The Disruptor

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

THE 2095 ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL PHYSICS CHALLENGE for youth age 7 through 18, published on New Years’ Day, asked students to prove or refute that statement in plain language. The correct answer was assumed to be something like “there are no particles to create the sound waves to transmit sound, or any components of the mechanical energy needed to realize sound; by definition nothing exists in a vacuum, so sound is impossible.”

The following response was given a lot of attention, in that it was submitted by a 7 year-old, the contest’s youngest entrant, and as it turned out no one was aware he had made a submission. He received no assistance from parents or teachers or librarians or anyone. He merely had an idea, wrote it manually on a half-sheet of lined paper, and put it in an envelope that he brought to the post office. So rare was this type of activity that the postmaster was called to the counter to deal with the boy, who she remembers as dark-haired, serious, and determined to get the envelope on its way to an address in Taos, New Mexico. She grilled him on its contents, as there was some fear he was putting a toxic substance through the mail at the behest of a crazed adult attempting to conceal themselves. She checked on the contest, verified the address, and sold him a $1.25 express mail with security stamp, which he affixed, and she embossed the envelope with the official seal of the Postmaster, Eugene, Oregon, January 9, 2095.

The response was written in clear, attractive block lettering: IF SOMEONE WERE IN THE VACUUM TO HEAR THE SCREAM, IT WOULD NO LONGER BE A VACUUM, BECAUSE VACUUMS ARE EMPTY. AND THAT ALSO MAKES ME WONDER HOW WOULD THE SCREAM EVEN EXIST. IT’S ONE OF THOSE QUESTIONS THAT IS LIKE DIVIDING BY ZERO – IT SOUNDS GOOD UNTIL YOU TRY IT AND REALIZE YOU’VE BEEN TRICKED.

There was great sentiment for that to be the winner, but ultimately the judges deemed that, while clever and logical, the answer lacked a scientific base, did not show knowledge of wave theory or the physical properties of the ear. “This appears to be a response generated by pure logic, more about language than about science,” was the official response.

The name of the entrant was submitted as Karim Al-Khalid. In his second grade class at Rogue Ravine Elementary School, he was known as Keith Allen Cole. ‘He’s a reserved, very self-contained student,’ his teacher reported. ‘I’m not always sure what he’s absorbing and what he isn’t.’

When a local reporter asked him what kinds of things he thought about, young Keith took a few seconds and answered: ‘If I read something, I usually think about that for a few days, go over the way it phrased things, does it seem real or not? I love true crime, how a detective will put together a timeline: On Saturday, she left the house early to buy groceries, returning at 10:30 ........... how close to the real event can you get? So that’s what I think about. Oh, and girls occasionally, except I never get anywhere with that thinking like I do with crime and numbers.’

'Are you upset that you didn’t win?' he was asked.

'But I did win,' the boy said. When it was explained that the judges selected a more conventional answer, Keith replied: 'Right, but I wasn’t thinking like that. I read all the answers and mine was the most original, the one that got down to how real the whole idea was. Plus all the write-ins favoring me, I feel like I won. But it’s on to a new idea.'

San Vicente, California: January 23, 2124 from the notes of City Manager Marshall Landman

I HAVE BEEN ORDERED BY PHILLIP ANSARI to summon Keith Allen Cole for a consultancy, and I have done so. He was in Sierra Urbano when I reached him, in the remote area beneath Mt. Karanaka known as The Outback. ‘I am doing very well,’ he told me, ‘and I can sense something brewing. How is the old man?’ He meant Ansari, of course. ‘The same, only worse,’ I explained. ‘Less civility. Barks orders, is displeased with everyone.’ I paused there, having no idea how Cole would take this. It was hard to tell if individual people meant anything to him, as Cole was all about the universal picture, the big lens, the corridors of eternity. ‘You’re the only one whoever did a job right,’ I said to Cole when he didn’t bite during the pause, and at that he reminded me: ‘That’s because I got out early. It would have been the same for me had I stayed.’

