The virus. OMFG, the virus.

There’s always a virus. In every timeline, regardless of whether there’s a despotic idiot in charge, or a corrupted system that lets them continue, or a network of cupids looking out for number one. Let alone when all three exist. There’s always a virus.

Hell, even in the timelines where mass-pop are so much more hoi-polloi than herd that they're already training against cognitive biases before they have a term for them, where a money economy is chugging along equitably and with no one really sufferering—where people have their shit really fucking together. There's always a virus.

Sometimes it’s Ebola — frankly, you really dodged the bullet having Obama as president when that one got to US soil the first time. Smart man. Smart, smart man. Simply put, he trusted scientific thinking and people prone to leveraging it. With it’s death rate, speed, and capability for system shock, the people it didn’t kill had a 80% mortality rate over the next 2 years from starvation. It wasn’t extinction-level, but peaktech economy could move nations until the built-in obsolescence made them all but disintegrate. Then it was full dark ages.

It’s not a pretty thing to watch a technological civilization devolve. Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. Those years are gonna suck. The good news is a few key tech pieces coming out in the next year or two will be built for longer lives. Peak tech for you guys will still be an economy of its own, but it won't be running the show. The tech will also last and be the foundation for leveraging civs out of not-quite-dark ages. It won’t really be dark for you, more like a twilight ages. Gloaming ages? Whichever taxonomical road this timeline winds up going down, it won’t be full dark, and it won’t last super long. Hell, you won’t really lose technology; it won’t be available to everyone, but it won’t be outright lost.

No, your biggest threat is all the evictions. Seriously, if you want any chance you’ve got to get a handle on pandemic sheltering in an age of homelessness immediately, or outlaw evictions and foreclosures.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

There’s always a virus. This timeline, it’s Covid-19, which will mutate to Covid-20 and Covid-20b and Covid-21a. Seriously, that thing has legs and runs.

Covid-20 is the one that gets the kids. That’s the heartbreaker. Those pictures are enough to scare the most militant of herdies, but by the time it’s understood as a mutation the economies are already ‘open’ with the push of Donald “Take it on the Chin for the Rest of Us” Trump.

Covid-20b actually starts earlier, but it doesn’t run through the population as fast as Covid-20 or with as much pictorial heartbreak. It decimates another system — neurological instead of the lungs or digestive. By the time the patterns are seen, the viruses studied and compared, the seemingly innocent, random signs tracked down and understood, people already understand that the kids have been hit by a mutated strain. It gets second seating and second naming despite turning up first.

By the time Covid-21a comes up, you have figured out that this virus is highly mutagenic. There’s no vaccine coming because no vaccine can keep up. Herd immunity is simply living with it for generations, until it hits people more like measles. Potentially deadly, individuals really get very sick; but, most people can recover, and being smart about it can keep the outbreaks contained.

Or, gods, is this the timeline where there’s only one Covid, that creates further damage every time a person is infected? The first time is digestive. The second, respiratory. The third, blood system. The forth, brain. The fifth, lymphatic. Although it doesn’t necessarily go in that order. Most of the time, for most of the people, it just progressively decimates various systems until it finally finds the one that will kill the host. Sometimes it jumps, finds the key system the first time around.

That’s a hard timeline. That…that one I can’t help you much with. This really is a romance for you. Go ahead and live your life. Find the magical tipping point for the thing you wish for most and make it happen ASAP. But take enough time to ensure it’s the true magic; you won’t have much time for repeats.

Let’s assume it’s the timeline with mutated Covids with very slight variations that makes it harder and longer to see the mutations.

The silver lining: we really start to understand viruses. They are no longer black boxes after our murder of Covids in the 2020’s (a ‘murder of crows’ was a backwards-time-drag from the murder of Covids; time is a network: it ripples in both directions, given enough presence). And with viruses not being a black box, and coming to grips with systems and the first outlines of wohshialis, humans can actually make a decision to escape the gravity of Earth. We don’t consistently—sometimes there’s some switch that throws in mass-pop cognitions and we decide en masse that it’s nice here, and we choose to manage our environment and enjoy the sunsets instead of exploring the depths of freezing, harsh space. But the option is there, and its sometimes taken.

