged. Last three elections voter turnout for that demographic was around 5%. Just how the administration likes it.”

  “The system has pretty much abandoned them,” Sorenson said.

  “So what next?” Manny asked.

  “Thoughtful policy debates based on facts not hysterics,” Dolores said.

  “A return to reasonable social spending policy,” Olaf said. “We can’t return to the spending levels of a few decades ago, but we must create sustainable cost recovery frameworks that can engender innovation but still keep the social contract intact. And using my factor analysis and multiple imputation model for extracting–”

  “And how does this debate happen?” Manny asked.

  “How do you mean?” Dolores asked.

  “How does the message get out?”

  “None of us have cracked that,” Fiona said. “The Internet isn’t a viable option.”

  ”What about physical newspapers?”

  “The New York Post was the last one,” Fiona said. “It went out of business two years ago.”

  “Well, not exactly,” Frank said. “Some of the hip kids have been makin’ a fuss about hardcopy recently. They print these publications and hand them out to their friends.”

  “Kind of like a few decades ago,” Dolores asked, “when music on large circular vinyl records became de rigueur with the bearded and bespectacled in the outer boroughs of New York city and Portland, Oregon? Even as these circular vinyl discs were overshadowed in mainstream commercial environments by digital files and players that held significantly more amounts of music with a drastically smaller footprint, the so-called ‘record’ appealed to individuals resistant to the digital age and the overwhelming amount of choice and access it provided.”

  “Funny you should mention this movement, Dolores,” Frank said, “my research suggests that the drivers of this activity you speak of, from a youth culture perspective, are a mixture of nostalgia for tropes of days past and an unheralded freedom from DCS oversight. The young adults engaged in the activity I mentioned on college campuses are reportedly referring to these publications as ‘zines.’”

  Furtlikipedia, the “information source of record since 2017,” defines zine thusly: “A zine (ZEEN; an abbreviation of fanzine, or magazine) is most commonly a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images. More broadly, the term encompasses any self-published work of minority interest usually reproduced via photocopier.”

  Originally focused on science fiction, zines reached the height of their popularity in the 1980s and 90s before weblogs overtook the imaginations of restive counterculture youths.

  “There’s our answer,” Manny said.

  “That’s your answer Mr. Computer whiz,” Fiona said. “Zines?”

  “Yes, zines,” Manny said confidently. It’s an environment that the administration has written off.”

  “It’s true. Field sticks to the Internet for all of his outreach,” Dolores said. “They have not reached the kids who use the zines.”

  “You can’t compete with Field’s resources,” Manny said. “I say you don’t even try. With these hard copy zines, pamphlets, newsletters, whatever you wanna call them, we can get people to engage without worrying about the DCS monitoring everything they do online.”

  “If the current administration is the virus, we are like the anti-virus,” Sorenson said, unbuttoning his tweed sport coat. “They go viral, we go anti-viral,” he said, puffing out his slightly concave chest, proud
of his play on words.

  “We create ambassadors,” Manny said, stepping on Sorenson’s moment. “First on the campuses, one at a time. We print our own materials. We pioneer a new outreach. Give the people something they can hold in their hands and feel. Something with substance. Something they can read without fear of reprisal.”

  The receptionist poked her head inside the door. “They hacked our site again. Now it redirects to the Department of Cultural Security site.”

  Fiona looked at the receptionist. “Leave it. We have a new strategy.”

  5.8

  Despite their name, the slumburbs were home to some of the most profitable manufacturing activity in the country. Unfortunately, this activity didn’t contribute much to the tax base, as the slumburb businesses were focused on manufacturing illicit methamphetamine, and more recently, the Cambodian drug sensation fermentil. The popularity of fermentil – a codeine derivative that was fermented inside civet dung – resulted in the rapid rise of the indoor civet farm throughout much of the slumburbs and their surrounding commercial areas.

