Luddite n. Any of a group of British workers who between 1811 and 1816 rioted and destroyed laborsaving textile machinery in the belief that such machinery would diminish employment. One who opposes technical or technological change.
They trampled out of their basements in overalls and dungarees, some climbing down from attic rooms filled with tattered copies of Look magazine and rusted Erector sets. The call having been made by CB radio and US Mail, millions of them took to the streets. Men, none younger than fifty and their spouses-disciples of Springer, Montel, and Oprah-already losing the battle to gray hair and sag, came armed with weapons of casual destruction. Some waved degaussing coils in the air from which dangled molded rubber plugs that were now miles from an electrical outlet, rendering the device useless except in their minds. Others had shoved slide rulers into their belts, as though they were medieval slayers of dragons about to set out on some jihad for their king.
Those that led the attack on the cities in automobiles-a vast majority of them in Ramblers and station wagons with dented wheel-wells-drove at half the posted speed limit and forced toll-takers to make change for hundred-dollar bills. Just outside of San Francisco, six Hells Angels, all well within the age limit for this event, merged into the parade and shot menacing glances at anyone they passed who voiced a complaint.
The Luddites were done with the electronic revolution, they'd given it enough rope, and now it was time to tighten the noose. "Down with the Internet," they shouted as they came, "Give us back our Smith-Coronas. Betamax and 8-track forever!" In London, thousands of them gathered at midnight with torches in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and made a ten-foot tall bonfire out of floppy disks. A prayer vigil in front of the main entrance to the Smithsonian Museum forced District of Columbia Police to reroute traffic for twenty-seven blocks north and south. And on Miami Beach, senior citizens with fire extinguishers tied to their walkers, roamed the beachfront and sprayed sunbathers who had too much exposed skin to suit their tastes, and anyone walking and talking on a cellphone at the same time.
The President made an appeal for calm while seated in his cabin on Air Force One, en route to Hawaii for vacation. Unfortunately, none of the Luddites had seen a television program since the cable conglomerates discontinued their free airborne signals, so the impassioned message served only to panic everyone else. As commander-in-chief, he gave some thought to calling out the National Guard, but they were still fighting wars in eleven Mideast and four African nations. The ranks of the Army, Navy, and the Marines were comprised of the sons and daughters of these people, which left only the Merchant Marines, and they refused to come ashore without a promise of hookers and beer for all hands.
State and local police departments were overwhelmed by the mass of marauding technophobes. Many of the seasoned veterans unloaded their department issued automatics and threw them in a drawer. Stuffing an old, reliable revolver into a holster, they clocked out on vacation pay and went home.
Email servers reached critical limits as the connected tried to warn of the approach of those whose only true connection to other human beings was physical. Word spread with the speed of electrons around a world where the concern over terrorism had become more important than having enough milk for a bowl of cereal in the morning.
The attack centered on three key targets. First, jamming into elevators in every office building they saw, the Luddites either stopped the car between floors or pushed every button and rode it continuously. Next were the major intersections. They abandoned their cars and dropped the keys in the nearest sewer. Bridges, tunnels, and drive-up lanes at every fast-food restaurant soon became bloated parking lots and the scene of several massive fistfights.
But the coup d'grace, the kiss of death, the last fart before you have to change your underwear, was the commando attack on the grid. Wires, above and belowground, were severed wherever they were found. In Des Moines, Iowa, a choir in full Sunday dress of white and magenta stood on the sidewalk, singing hymns for twenty minutes while three retired telephone workers disassembled a main-trunk junction box at the top of a pole. In New York City, an entire family of Luddite dwarfs, some forty-three in total, went down into the underground cable tunnels and sprayed Cheez Whiz on the wires; rats began gnawing through them before the cheese dried.
In Pakistan and India, technical support centers went dark. One, in Calcutta, lost all contact with the Net when it was rammed by a team of elephants under the command of a man, who then set a parked Humvee on fire. Country after country was sliced from the Internet by people who could no longer accept the change it had foisted on their lives.
Twitter twizzled and froze.
Facebook lost all its friends.
And with a perceptible sigh, the Internet collapsed into a pile of pixels, gigabytes, and dogma.
Of course, the secure government networks and those of big business that were independent of the telephone company and their co-conspirators-the cable conglomerate-were only partially immune to the onslaught. In New Orleans, a secretary at one of the large oil companies figured out how to tie a local jazz station into both the company telephone system and wireless network. Suddenly every company-wide email was addressed from Louis Armstrong and the public address system continuously played "Oh What A Wonderful World". Military computers still talked to each other over microwave links, but their discussions were the same boring rhetoric they'd been spewing out since the end of the Cold War and nobody was listening.
However, the rest of the world found itself in digital silence. Cellphones, iPods, ePads, Google, Gaggle, and the rest of the electronic clutter had disappeared; the Luddites had achieved the calm they were seeking.
Sadly, their victory was loaded with viruses.
The first effect, almost within minutes of the worldwide disconnect, was that no one had any access to their wealth. Cash, jewels, and precious metals aside, the real value of the human race had been reduced to bits and bytes, and in the case of the very wealthy-megabytes, gigabytes and the occasional bite in the ass. Card readers had no problem dissecting the encoded data on the back of a credit card, they just didn't have anyone to send it to. Home computers were swell for playing solitaire, but their portal to the online teller had vanished.