Before you wish that you were on any other timeline, I really need to stress that there is no timeline that doesn’t have to contend with the mortality of a virus that hits hard around the time that data tech is really making its mark. Viruses mutate. Viruses have a short life cycle, and are intent on blossoming. They are very simple, with a single perogative: grow and spread. To do that, they need you. Manufactories in the form of your cells, spread in the form of your extended, faster locomotion and ability to touch, droplets, continual breathing, and spastic expressways.

The only recourse is to be relatively healthy when they emerge. To do that, society has to be realistic about priorities. You need to not work people to the point of exhaustion, and you have to limit interaction. Don’t worry, you’ve got Fauci. He’ll get you through. And if he dies, there are others like him that already understand the outline — unless there’s an intellectual purge to go along with the outbreak.

Then you’re screwed. But you won’t know until it happens, and by then you’ll be so panicked you probably join the purge. Today-you might be horrified at the idea. Desperation and panic incite people do things their logical, sane brain wouldn't harbor.

If that happens, that world I briefly sketched out where Covids become something like measles? That doesn’t happen. Purge the intellectuals and you give up limping along with a couple generations of hardship. Purge the intellectuals and you go into twilight ages in the next year or two, and then court a dark ages. The thing about courting dark ages is that they want you, so hard and so bad that the first twinkle of interest is enough to have them on you like a tomcat in full heat-response.

Don’t purge the intellectuals. With them still around, it’ll take around 1-2 generations (they’re shorter) to life back up, but seriously nothing as bad as the dark ages. Enough records will survive that, along with some smart pattern-building in civ centers, everyone will still catch on that healthy people ride through viruses better. If more people can survive, so does civilization and tech.

Ah, but this also all depends on wrapping your mass-pop heads around the idea of keeping people in shelter. Also, healthy food has to become a priority for everyone. It can't be something meted out discriminantly. 

Don’t evict people. Please, for all that’s holy — that’s the thing you most need to not do, just as important as the need to get food to people. Both needs to happen: avoidance of action and positive action.

See, if there are mass evictions, everyone will live in tent cities— just like the Great Depression. Those were Hoovervilles, and the new ones will briefly be called Trumpvilles before a different name gains more traction: Covidities.

They outpace meat packing plants, nursing homes, and schools (once the Greatest Trump pushes for schools to be reopened, because parents need to work with more focus) as fast spreaders. The first Covidity makes it clear that there’s a mutant strain that will be named Covid-20b.

Worse, Covidities will bring back cholera. Measles (thanks, anti-vaxxers). Polio. Antibiotic-resistant staph infections. Anything and everything that would thrive in a Petri dish, thrives.

Think about it, really hard. Go into your preferred meditation pose (your body knows it even if your conscious mind doesn't: it's the pose you fall into when you're doing your best work). Bring up the images: row upon row of tents; 20, 50 deep in any direction you look. Huh, right now it looks like a festival. The tents are still reletively clean, the sky is bright, the colors stark and beautiful against the sky. Some people are hangdog-expression unhappy, but there are a few around who choose to find the bright spots and are able to pull up a smile. They are wearing masks, but you can see the smile in their eyes. Others congregate around them; even if they don't interact, being near the presence of a smile is a balm to their soul. 

Now skip ahead. Rain is pouring down. Tents are muddy. The paths between are loose and slippery, pocked with ankle-deep standing water. Even the ones who can smile are having a tough time finding those smiles. They are wet, hungry, and have a bit of a sniffle. 

Their mask? That hasn't been well washed since the laundromat went into the price gouging business: make money while they can! Such a boon, to be so close to a tent city. So the smiler has resorted to hand washing, but even clean water has been hard to find. Everyone is closing their doors, making sure that paying customers feel comfortable coming in.

Skip ahead again. The smiler is sick. Doesn't matter what, not really. It's enough that sickness is here, and spreading. It will spread, whatever it is. There's no easily accessible clean water to drink and wash with. There's no sewer system, and when people start getting really sick it's too much for them to walk to the one public toilet the park hasn't closed down (because if you really want people to get off their asses and make money for you, you show them how nasty life is without money). Everyone is hungry, so their bodies don't have the nutritional and energy wherewithal to really fight. While there was a support network for a small homeless population, it's so far beyond capacity that it's effect is nonexistant.

