Neal Stephenson, “Fall, or, Dodge in Hell”

The result of her having filled out a form, years ago … and having clicked the “submit” button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strenge bit of semantics.

Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trilliions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There’s no use for any of it.

If you were setting up a real military, here’s what you wouldn’t do: you wouldn’t issue every single guy his own collection of 57 different small arms and an infinite quantity of ammunition and nothing else.

The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which is followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk.

I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and become more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kandsas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that 300 year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts, we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.