HE WAS CORRECT, OF COURSE: there was no stopping the avalanche at that point. He left in 2116 to redesign the entire governmental infrastructure of New Mexico. 93% of the employees were able to successfully transition into new roles; the financial interfaces increased the speed of transactions to a level rivaled by only Switzerland and Dubai; this attracted new investment money to the State, and within a year New Mexico was transformed, and under a new Chief of Native Affairs the tribes were also held to a high standard and things were running as they should. He was New Mexico’s Man of the Year in 2117, known as the “Systems Whisperer,” an analyst of large institutional structures who could size up an organization in about an hour with precise insights about strengths, bottlenecks, challenges and hidden sinkholes. He stayed in New Mexico as an advisor through 2120, but things were beginning to unravel. He did not follow a directive from the governor, there were rumors of an affair with a high-ranking military official that was causing some resentment, leading to other rumors – drug use, sexual extremism, consorting with drug kingpins. He grew riskier, at times reckless. He refused to acknowledge bank credit ratings, dismissed educational accreditation as pushing bones around in the graveyard, challenged the legitimacy of certain elected officials with a statistical analysis of their Ranked Choice Voting victory, and purposely withheld municipal fees owed to school districts.

Cole by mid-2020 challenged everything, his mind working at twice the speed of anyone else’s, his insights like bolts of lightning that could incinerate an opposing argument. In California, retained by the embattled charter school cohort in the Oakland/San Francisco region, he somehow obtained the credentials to go before an administrative judge and successfully severed charter schools from District encroachment fees, publicly outflanking the pompous School District attorney when he told the administrative hearing officer:

‘What Mr. Onondaga is saying, if I am putting this together correctly, is that they never have clean numbers, they’re estimating, throwing lump sum debts at the charter schools based on their own mismanagement, the extent of which is still unclear – this is money that was overspent in certain unnamed departments and the General Fund was needed to bail out the overages. We understand by law this needs to be replenished, but it’s a random bill without backing documentation of any kind, arrives at random times, and is an enormous burden. The average bill for a school of 600 will be $720,000, in answer to the court’s question. Our position is that the bill is not legitimate, we did not contract with the district for any new services, the single line item reads Annual Encroachment, and nothing like that was ever discussed or agreed upon.’

The hearing was carried on Government TV, and by the time Cole got to that last speech thousands were watching. He had undressed the overmatched attorney, and when the hapless Onandaga tried to challenge an interpretation because it came from a non-lawyer, the judge turned to Cole: ‘Would you like to respond to that, Mr. Cole?’

‘Yes, thank you, Judge Reed,’ Cole offered, standing, addressing the judge, not the attorney. ‘I assume the court is considering the argument from a legal and a logical perspective without much concern about who speaks the words. We’ve done our research, and in the report we will file is evidence of a deliberate inconsistency and delay in reporting financials, a blatant attempt to destabilize vulnerable unaffiliated schools, and the court may do as it sees fit with that evidence. As for Mr. Onandaga, he has gone right up to the threshold of personal disrespect toward me, and as he has not crossed it I will only say that none of that is necessary, it’s beneath him, and I will continue to conduct myself professionally and await the Court’s decision.’

Judge Reed had them return at 430pm for a closed session to render the judgment in private first. Then within the hour they would release the decision publicly. Cole deputized me and I went with him to the closed session, and Judge Reed spoke for an uninterrupted 20 minutes, negating the encroachment fee, pulling no punches on the bad faith actions of the school personnel, demanding a report on all this overspending and how and why superintendents were not overseeing this. ‘Mr. Onandaga,’ the judge concluded. ‘Did you not see the lack of a foundation for this fiscal arrangement? How did you not go to the superintendents and tell them they were on thin ice here? Did you not see it?’ The tired attorney had his head down, was shaking it back and forth, produced a barely audible response. ‘Within the four walls of these school districts, it all adds up,’ he rasped. ‘Something happens to it when it’s out in the public realm.’

