Chapter Eight: Opposition
A senator took to the floor and railed against the Forum for six hours.
“This is an insurrection! Melvin Sninkle is trying to become the dictator of America! When this lunatic added those twelve pages to the bill we didn’t know what the hell he was even talking about. This is nothing more than a social credit system with extra steps! He’s trying to set up a whole new government!”
Relatively few senators defended the Forum, but one who did noted that the “extra steps” in the “social credit system” -the Chinese had instituted a crude predecessor of the Forum whose only incentive was to increase loyalty to the state- of the Forum were all the same as the “extra steps” that caused the current Republic to not be a tyranny.
A Nobel Prize Winning Economist who had both incorrectly predicted that the impact of the internet would eventually prove to be on par with the Fax Machine, as well as the complete and certain ruination of the global financial markets when a candidate he had opposed won office, decried the entire premise of the Rebuild Washington Forum was impossible.
“They don’t just give away Nobel Prizes, you know so I wish people would hear me out on this. The idea that you can have a leaderless group of normal people design something and then have it just appear is nonsense. I say let them go ahead and try to do it, and then you’ll learn soon enough why we should go back to doing things the way that we always have.”
He made sure to share this opinion in his weekly column in a prominent newspaper as often as possible. Previous comments show that he had been quite interested in the Forum before his account had failed to attract a significant number of votes and been doomed to obscurity. He did not address the primary counter-argument, which was that the United States itself had emerged in more or less the same manner as the Forum and that free markets functioned on more or less the same kind of decentralized pressures. Quietly however, many bright young minds began to understand that evolution, free markets, free republics, and perhaps even intelligence itself were really instantiations of the same fundamental principle.
Actors and musicians cried that the true problems of the country could only be addressed by solving racism, sexism, and homophobia. When asked how this could be achieved, they explained that this could only be done by doing good things and by no longer doing things that were bad -this being the most common level of exactness expressed about how solutions should work in Pre-Forum people- Only through more goodness and less badness could utopia finally be achieved. Artists had a long cultural tradition of drawing attention to problems in classical films that you may recognize from the “Someone Should Really Probably Do Something About This In Real Life” genre which had often led to real and dramatic change, but which almost never themselves suggested workable solutions. When the several major projects undertaken by racial minority creators on the Forum, and the self-organized inclusion initiatives which had been approved for several months by normal people, were mentioned the actors shook their heads sadly. Almost none of the artists chosen had been talentless radical communists -the art that was preferred by the Pre-Forum elite is truly bizarre and cannot be explained here in any credulous manner except to say that at certain periods its existence was financially supported by intelligence agencies who needed a way to launder money- and therefore could not truly be minorities. Practical, material solutions that gave people actual money and control over their lives could never solve the spiritual crises, they said.
This sentiment was surprisingly not repeated by Conspiracy Theorists, who by and large had become enormous fans of the Forum and participated for several hours a day, generally spending large amounts of time voting on individual items themselves instead of deferring their votes -many of whom had also developed a perhaps unhealthy obsession with Bethany Braxton Bingham as it was not uncommon for a typical Conspiracy Theorist of the century to have a poster of her on their bedroom wall photoshopped onto the body of a pornographic film actress wearing a bikini and holding two machetes- but by the mainstream television media. A popular Conspiracy Theorist who had been banned, essentially, from the internet dedicated a segment to passionately kissing an ultra-realistic wax head of Melvin Sninkle in between recitations of repurposed Shakespearean sonnets.
During terrified conference calls, members of the television press asked one another “what happens if they start using the Forum on the way we report the news?” They feared the way the Forum allowed common opinion to appear as a cogent articulate force in public discussion, not understanding that the Forum was not done growing and held far greater dangers for their industry. They began to search for dirt on Melvin Sninkle wherever possible, looking for anything they could do to destroy the credibility of the Forum before it could achieve universal adoption.
When news broke that Scott Gibbeck was trans -someone in the Press Corps under threat from their management finally dared to ask, to which he replied “yeah” before continuing to discuss a new weighting algorithm that was going to be made available to the Forum and which would forever transform what it meant to be an expert, and if anyone in the mainstream press had paid attention would have realized was their imminent doom. All follow-up questions were answered by Scott Gibbeck in the same manner and became one of his most famous mottos although it was later realized to be taken from a popular novel “Personal isn’t the same as important.”- the television news attempted to shift the nation’s attention back to the bathroom issue. That Scott Gibbeck was trans was now an established fact. By the reasoning of pre-Forum people, as this fact was now certified, and because someone in Wisconsin had gone to the bathroom and wondered if another person also going to the bathroom might have been trans, and everyone was curious as to what would happen if a child could had been going to the bathroom at the same time, this scenario had to be immediately addressed at the national level. No other concern, whether it be the declining state of healthcare or the rising rate of drug addiction and suicide, or a genocide occurring in another country, could possibly be more vital.
