Distraction

"Politics don't work anymore! We can't make politics work, because the system's so complex that its behavior is basically random. Nobody trusts the system anymore, so nobody ever, ever plays it straight. There are sixteen parties, and a hundred bright ideas, and a million ticking bleeping gizmos, but nobody can follow through, execute, and deliver the goods on time and within specs. We've given up on the Republic! We've abandoned democracy. I'm not a Senator! I'm a robber baron, a feudal lord. All I can do is build a cult of personality."
--
"No it's too late for that. We're so intelligent now that we're too smart to survive. We're so well informed that we've lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we've lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we've lost all sense of shame."
--
"But there's the animals," she said. "The genetic facilities."
"That's the truly tragic part. You can't save an endangered species by cloning animals. I admit, it's better than having them completely exterminated and lost forever. But they're curios now, they walk around looking pretty, they've become collector's items for the ultra-rich. A living species isn't just the DNA code, it's the whole spread of genetic variety in a big population, plus their learned behaviors, and their prey and their predators, all inside a natural environment. But there aren't any natural environments anymore. Because the climate has changed."
--
Oscar recognized the United States Senate as a strong and graceful structure built to last by political architects committed to their work. It was a system that he would have been delighted to exploit, under better circumstances.
But Oscar was a child of his own time, and he knew he didn't have that luxury. He knew it was his duty to confront and master modern political reality. Political reality in modern America was the stark fact that electronic networks had eaten the guts out of the old order, while never finding any native order of their own. The horrific speed of digital communication, the constant flattening of hierarchies, the rise of net-based civil society, and the decline of the industrial base had simply been too much for the American government to cope with and successfully legitimize.
There were sixteen major political parties now, divided into warring blocs and ceaseless internecine purges, defections and counterpurges. There were privately owned cities with millions of "clients" where the standard rule of law was cordially ignored. There were price-fixing mafias, money laundries, outlaw stock markets. There were black, grey, and green superbarter nets. There were health maintenance organizations staffed by crazed organ-sharing cliques, where advanced medical techniques were in the grip of any quack able to download a surgery program. Wiretapping net-militias flourished, freed of any physical locale. There were breakaway counties in the American West where whole towns had sold out to tribes of nomads, and simply dropped off the map.
There were town hall meetings in New England with more computational power than the entire US government had once possessed. Congressional staffs exploded into independent fiefdoms. The executive branch bogged down in endless turf wars in an acronym soup of agencies, every one of them exquisitely informed and eager to network, and hence completely unable to set realistic agenda and concentrate on its own duties. The nation was poll-crazy, with cynical manipulation at an all-time toxic high--the least little things produced tooth-gritting single-issue coalitions and blizzards of automated lawsuits. The net-addled tax code, having lost all connection to fiscal reality, was routinely evaded by electronic commerce and wearily endured by the citizenry.
With domestic consensus fragmenting, the lost economic war with China had allowed the Emergency congressional committees to create havoc of an entirely different order. With the official declaration of Emergency, Congress had signed over its birthright to a superstructure of supposedly faster-moving executive committees. This desperate act had merely layered another operating system on top of the old one. The country now had two national governments, the original, halting, never-quite-suspended legal government, and the spasmodic increasingly shrill declarations of the State-of-Emergency cliques.

"Okay. Let's imagine you're a net-based bad guy, netwar militia maybe. And you have a search engine, and it keeps track of all the public mentions of your idol, Governor Etienne-Gaspard Huguelet. Every once in a while, someone appears in public life who cramps the style of your boy. So the offender's name is noticed, and it's logged, and it's assigned a cumulative rating. After someone's name reaches a certain level of annoyance, your program triggers automatic responses." Fontenot adjusted his straw hat. "The response is to send out automatic messages, urging people to kill this guy."

Oscar laughed. "That's a new one. That's really crazy."

"Well, yeah. Craziness is the linchpin of the whole deal. You see, there have always been a lot of extremists, paranoiacs, and antisocial losers, all very active on the nets.... In the Secret Service, we found out a long time ago that the nets are a major intelligence asset for us. Demented, violent people tend to leave some kind of hint, or track, or signal, well before they strike. We compiled a hell of a lot of psychological profiles over the years, and we discovered some commonalities. So, if you know the evidence to look for, you can actually sniff some of these guys out, just from the nature of their net activities."

"Sure, User profiles. Demographics analysis. Stochastic indexing. Do it all the time."

"We built those profile sniffers quite a while back, and they turned out pretty useful. But then the State Department made the mistake of kinda lending that software to some undependable allies...." Fontenot stopped short as a spotted jaguarundi emerged from under a bush, stretched, yawned, and ambled past them. "The problem came when our profile sniffers fell into the wrong hands.... See, there's a different application for that protective software. Bad people can use it to compile large mailing lists of dangerous lunatics. Finding the crazies with net analysis, that's the easy part. Convincing them to take action, that part is a little harder. But if you've got ten or twelve thousand of them, you've got a lotta fish, and somebody's bound to bite. If you can somehow put it into their heads that some particular guy deserves to be attacked, that guy might very well come to harm"

"So you're saying that Governor Huguelet has put me on an enemies list?"

"No, not Huey. Not personally. He ain't that dumb. I'm saying that somebody, somewhere, built some software years ago that automatically puts Green Huey's enemies onto hit lists."