‘Yes,’ said the judge after a pause. ‘Something called reality. And fair play.’

COLE WAS MUCH IN DEMAND FOLLOWING THIS, given more and more autonomy and authority and resources to pursue strange and esoteric governmental interventions. The ramifications of the encroachment result included three superintendents leaving their positions, two embezzlement convictions of accounting personnel, various other funding anomalies within agencies and municipalities, and an entirely new paradigm in governmental systems design and how to effectively manage the mechanisms of government for maximum impact and service to the public.

I produced a white paper on unintended consequences of large-scale actions, created a "ripple theory" with 5 rungs of complex systems reactions to stimuli, much of it an elaboration of Cole's own musings. He approved the work and asked that I remove the credit I assigned to him. 'Sharing the wealth,' he said cryptically, 'sometimes is better only between friends.' I was thrown for a second as he referred to us as friends; I could not recall that kind of sentiment ever coming from him toward anyone.

Keith Allen Cole was now a kind of celebrity disruptor; the projects he was invited to join included every conceivable anti-aging idea, the colonization of Mars, extending the ban on sexual activity for those currently in the “No Sex” category that was instituted in 2122 to stop the spread of COVID-37, as that particular virus had found its greatest longevity through sexual contact and the list was recommended for reauthorization by Public Health. Only a few violations had been prosecuted; in 2122 Cole had spoken to a group of us in a remote yurt on California's Lost Coast, where he was asked to consult with an education reform group prior to departing on his lengthy retreat (he called it an exile because his radical views were attracting IRS and FBI notice) in the wilds outside the experimental colony of Sierra Urbano. I seemed to be involved in all Keith Cole events; people called me who wanted access; I was invited if Cole was to be present. In the yurt that day he told us: ‘If they want a revolution, a bloody coup, they just made the right move, along with legitimizing distance sex, phone and Internet sex, and the push for bot-sex is revived. There is going to be a case of unapproved sexual activity that is prosecuted and goes viral, and then ........... nobody knows. Your 5th ripple,’ he said, referring to my white paper, ‘is just the start. We’re going to need 12 ripples. Everybody thinking about innovation and how the future will fare, and we in it, is thinking about technology and transportation and medical advances,’ and for this last he gave us a sly look, a parting shot as he left for his exile, ‘but the real ground-breaking stuff is in sociology – how we organize, how we come to understand interactions, what we can do to get past our political divisions – how important it is to be in a yurt on nameless land, trading ideas hundreds of miles from where we live, then dispersing. What will come of this? Something will. Track it, keep it alive. To the future,’ Cole said, raising his tequila and juice concoction, as did others, and we clinked glasses, drank deeply, and went out to the foggy mist and the world that seemed to have just made a major shift. We needed leadership, and with Keith Allen Cole in exile I felt strangely alone and markedly unsafe.

THE FIRST TIME I ENCOUNTERED KEITH ALLEN COLE WAS IN 2113; he also identified as Karim Al-Khalid, and did not use his number when introducing himself. He was a 25 year-old graduate student at the Naropa University outside Boulder, Colorado, and was presenting his Doctoral Dissertation Project to a select group of international experts, who were going to vote and have some say in which of the seven doctoral candidates would receive the University’s first-ever three-year residency to see their project through. We saw the seven students over a 2-day period, the presentations up to an hour-and-a-half long, with ample time to reflect and rate the work in between. We were asked not to discuss our ratings until the very end, and that would be under carefully controlled conditions.

