Barbed Wire Phone Lines - Badass!

[razorsmile]

https://www.inc.com/magazine/19970615/1416.html - farmers' barbed wire fencing pulling double-duty as telephone wire in the 1920s. Frontier ingenuity at its finest. Makes me think of that Warren Ellis quote from Crécy, his woefully under-read comic/history text/treatise-

Comments

[__marcelo]

I very much like the idea for the genre. Panpunk? Omnipunk? Hackstory? No, not that last one. Kill that one with fire.

A relatively recent example would be the organized banks of (female) computers doing standardized large-scale calculations for the Manhattan Project (which is very much contemporaneous with the first computers in the contemporary sense).Heck, what we now call AI would be an example of that in a couple of decades.

Others for the list: Navajo as cryptography, Renaissance Florence was weirdly modern from some points of view - widespread accounting skills (even artisans kept double-entry books) meant something not unlike a decentralized P2P lending market (from one of my book micro-reviews/notes-to-myself), organized scribal book copying shops, the way there used to be streets of artisans specializing in different parts of mechanical watches, than master watchmakers would then assemble, classical mnemonics, and the proto-newspapers in Venice.

[__marcelo]

hackstory

HahahahahahhaNO - that sounds more like something where Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers kills really bad (and really hot) journalists or something.

And yes, the Renaissance Italy stuff is pretty crazy. Exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Basically our predecessors had the same problems we do (how do I spread my message to the entire town? How do I send my message to just *one* guy? How do I kill a guy while staying out of his reach?)

Since they had the same ingenuity we do and only the resource constraints differed, the shapes of the solutions look the same (hut vs house, Navajo windtalkers vs elaborate NSA codes or what have you) whilethe substance differs under the hood (so to speak. Chariot vs car, ahem

[razorsmile]

Sorry that was me. Forgot I wasn't logged in

[__marcelo]

(that entire show was like a masterclass on this topic)

Indeed. Beyond cutting-edge and long-obsolete. Mandatory first paragraph of Johnny Mnemonic:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, thought, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load then myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand- loading cartidges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers -all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.

Miss the old LJ too. Hopefully it won't take long to become obsolete enough to bloom again.