What good was the Forum, which appeared to be planning a Capitol rebuild with only one-percent administrative costs, if it could not address how people should go to the bathroom in a world in which trans people existed? This line of reasoning appeared on the front of every newspaper and was discussed for the full duration of every broadcast.
This problem was posted to a Forum solutioniong board under the title, “Okay, Let’s Just Fix This Thing Already. You Know What.” An inventor of Industrial 3D Printers who had worked through college as a janitor was immediately identified and elevated with a workable solution. Several prominent trans and cis spokespersons were elevated to provide approval -prior to the Forum group spokespeople more or less just decided they were in charge of an entire demographic and manifested this by being insufferable on social media on their behalf- Bethany Braxton Bingham invited all of them to the architectural livestream, as well as Scott Gibbeck -who said nothing beyond hello, rolled his eyes at his own prepared speech about how he didn’t represent trans people but that he supposed people should be able to go to the bathroom if they needed to, and then grunted a few times in approval as the livestream progressed- marking the first time that an Avatar of the Forum directly interacted with a senior government official, and together they designed an entirely new type of bathroom.
For younger readers, in the Pre-Forum age using a public bathroom was a deeply shameful and humiliating experience as the entire design had been centered more or less around contending with a disaster scenario that would require using a fire-hose to direct metric tons of sewage into a central drain. Stalls were built so that this hypothetical hose could be directed underneath them across the entire floor, which also made it easy to spy on another person in their most vulnerable moment. So much thought was given to what would happen if someone died while going to the bathroom that each door was secured by only the flimsiest lock that could be rattled loose in a matter of seconds. There were few places better at making people imagine their own savage murder, including prisons and insane asylums. Strangely, germ transmission was considered almost not at all. Shared surfaces were often sticky or suspiciously stained. Bidets were a cultural taboo and Pre-Forum people considered it more civilized to wrap their hands in thin sheets of paper and scrape fecal matter from themselves than to remove it with a quick spray of water. It is easy to see why this issue had become emotional, as everyday people were using facilities designed around the needs of sewage and corpse disposal, in a manner that required them to directly interact with their own feces, yet with no ability to plan long-term or apply context, society had only been able to try to fit people to the bathrooms rather than the other way around. Worse than this, a surprising amount of crimes took place in these near medieval torture chambers.
Ismail Phin —from whose name comes the euphemism “swimming a Phin” in the same way that “crap” previously originated from Thomas Crapper, inventor of the toilet- showed a 3D Printed bathroom which could be made cheaply from sealed concrete, and yet which was breath-takingly and hauntingly beautiful and resembled an underwater sea kingdom from out of a child’s fable. The curves and economy of space allowed its occupants both total privacy and room to supervise their children, a touch-free experience to reduce the spread of germs, and resolved most problems any person could reasonably have and allowed people to more or less use their best judgment. True modern toilets were displayed to the public for the first time at a national level, having become popular in Japan, and were met with great enthusiasm. Ismail Phinn proposed an entirely touchless bathroom experience. Jesse Herzog insisted that music be played constantly in the bathroom to hide noise by use of a common voice-activated digital assistant which could double as a method of allowing people to call for help during dangerous encounters, fulfilling his newfound primary and useful social purpose which was to bring up things that everyone knew about but no one wanted to discuss and then to propose practical solutions. Later he became the leading Risk Manager for the entire United States. -It is a little known fact that when voice recognition technology first became affordable people did not immediately understand that it was most useful for emergency response services and instead had it do things like recite the time and weather. When Jesse Herzogg led this transformation initiative under a new Sub-Forum he caused perhaps the single greatest drop in crime since the invention of the firearm under the “Just Shout Help!” Initiative- In the end, even the unpleasable Scott Gibbeck was forced to grunt that it “looked good.” All relevant spokespersons gave enthusiastic endorsement. In his old age, Scott Gibbeck admitted he’d had to fight back tears. The Forum, a structure both he and Melvin Sninkle had been discussing since college, was now real and working. He remarked that he could have died in that moment and been at peace.