One particularly heartbreaker of a timeline brings Ebola into the mix, too. Don’t copy that one, please. I can’t bear seeing it again. I’ll pop out if that happens, even though I should continue to observe. That’s not a trauma I can mentally and emotionally withstand again. I didn’t really withstand the first time, but the information was important to the models.

Gods, although if it does happen again here, it would give credence to the theory that we Rowans can be Schrodingers, too. Schrodingers, you see, observe the universe into a quantum decision. You’ll understand once you see the outlines of wohshialis, I promise.

Don't forget there is positive action to implement, too: food. 

Think about food in terms of pets. Most of your current society would cringe at keeping gaurd dogs hungry and angry so they would be particularly vicious to any intruder. You pamper your family dog and cat, make sure their bowl is filled, and complain that they let you know when they are hungry.

Yet look at access to food by people. You don't care if your neighbor is hungry as long as your cat's bowl is full. You refuse to see that entire swaths of the population have easy access only to chemical-ridden, nutritionally poorer packaged food; that their time is so heavily constrained that making food from raw ingredients has become a luxury, and that those raw ingredients come with a higher price tag. Food is being used as a social tool. And I've heard it subliminally so much: that if black people were really all that, they wouldn't have so many health issues, which are proof of their drag on society. NO. You've got the wrong end of the stick. Food has been used as a social tool on them for generations, and we're seeing the outcome in statistics. Health is an indicator. When it's so egregiously out of tune, it means social games are happening.

If you really want to fix a cancerous blight in your society, fix access to food. Farmers are barely hanging on financially, the people eating the trash coming out of grocery store inner aisles aren't flourishing, yet the money involved is gargantuan. It's the middle men, the money men, and social policy.

Take the profit out. Look at studies before they are quashed and alternative studies funded by people intent on making a profit. The data is there, it already exists. It just needs to be objectively reviewed, the cognitive biases acknowledged and weighing the data as needed, and restudied where it's shaky. Acknowledge, too, that every body is different. Respect the individuality, then layer the nutrition on top of that. 

And social policy? It's canted towards limiting access. Weigh both sides: the positive actions and the negative limitations and verbal blandishment. 

Look at your own soul: what would you do to not submit to eating from a soup kitchen? It's the ultimate weakness, isn't it. It would rock your inner world like a seismic shock. How long would you go hungry first? Would you avoid eating food that a friend or family member offered? What are the quiet voices repeating in your head? You're strong, you can take a little sacrifice and hardship. You're not weak. Only weak people eat what they didn't buy themselves. Only weak people are a drain on the system. It will all turn around, there's no point in failing so hard and having to rebound from the depths of failure just to put a few morsels of food in your mouth.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

You don't have to acknowledge it to me. I've seen in enough heads in this timeline and similar to know the threads, even if the words aren't as clear and sharp as what I wrote. The emotional underpinnings are there.

Look at that stream of consciousness, though. It's not you, its the words from outside that you've been hearing so frequently, so consistently, that you've internalized them. To be a good person, you buy your own food. 

Command: be good. You are today, don't screw it up. To get the thing that you need to survive, you need to put money in my pocket. Your sacrifice and hardship are secondary compared to the money in my pocket, and the proof is in your self-worth.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to fixing the food crisis. It's not a matter of pushing one lever and, yay, everyone eats tonight! Doing it piecemeal would take at least a generation, probably two or three. There's so much that needs to be changed.

Yeah, in case you haven’t connected the dots, there’s a very narrow path to the easy outcome of a half generation of virus-induced hardship.

The murder of covids will ultimately have a 15% mortality rate before a smart society figures out how to keep things running, people eating, and shelter stable. Start down the road of Covidities, and that rises to 27%. Include the resurgence of all these other diseases, and, well.

The cupids will starve despite all their hoarding.

There’s going to be a soft collapse that everyone wails about being the end of humanity.

Here’s a clue: if you can hear the wails, it’s not the end.

Not to dismiss it. It’s going to be fucking hell. People are going to be desperate and will do the things desperate people do.

