Snippets from Jon Bois' 17776 and 20020, a story you read online about sentient 178th-century space probes who watch football all day.
Val!
Valentine!
What took y’all so long to catch up? I’ve been here an hour.
Well, you know Perry can’t move as fast as you can.
Perry! What the fuck?
I got the wrong boots back in Evansville!
What’s wrong with them?
They’re dress boots. I just grabbed a box, I thought they were hiking boots. Had the wrong boots in it.
Well your stride is all fucked-up lookin’. You run like you were born with a dozen dicks. Get some new fuckin’ boots!
People believe this shit?
We’re talking about a handful of people, but yeah.
I wonder what motivates that.
In this particular case, a couple of things are going on. First, some hucksters invented a story to try to make a buck.
Second, it’s a sort of origin story that latched on with some who really need to feel like people from the old world are supposed to be here.
But more broadly, I think ...
A consequence of stealing land is that you will never find the significance of it. Whatever lies you made up to justify your crimes will fade away.
There are lots of people who grew up down there in a society that was missing spirit, purpose, anything sacred.
Some feel that they’ve found it iin this eternal paradise. Others have concluded that they’ll never find it, and have come to peace with that.
And then there are some who, in this post-consequence existence, need to assign the sort of historical importance here that they see in Paris, or Addis Ababa, or Bangkok.
You know what it's like? I was just reading about this this morning. It's like a Fermi problem.
What's that?
It's named after this guy named Fermi, Enrico Fermi. He was this famous mathematician, and he would ask questions, like the big one was, "how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?"
Huh.
So how do you answer that without actually going and counting, right? Well, you ask a lot of little questions that kind of hack away at the answer. Questions like, okay, first off, how many pianos do you think there are in Chicago? And then it's like, well, what percentage of people actually own a piano? So you estimate the number of people who, you know, you've been to their house and you know they have a piano. And then divide that by the total number of peoples' houses you've been to.
Hmm ... I'm gonna say one in ... let's just keep it easy. One in a hundred homes has a piano in it.
Sure, we'll use that. And the population of Chicago is like three billion.
Three billion?
Million. Three million.
You said billion. I swear you said billion.
Well whatever, you know I meant million. So that would mean there are ...
30,000 pianos in Chicago.
Uh uh uhhhhh! There are three million people in Chicago. Not three million homes. You're probably looking at, I don't know, one million homes maybe? That's like three people per home.
But then you have to think about the number of Chicago homes that could actually accommodate a piano. Probably fewer than usual.
There you go! Now you're getting the game!
Man, where did you read about that?
Wikipedia.
You rabbit-holing again?
Yep.
God, I can't believe I didn't know about that until now. It basically describes exactly what I've spent all these years doing.
I swear, I'll never get to the bottom of Wikipedia. Or at least, it'll take a long time. You know they've started putting in entries for apartment histories? Lori was telling me about it.
What do you mean?
Like, the history of an apartment. Like you can type in "123 whatever street, apartment 3" and it'll be this enormous history of everything that ever happened in that apartment.
Ah.
I thought it was kinda cool.
anyways
man i love sayin “anyways,” i feel like i say it all the time
anyways
