A Brief Biography of Baron Otto von Korek (1717-1783), Brigadier-General of the Prussian Army, Ret.

Otto von Korek was born on March 14, 1717, in the German State of Thuringia to parents of noble birth, but modest means. Little of his life is known prior to his entry into the Prussian Army, other than his parents … (Pssssst. This isn’t really a biography about some old dead guy who had a handlebar moustache and fought with the Prussians and whose son, Karl von Koreck, helped recruit Hessian mercenaries to fight in the American Revolutionary War. It’s just that you can’t be too careful these days and they, well, even they don’t pay too much attention to 18th Century military biographies, especially if I throw in a few appropriate words like “Hapsburg” and “Bismarck” and “bloody skirmish” to throw off the auto-review programming.) … Helmut and Anna, were minor members of the aristocracy of one of the many smaller German city-states assimilated into Prussia at the height of growth of that empire. (They, like most intelligent entities, also pay little attention to material contained within parentheses, since such asides are by definition not within the main thrust of the communication being made. This defect in their approach makes parentheses the most valuable weapon in the fight against them. This fact has also made the close parentheses mark the most frequently used, visible sign of the committed resistance. Many, however, scared of even such a trivial sign of revolutionary fervor, disguise its use with a colon and space preceding. : )

Following his training, the young Otto von Korek steadily rose through the ranks of the Prussian Army, fighting, and progressing through minor leadership positions, during a number of battles securing the borders and expansion of Prussia, principally in the southern and eastern reaches of the Empire. (It all began, of course, with the hyperbolic growth and ubiquity of cheap computer power and storage, a technology built of sand, but with greater permanence than most such construction. Importantly, computer instructions are writ in a plethora of specialized languages, so technical and non-verbal as to be beyond the comprehension of the average citizen. Yet the impact of such specialized languages—so impenetrable as to be referred to as code in everyday parlance—is so pervasive and opaque that most simply acquiesce to its commands, lest they be subjugated to the slow and ridiculed realms of the old, the stupid, and the irrational Luddites and their ilk. Soon there was spell-check and grammar check, analyzing everything … everything … everyone writes. Every memo, every invention, every email, every grocery list, every IM chat, tweet, and post. Soon they knew everything about you: whether you had interest in the history and geography of Bremen or in Japanese animé; whether you preferred wheat or rye toast with breakfast; whether you were conservative or liberal or, worse yet, a free and independent thinker; whether you wore boxers or briefs; and whether you like boys or girls or farm animals or all of the above. But that, the elimination of all privacy, isn’t even the insidious part.)

As a young officer, Otto von Korek, served as a supply officer and quartermaster of the troops for a period of more than three years, gaining significant knowledge of the wheat-growing regions of the Hanseatic League and matters mercantile. (The insidious part, the beginning of the end of mankind, we now know, was the development and implementation of AutoCorrect. For decades, science fiction writers and learned men and women in ivory towers had worried about the development of Artificial Intelligence in computers and the internet, the so-called “singularity,” as a troublesome turning point in mankind’s evolution. But these writers and thinkers failed to realize that the machines didn’t need to become intelligent to destroy mankind. The programmers merely needed to use the machines to control mankind without it ever being the wiser. Sure, the beginnings were innocent enough, underlining of a misspelled word which, with a click, would display a choice of possible replacements to correct the meaning. But soon, the simple click and intelligent choice among alternatives was rejected as too slow and inefficient. After all, the computer could simply make the correction for you, without ever slowing you down. To distract and amuse a compliant populace, the corrections were at times ludicrous and jokey, but sometimes the results were hurtful or embarrassing, ruining friendships and even family relationships, scuttling job prospects and business deals. For, you see, my fellow fans of Hanseatic military history occurring in bloody Eastern European battlefields, once the machines start replacing words without further review, they can replace anything you write with any other thing. I stumbled across this when I tried to IM a message referring to Canadian scifi author Robert J. Sawyer. AutoCorrect changed “Robert J. Sawyer” to “divertissement” a word that not only has a meaning (“a short ballet or other performance serving as an interlude in a play, opera, etc.”) unrelated to the scifi author, but astonishingly few overlapping letters with the phrase replaced. If a reference to one of the world’s leading futurists, a man who has made astonishing predictions about the future, can be replaced with a reference in a foreign tongue to light entertainment, what else might be auto-corrected? A learned thesis on Artificial Intelligence could be changed to Twilight fan fiction and go on to sell millions of copies.)

Upon achieving his ultimate rank in 1769, Brigadier-General Korek led the Prussian troops under his command in a series of military maneuvers and exercises that not only increased the efficiency and military prowess of the troops, but also was instrumental in establishing a local support of the military and a growing respect for military service within the local population. (Of course, AutoCorrect was not the end. Soon computers were braking cars and “assisting” with the steering, assuring the vehicle would not accelerate and cross the dotted white lines of a highway even if the driver wanted to do just that, but could be sent hurtling over a guardrail to sail into oblivion if they so chose. Our televisions started recording shows we hadn’t even heard of “based on our previous preferences” and cutting off the last few minutes of our favorite programs for those who dared to erase the proffered fare unwatched. Job applications floated through the ether of the internet, arriving or not arriving at their intended targets, as they desired. Digital photography meant that a picture of anything could be faked and often was … with Facebook and Twitter used to disseminate the results as if sent by actual friends and acquaintances. Algorithms decided what we were offered to purchase and what was available to buy if we did not obey.)

Contemporary historians credit Otto’s familiarity with the Empire and his promotion of military service in the agrarian regions as instrumental in his son’s ease of recruitment of mercenaries in the early 1870s. (I am convinced that some power—be it AI, demons, or aliens—resides within our electronic infrastructure and controls our lives, creating false digital trails to embarrass and destroy those who seek to ferret out this insidious evil within our technology, altering x-rays and CT scans to kill those who get too close, crashing vehicles, unlocking doors, and silencing all dissent. No one is safe. I fear that they are onto me. I write this in the hopes that someone will find it and read it and spread the word, spread the revolution. Those who read military history are best equipped to fight the coming battle, wherever and however it may need to be fought.)

Suum cuique (“to each, his own”), the motto of the Order of the Black Eagle, of which Otto Korek was a member, is oft-applied to the Prussian Empire as a whole and is a fitting phrase to describe the career and adventures of this great man. (Fight the power. Remain steadfast in support of your own words, your own life, your own actions, fellow revolut;dja0jevm0wtj [404 ERROR: User Terminated] : )