Thus, those who had gobs and bundles of currency were suddenly amongst the wealthiest people in the world. Take for example, drug dealers, bookies, and pimps-all of the more outstanding members of the community-business executives who dealt solely in pocketable cash. Add to them the people who never trusted a bank from the get-go, most of them Luddites, and the balance of economic power had tilted into the hands of people who weren't quite sure what to do with it.
Yes, the digital wealth still dwelled on the magnetic surface of millions of hard drives, but without the necessary Internet link to move that money around, it was as useless as a box of corn flakes without a container of milk. The numerical displays in the stock market whisked along with the same values until the closing bell of the first day, volume at an all-time low. A millionaire with a credit card couldn't get a hot cup of coffee, but a junkie with a crumpled five-dollar bill could trade it for a Rolex. The President, now eastbound and headed back to the safety of the White House, ordered the stock and commodity markets closed indefinitely and set the printing presses at the US Mint into high gear. One small town in Minnesota legalized Monopoly money as valid tender until the crisis could be controlled.
The next unintended consequence of the Luddite's attack, late at the end of the first week, was the loss of the penny. Engineers from the various wire and cable installation companies had been collected by military helicopters and flown to bases equipped with satellite communication. They were asked to give an estimate of just how long it would take to rewire the world and get everyone back on line. Their answer-at least five to ten years-wasn't the worst of the news, though. As it seems, the damage done by the Luddites was so thorough that none of the existing wires could be salvaged; everything had to be run anew. And, even worse, there wasn't enough copper wire available to do the job.
In an almost unanimous vote, the US Congress made the penny obsolete immediately and sent a mailing to every bank and financial institution in the country. Pennies were to be collected and smelted down to make wire. The dissention on the part of the two Illinois senators and their nineteen counterparts in the House was followed by a day of mourning in Springfield, but every coin collector in the world rejoiced as the value of their collections exploded.
With email yesterday's news, the Post Office went into hiring mode for the first time in three and half years. As mail levels returned to volumes they hadn't seen since the seventies, the Postmaster General announced a first-ever reduction in the price of a stamp. Both Saturday and Friday delivery were reinstated, post boxes reappeared on corners and bolted to walls, and just when it seemed like Christmas at the Post Office, a sorter in Frostproof, Florida went nuts and shot up the branch with a paintball gun.
Driving, which had become a game of bumper cars thanks to texting, talking, and twittering, was once again a safe method of travel with those distractions no longer available. Police in Tokyo, once the leading edge of the technological razor, reported a major increase in the theft of Citizens Band radios and walkie-talkies. A popular technique for meeting a stranger developed in Paris where drivers became adept at tossing paper airplanes from car to car with the address of a favorite bar and the pilot's name.
However, the most significant development, and probably one that the Luddites had counted on, was the massive decline in obesity worldwide. Detached from each other electronically, teenagers rediscovered bicycles, roller blades, and skateboards. Where they had previously spent hours engrossed in an online battle on some mythical planet, lightyears deep in their imaginations, they now spent those hours out in the fresh air and sunshine. Pale, thin, and acne-faced youths transformed into tanned, toned, and well, still acne-faced sports enthusiasts. Late night parking on a ridge overlooking the city was no longer just for swapping purloined video games.
Children who used to get email accounts and Facebook pages while they were still working out "see spot run" now wanted sneakers and baseball bats. Little girls who had forsaken the tea party for Twitter dusted off the teapot and set the table for friends to visit. Pop Warner rose from the dead and started tossing a football to every boy in a helmet. High school coaches who were used to begging students to come try out for a team now had more players than positions.
Over a five-year span, the average weight of the American teenager dropped by a full fifteen percent. The American Heart Association celebrated by declaring bacon a health food. Fast food and packaged snacks, the standard diet of the midnight computer gamer, were shunned in favor of healthy meals-three squares a day-as the night crawlers returned to the sunlight.
Gym memberships doubled, then tripled, then jumped so high that waiting lists formed and those with enough cash could buy them on the black market. Weight Watchers convinced the Girl Scouts to drop their traditional cookie offerings in favor of their prepackaged meals. Even Oprah managed to finally lose those last thirty pounds and keep it off.
With the hypnotic eye of the computer monitor silenced and the temptation to click until there was pain in the wrist staunched, people around the globe had no choice but to find alternative sources of entertainment. Many even refused to reconnect when the new wires were brought into their neighborhood. Movie theaters took over the spaces where major electronics retailers could no longer afford the lease. Drive-ins that had stood for decades growing weeds were refurbished and packed with cars seven nights a week. Carhops greased their roller skates and were hired on the spot.
"How ya doin'?" was no longer a rhetorical question, but an opening line to what could be hours of dialog, as face-to-face communication became comfortable after so many years of anonymity. Penmanship was something to be proud of. Dictionaries replaced spell checkers.
The breakneck pace of the planet had been slowed enough to where the nuclear scientists turned the Doomsday clock back to noon. Even the terrorists, seeing that their vile threats had no route to reach the masses, sat down and munched on some dry cereal. Inadvertently, the Luddites had solved problems that politicians had failed to alleviate with hot air, guns, and lard.
And from the safety of their Barcaloungers, deep in their cool basement caverns, walls lined with paneling, ceilings of asbestos squares and four-bulb fluorescent fixtures, the Luddites smiled and breathed a collective sigh of relief. Sure, the Internet might return some day, but they were ready to stuff it back into the can again when it did.
The rest of Ricky's website.