  But as luck would have it, a number of abandoned newspaper printing facilities in slumburban Virginia had yet to be converted to civet farms and were within biking distance of Mod headquarters. After they secured entry into these abandoned buildings, the Mods were able to recruit two students from the Virginia Commonwealth Community College (VCCC) to help them restore the machines. Flannlgrrrl93 and Ko Bain were both familiar with the burgeoning “zine scene,” and they were able to transfer some of their talents as basement zine publishers to the Mods, teaching them the format and writing style, which differed in length and tone from the current news delivery style. Zine articles tended to be longer, with no images or bulleted information. Sometimes zine articles had as many as 500 words. Some had even more.

  These two students, both 21, were, as their names suggested, early 1990s romanticists. Ko Bain, a slight Asian kid in baggy ripped jeans, tattooed “I feel Stupid” across his lower stomach. His lower back read “and contagious.” Flannlgrrrl93, a short round girl with a face defined by deep scars across her right cheek and forehead, bright pink hair, and thick black glasses, lifted her pseudonym from her grandmother – it was her alt.sex screen name. When she caught Manny staring at her face she told him that her scars were “souvenirs of a car accident six years ago when my former friend Melahnie overrode the hands-free driving mechanism in her car and sent us head first into a truck. Melahnie’s air bag worked, so she was fine. The girl in the backseat died.”

  Over many hours of impression lever and roller hook repair Flannlgrrrl93 and Manny forged a close bond. Her generational despair and anti-authoritarian views reminded Manny of his younger self. “They’re just insecure,” she told Manny. “I used to be like that. Always tryin to sculpt my image, sculpt my brand on the Internet. Impress my friends with how perfect my life was. But it wasn’t. After the accident, I couldn’t talk or type, or even read for three months. And I couldn’t pretend things were perfect. I didn’t wanna pretend. The zine scene doesn’t pretend. It’s not slick, it’s messed up. Like me. Like the scars on my face. This is who I am. This is who we are.”

  Flannlgrrrl93’s enthusiasm fueled Manny’s newfound obsession with zines and printing presses; he would frequently spend days without sleeping, taking apart the machines and putting them back together in an effort to retrofit the printing presses to produce Mod zines. Then he transitioned to laying out, organizing, and editing the Mods’ materials. It was reminiscent of his early days at furtl, when he would obsess over search algorithms and computing efficiency.

  The rest of the team also worked around the clock. Thanks to the zines, Olaf finally found an outlet for his reasonable spending paradigm theory, and Frank was able to expound upon his Bonobo chimpanzee research, equating the power dynamics of that species to the current political arena (research that the DCS made illegal two years earlier when it deemed all animal-based anthropological inquiry to be “suspicious”). Dolores could use the zines as a platform for her deep historical knowledge, drawing parallels to the current political environment and the political landscapes of yesteryear.

  Sorenson excoriated both parties for their flawed partisan political rhetoric, laying out his theory of pendulumism – an idea that he summarized thusly: “political ideology should not be fixed but rather should respond like a pendulum, swinging gradually, responding to the pull from both poles of the political spectrum in order to achieve a constant state of balanced imbalance that can further the evolution of the Hegelian dialectic and respond to real-world environments without being weighed down by narrow and rigid worldviews or constrained by outdated political allegiances that curtail systems growth.” With continuous force from both sides of the pendulum, he argued, “pendulum disequilibrium” can be mitigated. Without this dual force, he warned, “extreme positions can overwhelm the debate, creating wild pendulum swings as opposed to gradual movements along the pendulum continuum. Wild swings of the pendulum create uncertainty and poor societal outcomes, which in turn threaten to disrupt said pendulum and pin it to one side or the other without a sufficient countervailing force pulling it back to the center.” Sorenson, like Dolores, was not known for discursive concision.

  5.9

  Once the printing press was up and running and capable of mass producing the Mod Times, Flannlgrrrl93 and Ko Bain tapped into their network of zine scenesters. From there, they began clandestinely leaving the Mod’s zines in coffee shops and cafeterias. They would watch from a distance as people who shared their nostalgia for the days before the Internet controlled almost every aspect of their life consumed these materials.

