Chapter 3: Thoughts

One thing is to be part of a generation which grew doused with conspiracy theories and a very different one, to be involved in one within two hours.

Two days after I came from Vienna, Diego firmly positioned in front of one of his favorite series and the washing machine finally working, I took position under the open window of my room to take a look to what Boone had given me.

As Boone promised, my password worked fine and I could log in to the small machine. It started to boot what seemed like LINUX. The GUI could not be simpler. A black background and a folder structure longer than a day without any bread. After the first discouraging look I started to find some pattern on the folder structure. They were numbered and seem to have a logic behind, so I started at what I assumed to be the beginning.

The main Problem I saw on all that was the same I saw in almost every conspiracy movies; the lack of information. Apparently that small computer was full of it, but it was no more than paper... digital paper if you wish. No solid evidence. The following day was Saturday and Diego was traveling back to his family, as almost every weekend. That was somewhere in Murcia, according to him. I spend the whole weekend going through all that information just to get out that yes, there was a lot of information, reports, confirmation reports, lots of governmental agencies doing bits here and there, and lots of diagrams and plots but in a way it all seemed like a theoretical exercise. Since no other agency had the insight Boone's had, there was just a huge jigsaw puzzle. Of course there were a couple of loose ends, but it all fit together fairly nice. That I had to give them.

Our kitchen in Madrid

After leaving my cup in the kitchen sink, I went back to my room and from the sock basket I pull the envelope Boone had given me. I checked the data for umpf time and I put it back. I had less than a month to verify all that stuff independently, within the scientific community. I had quite a lot of digging to do in the internet.

There was a second big lot of documents in the small machine, even more unsettling if possible. It was the scheme Boone's friends had put together. It was also the hardest to swallow somewhat.  In essence, it was quite simple. In a white paper that opened the section, it went on discussing that our current understanding of modern state was going to disappear. Since "The State" could no longer act as a warrant of the rights of the citizens, it would lose its meaning and thus be condemned to collapse. On its way down it would take our modern society, that of specialized individuals who have a specific role in society. The collapse of the state would happen through the eroding of institutions and thus would also flush the modern society away.

The disappearance of specialization was a consequence of people having to invest more time on finding food, shelter and protection. It takes with it the need for education and thus starts a dangerous spiral down to the dark ages. On addition to this, our average citizen is not prepare to face such situation.

... As an example, it is for generations that city dwellers are no longer to even carry a pocket knife. Tools used by modern citizens are highly specialized, expensive and dependent on electrical power. In Europe and the US, a massive migration southwards would place millions of people in a very novel situation. Most of these migrants are not able to go day by day without electricity and running water, yet the destination of their migration does not offer such comforts. Moreover, these new arrivals are not of any use to their new hosts, as their skills are superfluous on an economy of survival...

... And it kept like that for a while. It sounded to me a lot like preppers paranoia and totally over the top. However a point for it was that it sounded to me exaggerated; wasn't I one of them? a product of the oversatisfied society, used to have rights and too comfortable with it?. I was coming to the point of asking myself whether that was real at all. The dimensions of the change were mind blowing.

The capacity of the human being to generate and feed on hope is unique to our species. Humans have learn that living in a society is the best evolutionary strategy. So much that we do not contemplate any other alternative. We depend on other human beings and on our capabilities of interacting with them. This might lead us just to hold on hope when there is no hope, to turn a blind eye to the need of change. There are many examples of that. During Nazi Germany, many Jews did not expect things getting really bad, until they got the worse they could. Communist Russia, Post Civil war Spain... even the fall of the Roman Empire. You have many individuals holding to a dead reality... and to many it ends up costing them their lives. Obviously there were others that recognized the potential danger and took action. The most obvious is to emigrate, to leave that disaster behind. These were practical people, those who knew they could not revert the changes their societies  were experimenting... at least not at a massive risk, like fighting... and the best fight is that one that never happens.

Under the light of my table lamp and the small computer feeding on wall power I started to take notes, dive into diagrams and follow links to public references I could double check. Apparently that small computer had little possibility to connect to any data net, no USB either and I could not edit any files, just read.