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Dooming America: a scenarios exploration

This Slate article describes a scenarios exercise, where a group explored different bad futures for the United States.  It's a fun article for futures studies and Gothic stuff alike.

It's attached to a fun little exercise, a sort of "Choose Your Own Apocalypse":

The main focus of Josh Levin's article is a single day of brainstorming, led by GBN:

For nearly three hours, we run through America-killers that range from the believable to the science fiction-y: rising sea levels, a collapse of entitlement programs, an attack by a foreign power on American soil, a pandemic 10 times worse than the 1918 flu, global domination by a space-faring nation that uses geo-engineering to "turn off" climate change, and the emergence of a transnational class of biologically enhanced supermen and women... who identify more with one another than with any particular nation.

The article also heads off towards Robert Wright, Igor Panarin, and the Institute for the Future.  The latter's Jamais Cascio gets his turn to describe several 50-year scenarios:

Cute note about futurism: "Most scenario-planning sessions end with the world stuffed inside a grid."

Turning off the world

It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens.

The end of the world came, and humans fought hard.  Especially as server lags grew, and GMs ran NPCs.  The article describes the last days of Tabula Rasa, a massively multiplayer game which was closed down, due to low subscription numbers.  The account starts with humor, then shades into melancholy.

back-and-forth exchanges followed, with the GMs even breaking out that most classic of old internet chestnuts. "ADMIN MESSAGE: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US," declared the server, followed a few moments later by, "ADMIN MESSAGE: ALL YOUR BASE," presumably to make clear the quantity of base in question.

Soon after, the final countdown began, ticking down from ten to zero in 45 seconds and capped off with, "Good night, and good luck!" Then, a freeze frame, a dialogue box reading, "You have been disconnected from the server," and an unceremonious dump back to the title screen.

And, like that, a world ended.

(hat tip to Collision Detection; image from Tabula Rasa Memorial)

Eentsy weentsy browser pal

A spider crawls across a map of Europe, according to your twisted whims, in this Flash toy:

When will a Hello Kitty version appear?

(thanks to Peter Naegele!)