Language Games II
Terrestrial Alternatives: Set in a near-future welfare state where the Experience Machine from Nozick is offered as a standard public service. Follow a caseworker who must determine, via home inspections and interviews, whether applicants have "sufficiently exhausted terrestrial alternatives" before being approved for permanent plug-in.
The Rule of Three-and-One: In an alternate antiquity, the Library of Alexandria develops a sophisticated system of distributed backups using scroll-copying networks across the Mediterranean. Write the technical documentation for this system (in translation), then write the story of its failure during the fire—not through enemy attack, but through a Byzantine fault in the consensus protocol among the copying houses.
De Exhaustione Moderna: Translate (invent) a lost treatise by Seneca the Younger, De Exhaustione Moderna, addressed to a young bureaucrat in the imperial service. It should read as genuinely Stoic, yet address phenomena we would recognize as chronic workplace stress, email anxiety, and the collapse of the distinction between otium and negotium.
A Going Concern: In a post-AGI world, only one human-run company remains, kept alive as a curiosity and a control group. Write its annual reports for years 1, 10, and 50 after the transition. The reports should trace the company's evolution from futile resistance to ironic performance to something like a monastery—an institution whose economic irrationality becomes its value.
House Style: Draft a style manual (with numbered rules, examples, and exceptions) for journalists covering events that are, by consensus, beyond language (genocide, the death of a child, the view from orbit). Each rule must be illustrated with a real sentence from a real writer, then a counterexample. The manual should be usable and heartbreaking.