The difference is the world will see some of it. And the same people who try to deny Auschwitz, global warming, and call Covid-19 a hoax will deny these things are happening, until they happen to or are perpetrated by them, on video, and shared.

Their reality isn't self-affirming anymore. They need the share to understand which of their responses are the right ones.

Their will be one Joe who, my god. The shit he does, all while vocally, loudly denying that any of the desperate acts are really happening. He actually freezes his butchered neighbors—it’s not conjecture. He actually did it, and the first time was well before Covid-19 struck. The details are in one of the last news cycles before the soft collapse. Medical people were speculating that he had a prion disease, and his behavior and attitude of the past few years was highlighted as reason to look into it.

In some timelines—I don’t think this one—he’s caught with a hunk of Sam on the grill.

Clutch your pearls when that comes out. Jesus, people. Your imagination has no bounds, and are only bound by reasonability when there is time to think and process until you get your cognitive biases in check.

So, yeah, a soft collapse will happen. Food will become scarce. Not in the fields, it’s rotting in the fields. It can’t get to people. Money dries up, and, well. yeah. Money is the only driver. The economy in this spot in the linearity is still propelled by money. Nothing gets done without money.

So when the money dries up, at the height of when produce is available, the produce will rot in the fields. There won’t be enough money for wages, or transportation, or storage, or cleaning, or getting it on the shelves, or delivering. A chunk of people will have to die before enough people get pissed off and tell the money men to take a fucking hike.

The money men won’t go peacefully. They will try to economically strangle the firms that have the keys that can be forged together to make that first iteration of the data economy. They will bluster and beat their chests and send out fleets of lawyers.

The corporate entities will back down. Well, in some instances it’s less ‘back down’ and more ‘get distracted and need to regroup.’

It comes down to a group of 23 developers from across multiple corporations (they have the invested knowledge and access to more) and a few contractors (extra brilliance in navigating the complex databases and setting up elegant calls to keep the outputs chugging along in constrained data pathways)—to call in sick, then quietly become incommunicado. They’ll resurface by launching on a pirate server, get a few CEOs on board to tip the machine into action, and when a few fields are harvested in the midwest and people in starving NYC are fed it’s set off like dominos.

Money men can’t use laws to maneuver around a ravening hoard of mass-pop.

The waves of otherwise-managed diseases—cholera, measles—will start cropping up a bit before the starvation hits. It’s the Covidities. Without proper shelter, without the clean water and sewage systems we’ve developed for the shelters, bacteria spread.

It’s simple and immutable. Viruses don’t see barriers, they just see carriers. Bacteria wallow in things you can swallow. When bacteria aren’t managed, they thrive. Their wallows spread. Infection happens.

People die.

These deaths are the real soft collapse according to future history. They were preventable. Don’t fucking evict people. Don’t let food rot in fields. The virus is bad enough without being helped.

Money is dying anyway. It has to. The deaths by starvation and preventable bacterial infections is its last, grasping clutch at power. “Look,” the money men will try to tell you, “if you just let me control everything, only the weak will die. You want to be strong. Prove your strength. Use money to bootstrap out of this mess. Pay me, and I’ll protect you.”

Yeah. It’s a protection racket.

When people start dying of starvation and bacterial infections, when the food starts rotting in fields, when hospitals implode and the knowledgable health care population has been decimated, when the police and firemen have been furloughed and the gangs flourish, when the post office stops delivering and UPS and FedEx trucks are lumbering targets for gangs, when digital communication lines become spotty, it will feel like the world has ended.

This is the soft collapse.

The soft collapse will happen, and the first version of a data economy will emerge.

It will feel like a new world to the survivors. Trump will try to spin it as his plan all along—it was always what he knew needed to happen, and it’s the democrats’ fault that everyone needed to be killed to shake it up—they just won’t listen, and were on a witch hunt, and the Russians, and Obama, but bigly. Great. He’s done it against the worst odds with everyone out to get him, but he’s done it. He’s lead us to a Great America again.

Jesus, people. He’s an idiot. Why couldn’t you see how broken he was? There wasn’t a sane nugget left in that brain.