  The speed with which the Mods’ zines became popular was surprising, even to Manny, and before long zines were popping up on other campuses in Virginia. The mushrooming popularity of zines was born of the fact that a large segment of the population was hungry for the information, for the experience of reading things that challenged them, and for the forum to discuss the complicated, messy processes of democracy and governance. People were careful not to discuss the zines openly for fear that the DCS would learn about the operation, but in fact the DCS was out of its comfort zone with anything not on the Internet and so its ability to spot this new threat was limited.

  After three weeks, the DCS finally caught wind of the operation and tried to clamp down, but they were too late. The zines were now circulating on college campuses across the country. There were too many zine distributors. Too many zine writers. The identities of the local distributors were effectively kept off the Internet. The covers were notably inconspicuous. Many people hid them inside their laptops, reminiscent of an adolescent boy hiding his dog-eared copy of Playboy inside his copy of Life magazine in an earlier era. Readers looked like they were using their laptops when really they were devouring the latest edition of the “Mod Times.”

  As the zines gained popularity, Fiona started making public appearances throughout the DC area, first to tens of people and then to hundreds. Frequently the location would be unknown to the DCS and the details of the events would be distributed only through the zines a day prior.

  Some of these new underground publications were pro-Mathis in their agenda, but many were not. Inspired by Fiona’s platform of informed debate and critical thinking, many zines offered up their own take on the presidential election, both pro and con.

  When Field found out about the zines he began deploying his resources toward countering this movement. But Field-sponsored zines struggled to gain traction with the zine reading populace. Field’s zines were easy to spot because they were slickly produced and the writing was poor, with bullets and pictures everywhere, like a website. All the articles were short and uncritical of the administration and its policies. All of the letters to the editor were filled with quotes like, “President Field, could u b any awesomer LOL ;—}” and “WTFOMG I think these zines are way dumb and errbdy shld go bk 2 da intrnet for they news.”

  Mathis’s poll
numbers started going up, from 0.01% in the metro DC area the first week of July to 2% at the end of July to 4% by the middle of August. Soon her national numbers started to rise as well. The blue states on the coast started to slowly turn purple, as did the red states in the middle. All over the country, reasonable debate started spreading like a viral video of a kitten sharing chocolate cake with a lion nuzzling against an orangutan’s bosom (a popular viral video of the early 2020s). Spending, science, infrastructure, international engagement, tariffs, tax reform – it was all on the table at these debates, renamed “fireside talks” by the Mods. These events ultimately became true grass roots efforts, the topics dictated by local concerns and held in far smaller venues than the stadiums and convention centers preferred by the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates.

  Then, just as suddenly, Fiona’s poll numbers froze in place. Her national polling numbers held at 8%, and in the college towns where she was most popular, she couldn’t break through the 15% barrier. The Mods were puzzled at first, particularly as their popularity and name recognition continued to rise across the country.

  It didn’t take long, however, for the Mods to figure out what happened. The polling operations, all run through furtl, were no longer a reliable source of polling data. They were cooking the books. As the zines began reporting on this issue, a number of independent polling operations popped up. These operations were initiated by a group called the Hard Copy Community (HCC). The HCC’s efforts started small but grew to include clandestine basement polling operations throughout the country. Their paper polls, distributed and tallied through the burgeoning zine distribution networks, bypassed the furtl network, and the results were released via the zines. These results became the most relied upon polls in the country. Not surprisingly, they showed different numbers than the furtl polls.

  The Mathis campaign was now polling well throughout the country, according to these HCC stats. Fiona’s platform of responsible public spending attracted individuals who had grown weary of the polarized political debate in Washington. Add to that her strong message advocating for more personal privacy on the Internet and a curtailed mandate for the DCS, and many people were quick to come around to her candidacy.