“Melvin and I thought it would be used to solve AI problems and when I saw that goddamn bathroom I realized it might actually work. I was like a father seeing his son become a father. People were buying it. I knew my work was done.”
In the interview he attended immediately following the presentation with Chastity Anderson, Scott Gibbeck directed all questions about his sexual identity to the work of the PIST team, and explained how the Forum might be used to work through multiple issues and again stressed that national focus should fall on a new Forum Credentialing Algorithm. Chastity Anderson, who was under instructions to absolutely destroy the credibility of the Sninkle administration, blinked several times and instead asked about trans participation in Sports. Scott Gibbeck glared at her and assembled an ad hoc spreadsheet graph -he repeatedly refused to break for commercial and each time this was suggested shouted “you asked me! Well, then listen!”- to visually display statistical clustering to determine when separation might be appropriate, talked through how most problems could be solved through common-sense approaches such as awarding two medals by category, and allowing the trans participants to compete alongside the cis groups in solo events when there was not a large enough body of trans participants so they would not feel isolated even if awards after the event were separate. He based this logic on the pre-existing structure of weight classes that had existed for centuries in wrestling.
Chastity Anderson was outraged.
“You need to stop this! Stop trying to run to a spreadsheet whenever I ask you a question! You need to engage with me, and the American people, on an emotional level! These are emotional issues!”
The response of Scott Gibbeck -who never feared to match outrage for outrage- plays on a loop in his commemorative library, later known as the “Actually” speech:
“Sooner or later someone actually has to actually do something. Everyone can sit around and cry about this and leave it to a bunch of junior high school kids to try to decide policy by themselves, or we can all decide that we’re the adults and it’s our responsibility. And because once nothing starts to actually become something it can’t be everything, someone will be upset. That’s life but you’ve still got to come up with an actually real, workable solution that everyone can live with even if they’re not excited about it. And instead of doing that you just want to sit here and complain about what? That life isn’t perfect? That it isn’t fair? That we live in a fallen universe and this isn’t the Garden of Eden? Grow up. People like you are out there like vampires, just waiting to swoop into someone’s life and milk their tears to keep yourselves alive because you’re dead inside and co-dependence is as close as you ever come to feeling alive. And you’ll walk away giving yourself a big pat on the back even though you didn’t do a damn thing to make their life any better in any actual way. You’ll give yourself all this credit for how hypothetically kind you are to all these hypothetical people. You just want to sit there and nebulously love as many people as possible without ever actually doing anything based on that love. That’s not hard. Having actual ideas to improve life is hard. Solve actual hard problems and that despair inside will go away. Love someone by Goodman doing something real. If you don’t have actual ideas, at least articulate exactly what you want changed. If you just pause and burn a calorie to do that, you’ll probably surprise yourself and accidentally figure out the answer. If you have a better idea of how to fix all this shit, I’ll listen to it. I don’t know everything. No one does. But someone out there will know the right thing to do, or how to figure it out, and all we have to do is find them. That’s why we built the Forum.”
Prior to the interview, a panel of activists was consulted on how to most appropriately label Scott Gibbeck a racist or a sexist, this being the best way known to destroy a person’s reputation. It was determined, after much fraught discussion in which a number of Pre-Forum pseudo-religious observances were made alluding to the notion that no one could be responsible for anything and that certainly everyone loved everyone else, that the fact Scott Gibbeck had given up being Stephanie Gibbeck could probably be used as evidence that he hated women. Also the fact that he never mentioned being Black was probably evidence that he was a white supremacist. This was the logic of Pre-Forum people and it is difficult to understand in today’s terms.
Using every last millimeter of the expressive power in her eyebrows to create the illusion of intellect, and lots of statements like “some people say” and “it could be seen that” the chief public representative of the military industrial complex and the intelligence agencies, Chastity Anderson, put forward these very notions.
Scott Gibbeck’s facial expression during this “question” was later featured in several perennial memes, many of which are used to this day. The most popular screen grab became known as “Fury Incarnate.”
“I do wish you would earnestly believe me when I tell you that I don’t harbor hatred for anyone based on their race or gender,” Scott Gibbeck said, through gritted teeth.