‘We’re not interested in consensus,’ Provost Kelsey Arthur61 told us bluntly at our first meeting. ‘You don’t have to agree on anything. We just want to hear your thinking. The faculty will vote, the students vote, and we have eleven distinguished guests.’ Someone asked about weighting the votes, and the Provost seemed to stiffen. She did not like even the hint of a challenge. ‘The faculty is weighted double,’ she said quickly, and was about to move on when the questioner stood up from the student desk he was too big for and asked: ‘Are they allowed to discuss the candidates?’ He was tall, sandy-haired, held himself with the casual elegance of a man accustomed to being in charge. He had the slight drawl of an educated Southerner. The Provost seemed stunned, stared at the standing man for a surprisingly long interval.

‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘They are like family to the students.’

‘Very nice,’ said the tall man, and took his seat.

WE DIDN’T SEE COLE’S PRESENTATION UNTIL SLOT #6 at 2:00pm on Day 2. These were Psychology students but were separated by their specialty area, and there were wide gulfs of practice and purpose. At that time I owned a private investigation firm that gauged security risks and offered companies a rating on how attractive they would be for a terrorist attack, a financial take-over, an embezzlement scheme ...... everyone was at risk for something and we dreamed up new ways people could be at risk. I had sketched out a Risk Index, an algorithm that took certain actions and projected them out to worst-case scenarios – what problems, or what kind of boon, or complication might occur? It was a prototype for the "Ripple" idea, and I couldn't get the patent yet as the Patent Office kept requiring more data. The fight with them was bringing me some notoriety and led to my invitation to Naropa. There was a fascination with the idea of a Risk Index based on imagination and pure evil intent, and we were the first ones bold enough to put something out there. I knew we needed to reel ourselves back a bit: a few bad predictions and the sky would fall -- on me. My worst-case scenario I had not mapped yet.

The first five presentations were disappointing. The two clinical psychologists could not tie their thesis to the main question: How will this work affect the world at large in the following domains: political, academic, legal, interpersonal, medical, collective psychological, media communications, technologically, creativity, artistically ..... there were many domains mentioned and the candidates needed to choose the ones they would influence, but the clinicians were more interested in the inner workings of the patient, as they kept calling the subjects. They were not thinking and I grew frustrated and fidgety and had to fight the urge to pull out a few devices and work on something else. They were both seen on Day One along with a neuropsych specialist and a linguist, the former very technical and fixated on developing an electrode that could stimulate multiple specific combinations in the brain; the latter putting forth a hypothesis that with strict speech training, activating certain cerebral and emotional networks, we could increase human productivity tenfold. ‘Very strict protocols must be followed,’ she commanded at the end. ‘Any deviation and we lose the resonance, the brain falls back into its patterns.’ The woman was about 40, from northern India, and spoke very stiffly, trying to modulate her accent. I gave her the highest rating on Day One, on a 100 point scale her 73 looked better than the scores in the 50s and low 60s.

Day Two began at 8:00am with an Arts and Music Psychologist waxing poetically about how the world will be affected by an immersion across the globe in music training, therapy, appreciation, new technology, suicide prevention, education (‘Reading and writing as we know it will be transformed. Music and visual art will speak to us. Everyone will contribute to the group symphony ......... war will end overnight.’) She finished quickly, in under an hour. ‘All I am asking,’ she told us at the end, ‘is $3 trillion a year for three years. I have a detailed business plan, a global strategy, I will employ tens of thousands of artists ........ a transformative planetary miracle, and then we go interplanetary.’ She was one of the believers who analyzed a recent discovery in cratered land alterations in eastern Turkey, with alleged evidence of aliens, messages etched into rocks, objects that may have been extraterrestrial musical instruments. ‘They’re out there and they deserve this transformation as well,’ was her closing, and a few attendees gave her a subdued applause.

I needed some time alone and went back to my room, but a repair robot was laboring over an open electrical panel, talking through diagnostic procedures. ‘Hello,’ it greeted me without turning from the open panel. ‘Hi- speed data has system overload, repair time 1-2 hours.’