Ok, ok. We’re on a certain linearity here, but every linearity has nodes where it can split in multiple directions. But, Jesus, Trump? This is a bad linearity.

To get someone as broken, as incomprehensible and idiotic as that particular man into the presidency, you’ve gone down a time-whimey rabbit hole. There are a couple that would have been worse, but they were worse in a way that was faster. Those timelines, civilization fell like a bandaid being ripped off.

There’s a chance — small but real — that you won’t reelect Trump. There’s a chance— small but real— that he’lll either be assassinated (not a good thing, FYI—his herd becomes rabid) or imprisoned (best case scenario! All his lies shown to the world, and once in prison he has a mental breakdown and for one brief day tells his real story).

There’s a chance—small but real—that the entire White House will become an epicenter for the virus. Trump, like a roach, survives in most of the timelines.

Here’s what’s likely to happen:

The ‘red states’ will have a 10% Covid death rate. It’s because they don’t have the health infrastructure left, because the money men insisted they didn’t have the wealth. And they buy into the idea of, “the strong warriors will survive,” believe they just have to say goodbye to grandma early, and dismiss the new evidence that the massive spread was spawning a higher than average rate of mutation that was strongest in the epicenters. Yeah, grandma dies and its sad (sigh, before her time, but not by much), but the virus was mutating in her before she went and now Kiddo’s entire veinous system was imploding.

By the time that segment of the population mostly believes it, it’s too late.

So, Trump’s base dies en masse. Towns that voted inordinately heavily for him in 2016 are some of the first mass graves.

Biden dies. Bernie for president! Oops, Bernie dies. Warren for president!

Then the soft collapse decimates everyone. Trump’s base are closer to the fields; they gang up and walk in and take what they need in a few key spots—although especially the corporate farms engage security (new-fangled tech shit, too!) and a few hostile individuals are harmed. The health infrastructure is gone, so while they could have survived if they got to an ER, well, there’s no ERs left except in the cities.

The soft collapse hits Blue states harder. In the end, starvation and bacteria take more democrats than republicans, and republicans forgive Trump because he repeatedly said he had a plan, this is the best of the best outcomes, and survived Coronavirus himself.

By now, the data economy is rebuilding basic health infrastructure (slowly). Food is getting to tables. Tables are back in houses with clean running water and sewer systems, despite Trump’s railing at the illegality of it all. Where's all the money for this, he'll rail. 

Money men try to swoop in and ‘legitimize’ the new economy (read: start finding a way to game it to their benefit—remember greed; also remember the money men are just cupids’ tentacles). The developers who worked on the first iteration unanimously decided to publish the code as open source, except for one key thing: the check/balance system, wohshitlib.

It is, ultimately, taking the networks of farming, packaging, transportation, storage, restocking shelves, last-mile delivery, nutrition, health basics, and individual likes/dislikes/cautions/warnings and building information nodes. Those nodes became part of a system that hung them all together so when one node started feeling pain, the information was handled—logic to ensure that all the Suzies wishing they had lettuce was aggregated while Paul’s peanut allergy was highlighted in multiple facets (Albert: look closely at the peanut allergies!)

Wohshitlib started as a conglomeration of cool, interesting data sets and aggregations that enamored a couple data analysts. Then when the Russians hacked some networks and some fields failed to get harvestable food out, the analysts had an ah-ha moment.

Systems told stories as simple as a network, but with infinitely more variability. The data could be lost. Big data crunched, but didn’t have an infrastructure for pulling information into actionability.

When smart people with their primary agenda of feeding masses without profit as an outcome looked at the system of networks, they found there was a way to parse the system by way of an overarching system that encompassed both transitional and reflective data, and sometimes seemingly at-odds set of priorities.

There original code for the system that oversaw the system that balanced the networks was dense, easily crashed, and inelegant. They were worried that hackers would get into it and do the same harm on a broader basis, so they protected it until they could make it more elegant.

It took years of these super smart people working on the code to make it more elegant. Their goal was really on par with the wohshitlib itself: they wanted to easily see if something that shouldn’t have been changed, was. They looked at tensors and leveraged something similar to that to build a graphic interface that could be sliced different ways to promote understanding according to individual adeptness.

