So the roads were near impassable from all the rolled over still-burning hulks, and the only reasonable way for his 12-man focus group to travel was in fleets of '76 Toyota sedans, 4 men to a sedan and he and random hitchhikers in the fourth, lead Toyota.

Originally they'd planned to roam the land by highway, healing the sick and bringing the dead back to life using the widely accepted statistical techniques of modern polling and the theory of how a large enough focus group, given the right questions, could solve any problem, especially those involving the behavior of large numbers of irrational, lawless particles which even mathematics and physics couldn't touch -- such as how many jellybeans are in a jar, or cancer.

When that didn't work, the focus group focus grouped up an algorithm that could distinguish the point where the sounds emanating from some nearby machine ended and the sounds emanating from inside your own damn head began.

At first, they embodied this algorithm in a mechanical device the size of a room. Then they made the device progressively smaller. Eventually they got the size down to where it disappeared, and the price down to where it was free, so everyone could own one or a million.

Then they mysteriously all simultaneously died of a rare blood disease while receiving the World International Prize in Copenhagen for having created a brave new world in which people no longer had to worry about whether that fucking sound was coming from some fucking machine outside themselves, or some fucking machine in their own fucking head.

Despite their death, their success quickly became the model for all business of the future, and every new company began with the goal of seeking to come up with something analogous to what they'd come up with, in a way analogous to the way in which they'd come up with it.

And so their brave new world quickly became like all the scared old worlds before, the sum of all failures at this -- a world based on ONE person having done ONE interesting thing ONCE, followed by hundreds of millions of years of history which exist SOLELY to cash in on everybody's hopes that somebody can do it again. But nobody ever does.

permanent link to this article