Something a little different today, if it wasn’t obvious already.
To present this post (well, posts, really) the way I envisioned it, I decided it needed its own template. So the link to the actual body of the post itself is here.
To allow folks to comment & trackback it, however, I’ve created this entry.
I present the post without comment for now, but would very much welcome feedback, comments, and thoughts.
-N.Z. Bear
By the way: One source of inspiration for one of the major threads of the piece was Holsinger’s StrategyPage piece on the potential impact of a smallpox attack (which Glenn linked to last week). And if you’re still wondering, yes, the kind of worst-case scenario described in Holsinger’s piece is (one of) the ghastly future events I’m presenting.
Update 7/29 AM: Thanks to all who have linked! (And to those who haven’t: please? Pretty please?). Still haven’t hit Blogdex or Daypop, but I’m hopeful. I’ll be a lot more excited to see this piece getting wide visibility than I was with that stupid TIPS satire. (Side note: I’ve even gotten hits from a Spanish-language journal on that one: it’s gone really far and wide…)
One thought I wanted to throw out: I find it interesting that (to my perception at least) folks seem to be reacting most strongly to the “we might end up building our very own totalitarian state” aspect of the piece. This is interesting to me because I thought the other part of it was kind of scary too — the fact that the scenarios I’m posing imply billions of people have died worldwide.
The core idea of the piece is that it’s possible to sacrifice our freedoms and lose the war. But it seems like folks are picking up more on the former, and less on the latter.
Not sure if that’s just a failure of writing clarity on my part, or if it says something more meaningful about the mindset folks have brought to the table in reading the piece…
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technology meets creativity in a disaster-prone world. confident enough to try; humble enough to learn.