They did, in the end, make it open source. It was a beautiful thing, and the output was the first concrete, replicable instance of wohshialis.

There have always been a few people through the ages that could look at systems and somehow parse them against priorities to make them work. Some made it into mass consciousness: Socrates. DaVinci. Alexander Hamilton. Henry Ford.

Most just lead quiet lives that seemed extraordinarily easy to those who didn’t understand. They were old souls, shamans, gurus. They were moms and dads, artists and musicians. They got it, but didn’t have terminology to talk about it or find others who got it.

Once wohshialis hit the popular mind in a really big way, they came out from the woodwork. “Here,” they pointed to the graphical interface, “it where it’s off.”

In finally having something to refer to, in finally finding others that were interested in the same thing, a language developed.

There were politicians that had the talent, none better than Elizabeth Warren. Turns out she was a policy wonk because she truly and deeply understood the system of systems of networks. Hell, if her policies are an indicator, she was probably close to figuring out the system above wohshialis.

Many with the talent were already in technology. Librarians were another common niche. But really, there wasn’t any predominant class, gender, job, education. Some people got it, some didn’t. Moms who hadn’t pulled a paycheck in over a decade. Someone with a PhD in English Lit. A super-precocious child with a knack for leadership that hadn’t been beaten out of her yet.

Oh, but that’s the timeline I like. That’s the timeline where there’s a soft collapse, and the first tentative steps out are actually in a useful direction, with certain cognitive biases better managed in the face of mass graves. I spun down that probability network starting at about the time Warren was optioned as the democratic candidate by the (now useful for the last and most remarkable time) electoral college. That was a nice timeline. The soft collapse was the only collapse.

If I got my directions right, that’s not this. That is a nice timeline, but we’ve already studied it. We know the positives that need to be in effect; now we need to compare for the non-action voids that needed to happen, too. I'm not actually here for you; I'm here for the future, trying to finesse a complex system. We have a goal, and, well, studying this timeline and how it fails helps that goal. The chances of the right person reading this are miniscule, let alone the right person reading it and believing that there's actionable insight here. It's safe to tell it as a story; the story isn't going to have enough impact to change the linear points we need to understand better.

So, Trump’s base dies en masse. Towns that voted inordinately heavily for him in 2016 are some of the first mass graves.

Blue states, with populations heavily centered in densities away from food production, are decimated. They have mass graves, too. Later. Larger.

November is a time of chaos. The first mass graves have happened, and Trump sees the writing on the wall: he’ll never be reelected. So.

Coronavirus to the rescue! It’s too unsafe to vote. You should work, definitely. Your kids should go to school, definitely — mostly to make sure that you work productively. But voting is too unsafe. Those lines, that time. We’re going to reschedule the election, once coronavirus is managed. January. Maybe next November. Maybe in four years, the next election cycle. Pocahontas.

He'll say a transition of power at this time is simply too dangerous. The Republicans will rally around him and block every effort to enact any kind of voting.

Despotic. Idiot.

In every timeline that does not have him in power after 2020, his lies and power mongering are repaid. He’s the first president in US history to be jailed; in some time lines, he’s the first president in US history to be deemed a traitor and executed. He’s really a piece of work. You have no clue the extent of his cupidity yet. Where he was smart once, he’s declining cognitively; and even at his smartest, he was never the smartest in the room. Hell, his sister was smarter than he was.

But I digress again. The election never happens. He sits like a toad in the presidency.

His promised vaccine comes, and goes to the elite. He’ll cite expense, and logistics, and and and and and and. The action tells the truth: he wants mass-pop weak and too scared.

If action outlines reality, his intent was and remained to bulwark the cupids, rein in the herds, subjugate the hoi-polloi, and finally make a system where his own power is stable, implacable, and he and those that truly understand can have all the haves.

The new world, in the most probable collapse of potentiality based on current cultural standards, is a new enslavement-by-another-name. The cupids have. The herds do not. The hoi-polloi will either behave like the herd to survive, or be executed. The cupids will find reasons at first, and then dismiss the act and just tell the herd that Jim and Ann were thinking too much.

Don’t think, the message will be, and you’ll survive. You want to survive, right?