Scott Gibbeck stared at her flatly. In this day and age to be called prejudice was a sort of public death sentence and you must understand that to the limited mind of Chastity Anderson this exchange seemed to have turned the conversation her way. She had no way of knowing that the following response from Scott Gibbeck -immortalized forever and now known simply as “The Three Responses”- are used as a rallying cry against tyranny and can often be found displayed alongside the Gadsen Flag.
Sensing her victory Chastity Hale replied, “Do you wish that so that we’d all blindly go along with your attempt to subvert the government”
“So that when I tell you how much I hate you for who you are as a person it will hurt more.”
The studio became silent and all across social media citizens posted “oh damn” and “snap” at the same moment.
“I’m not fond of you either,” Chastity Anderson retorted. Her hands shook as she straightened her notecards.
“If you approved of me, I’d never forgive myself,” said Scott Gibbeck, refusing to break eye-contact.
She tried to laugh, which was the worst part. It was the sort of laugh that made a person’s skin crawl. A laugh that put lie to the idea that the person laughing found anything funny.
“Ha, there you see! Do you hate me just for being a woman? Admit it! You hate me just because I’m a woman!”
The look Scott Gibbeck gave her was as nakedly murderous as the numerous drone-strikes she had endorsed on innocent civilians.
“I hate you for lots of reasons but that’s not one of them.”
After which, the interview came to an abrupt end.
Scott Gibbeck’s face was inserted over a various number of popular cowboy figures and film characters. T-shirts were printed with his face and for the first time ever Chastity Anderson, the well-eyebrowed representative of the military industrial complex and the intelligence agencies, had to fear social ruination. The common person had long since become weary of the mainstream press, yet at the same time feared their judgement. For the first time, Scott Gibbeck gave common people permission to show open contempt.
Multiple articles appeared after the interview refuting the statements of Scott Gibbeck, calling him the vilest names the writers could imagine -which were “Conservative” and “Republican”- and declaring that the bathroom debate would never truly die until every possible issue that any trans person could have across time or space, in any universe, was fully and completely resolved in the process of going to the bathroom. Other articles appeared with the argument that as Scott Gibbeck was mostly defined by his Scott Gibbeckness -as in the sheer immediacy of his personality dwarfed any other trait and was immediately obvious to anyone in his presence- was he even really trans? The article concluded that the only reasonable answer was no. The Forum Index reveals this conclusion to be incorrect.
Quietly and productively, under the Forum topic “What can we actually do to make people’s lives actually better?” people who were good at articulating problems and people who were good at finding solutions came together and actually resolved numerous concerns. The new Capitol would be handicap accessible without sacrificing its architectural beauty. A hall of American heroes was designed, where every person would see themselves represented in heroic proportions. Despite his personal protests, Scott Gibbeck’s likeness would be immortalized there in bronze.
When reached for comment Melvin Sninkle addressed the concerns on a nine hour edition of the Presidential Podcast.
“I suppose we could in a sense be trying to set up another government, but one that is entirely parallel and would be very difficult for any one person to control. Also of limited scope since funding can only come from Congress. Consider the enforcement mechanism of the Forum. If your proposal isn’t supported, you just don’t get paid and there’s no printing press for you to run to in order to create more money. How would you exert tyrannical control over that? There’s no one you can point a gun at and demand they give you their money. It’s all just computer code. In fact, one could even liken the structure to a fungus. It has no central brain. At the end of the day, I suppose what we are trying to do is create an apparatus that produces good decisions that improve people’s lives and don’t trample on their freedoms. It won’t work if it isn’t funded. I mean, if all of Congress agreed that it should become the government, or if people universally decide to treat Forum votes as the new currency, then yes, I suppose that could happen but it seems unlikely.” This last sentence is quoted on his monument atop Olympus Mons, built there by the unanimous consensus of the Martian Forum. He then spoke at length about the history of governments and group decision making and the history of tyranny. It garnered the most live-listeners of any broadcast in human history.
One telling comment on a social media site following this podcast was:
“I mean, I didn’t listen to it, really. He’s hard to listen to for more than five minutes at a time. It was just good to hear him talk. You can just tell he has his act together. Like, he doesn’t just make stuff up when he doesn’t know what is going on, you know? He explains things all the way through. The smart people I know say that it all makes sense. I started playing it at night to fall asleep instead of rain sounds or whatever. Nothing makes sense anymore. Everything is just noise. But when I hear that nasal voice and all his long, tedious explanations the world makes sense again. I’ll be laying there feeling anxious and then I’ll think, ‘well at least one person knows how to make things work.’ Puts me to sleep right away.”