I took the materials for the next presentation from a drawer and went to the Technology Center where I could get a private pod. After scanning my access chip the security engineer told me there would be restrictions on any data related to the candidates. ‘Understood,’ I said. I signed a disclaimer, promised to follow the rules, and settled in to read the approved materials, prepared by the student himself. The hard copy was a rarity, and I read it in the sealed quiet of the translucent pod, sunk deep into a hanging chair that spun slowly across the hours. The filtered light and amoebic movement in the pod’s membrane made it almost as if I were an embryo nurtured in the fluid and warmth of the womb. At 1:30pm I exited, soothed and refreshed, and made my way to the presentation center.

COLE HAD CHOSEN A DIFFERENT ROOM FOR HIS PRESENTATION, a circular enclosure with a high, stained-glass dome and multiple image stations in recesses set every 60 degrees. As I was settling in, Mike Warren73 -- the bold Southener who had challenged the Provost -- entered the room, looked around and seemed to head in my direction purposely. He took a seat two over from me, leaving one between us where we both placed our personal bag. ‘Did you get a chance to look over the materials?’ he asked me. I nodded, and we looked at each other knowingly. Ten minutes before the official start time, Cole came in the room, used a finger chip to test the imagery in the different recessed stations, and looked over the data feed with a technician. He was dressed in black, with his dark hair slicked back and tinted glasses wrapping around his face, almost like a tube; he had data modules on his wrist, multiple laser pointers on both hands; a belt pouch had wires going into it and a node hung on a chain around his neck. He was giving off the occasional twinkling light.

In the subdued illumination of the domed room Cole began telling a story, casually, like a musician whose tuning had effortlessly become the opening bars of his opus. His words were punctuated at key moments by the images set in the various recesses around the room. Somewhat distant and self-contained in most settings, with an air of supreme confidence and knowledge that usually resulted in his response to a question being the last response, Cole came off as friendly and humble here, questioning his own assumptions, letting us know when data was not verified, when he was speculating. You would have thought we were in a dark movie theater; no one made a sound, and even when asked, no one responded with a question or comment.

"SO THE QUESTION WE ARE TO ANSWER is about our project’s relevance to the world. And I hit a block because I don’t believe I know the world well at all, certainly not well enough to know what it needs and what effect I could have on it. I began with the premise that I needed more fundamental info before proposing something that was to play out over three years. It’s an entrepreneurial challenge with a social activist overlay; a scholarly and real-world pursuit simultaneously. Very rare, and I want to honor the level of thought with a thoughtful proposal. And this proposal is about a study, about developing a way to analyze our world.

“I began with considering the current conditions under which we operate. Here are the representative pieces of the world of 2113-14 that I have come to believe are key to understanding our true souls as a people:

“Garage owners or parking lot owners are this generation’s rich man VIP leisure club; maximum usage, prices going up, no overhead, inalienable property rights, performing an absolutely essential function. Automobiles, motorcycles, personal lift-craft, motor skates, cable car hybrids, some have heli-pads and can handle all the DIY off-the-ground-craft, charging pads with thousands of fittings, connectors, adaptors. An urban setting with 17,000 spaces at full capacity 24/7/365 in the US last year grossed over $6 billion. A downtown lot, no structure, 40 spaces, at 80% capacity, grossed almost $900K. They’re tearing down office buildings to build parking lots as we speak. The question becomes: at what point, without buildings, will not enough people come downtown? We’ll have a glut of empty concrete, failed business people, loan defaults, and a new cycle of urban decay – the fifth since the Industrial Revolution and promising to be the worst. Parking aristocracy, haughty and impervious, protecting cracked concrete.

“The rise of virtual countries has created a dozen or so hidden networks who declare sovereignty as if they had physical space, claim the space of their network — their homes, their roaming data path – as sovereign, demand loyalty, have all the symbols of nationhood: flags, national celebration days, oral history, border laws in terms of getting access to their website through a virtual visa, laws that contradict the laws of the nation where they sit physically. The first virtual nation may have been Al-Qaeda, the pan-Arab plotters who attacked New York in 2001. Q-Anon, still around today, began as a virtual nation. Now these entities hide effectively on the newest encoded info network, El Junto Diablo, and uncover obscure laws granting them land rights, independence; even within countries we have cities and counties under private control; they can wreak havoc with digital cyber-attacks, or amass guns and coordinate multi-locale raids in what the Department of Homeland Security calls “non-virtual space,” a phrase that incredibly has reality referred to in terms of virtual space, as if the latter is the foundation.

“The social identity scores and point system, with its rating of every human interaction, with the penalties for low scores starting to be like a shunning – slip below 4.0 and there are apartments that won’t rent to the outcast, insurance rates go up, potential romantic partners are limited by dating companies ....... you are rated and you rate the checker at the market, the taco truck in Old Town, the bus driver in the airport shuttle. “5 scale 5” has become one of the mottos of our age - everyone reminding everyone else to score them high. Revenge plots have been launched due to low ratings, anonymous as they claim to be. People configure their mass mail settings to hold back newsletters to those who slip below a 4.0 rating overall.

“The sexual prohibitions based on category of viral risk is a violation of every human right, subject to mass manipulation, and will create a sexual psychosis for the future that could be as disruptive and destructive as any policy ever enacted. Who comes up with stuff like this? Do they have any idea what they are standing in the way of?

“We have speculators paying money to parents in the shadowy Human Futures movement, buying shares of their children, banking on their future success, able to direct their studies, their work life, with rights to part of their earnings. Parents so desperate that they will allow for this sort of investment, taking thousands on the day of their child’s birth just to survive ....... and in later decades suffering as their investor starts demanding dividends, and with those not forthcoming in some cases they can direct the schooling and the direction of their "investment."

“The 1000-year movement has pseudo-scientists in competition, laying claim to various secrets that place them ahead of anti-aging competitors. Combine that with the Human Futures movement and we have a sprint toward a genetic and financial Master Race, with millions trying to buy in on a proposed immortality.

“And finally, the item most disturbing, is the storage of human memory in cloud-like electronic labs – the actual extraction of specific human memory to allow for extra room to master complex systems like space travel, advanced economics, nuclear power on a global basis, military advantage through diversification of weaponry and poison. They will take memories of your wedding, your child’s birth, an athletic victory, your grandparents, and place them in a holding facility, while you -- empty- headed, heartless, primed for pure abstraction -- pursue global domination and financial tyranny for your country or your tribe.

“What kind of human being will we create by accelerating them into advanced complexity, without any memories of people they love, separated from context and meaning? How can they exercise their advanced knowledge and skills with any sense of human values?"

THIS WAS THE END OF HIS PRESENTATION, and he left 30 minutes for questions and comments, which were subdued at first, almost stunned. Afterward, we made our way through the last presentation, and went into our deliberations. The faculty present didn't like what we had to say; they clearly had a favorite. I had scored Cole at 94; Warren went as high as 97.

'If you choose anyone but Cole,' Mike Warren73 told the Provost, 'you will lose all credibility in the field.'

Under duress, he was awarded the fellowship, which he ultimately declined. He had other offers that interested him more. The fellowship was awarded to the Music and Art expert, but she was not able to hold out for the $9 trillion she needed; the final budget was not made public.

But Keith Allen Cole was launched. He was very busy very quickly, and by the time Ansari had me summon him he had still not gotten to the agenda of the seven insights into the world of 2114. Ansari would not give him time to explore any ideas of his own. The old man had been at that Naropa event, watching on closed circuit, and he had taken what Cole had said about private ownership of cities and counties and had created the California City/County of San Vicente - and it was about to explode. He was expecting Keith Allen Cole to take his brainchild and straighten it out.

And thus, from icy exile, we were to celebrate the return of The Disruptor. The man who was to come to us was about to redefine disruption, and that should have come as no surprise.