"The Revolution Will Be Automated" - March 20, 2025
Something was happening to established fact in the digital realm...
Every Thursday, Silver Gecko Publishing highlights one of my stories, either a work of short fiction, a novel, or an audiobook. This week’s selection is the short story “The Revolution Will Be Automated,” from the anthology THE GHOST READERS AND OTHER STORIES, available on Kindle, and in paperback.
As a rule, I don’t talk politics in a public forum. However, political ideas can creep into my writing. After all, as many artists will remind people, art in itself is political.
I wrote this story eight years ago as a direct response to some disconcerting events that happened in the early part of 2017. It made its way into my anthology of science fiction stories, and I haven’t thought about it much beyond this. However, sadly, it has become relevant again. Now with the powers now available through AI, it makes this issue even more dangerous.
I think the best way to preface this story is to pull some of my notes at the end of the anthology where I talked about the genesis of the tale…
As a former newspaper man and an ardent supporter of the First Amendment, I saw some truly troubling things happen mostly below the mainstream media’s radar. There have been reports of huge chunks of data previously available to the public on governmental web sites being changed, moved to non-public sites, or straight-up deleted from the servers. Some of this data could be seen as politically controversial but still was either legitimate public information (like the inclusion of LGBT issues and civil rights) or authentic scientific information that some political factions simply did not like (such as climate data). Beyond that, there were other examples of scrubbed information that had no apparent political motivation whatsoever (like animal welfare reports on pet stores).
I don’t care what side of the aisle you align yourself with, this should bother you. It should bother anyone when the government tries to make information disappear... especially when we the people have paid for it. It was a practice warned against by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
Conservatives often feel insulated from comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four because the government of Big Brother in Orwell’s classic novel is an obvious allegory to the Soviet Union. Heck, the book goes as far as to call the government “Ingsoc,” which is an abbreviation of “English socialism.”
However, the practice of rewriting history is actually not an ingrained element of socialism. It is an element of totalitarianism, and it can be done by anyone in power, regardless of political affiliation. “The Revolution Will Be Automated” is a warning about how easy this can be achieved in the digital world.
This is not an indictment along party lines, but rather a condemnation of revisionist history at the highest levels. This is not a right versus left argument. Rather, this is a cautionary tale against any organization trying to control the message to the point of dismantling the past. It has been tried by a range of regimes from Joseph Stalin in the past to modern-day North Korea regime, and by many a totalitarian leader in between. It never ends well, and it’s not something we should allow.
Okay… lecture over. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled fictional newsletter…
-Kevin Carr
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Illustration by jamesmarkosborne (@jamesmarkosborne) from Pixabay
The Revolution Will Be Automated by Kevin Carr
Wikipedia was wrong.
Julia knew this was not an uncommon occurrence. Wikipedia was wrong all the time. After all, any online information platform that didn’t just allow – but relied upon – user edits was prone to a variety of problems from basic spelling errors to deliberate and malicious trolling.
What bothered Julia about this wasn’t that Wikipedia was wrong, but instead how it was wrong.
In this case, Julia couldn’t find a specific reference that she knew should be there. While politically-charged and controversial scraps of information are routinely deleted, overwritten, and reinstated, something innocuous like a meteorologist from New Mexico shouldn’t be in any danger of being deleted.
But there it was. Or rather, there it wasn’t. All references to Peter Wiener from Clovis Community College in New Mexico appeared to be wiped from the site.
Julia had stumbled upon the citation a few years ago while mapping a cross-country trip in which she wanted to see some of the most majestic sites the country had to offer. Along the way, she found a mention on Wikipedia that caused the immature nine-year-old child in her to literally laugh out loud. It was a reference to rainfall data in Elephant Butte, New Mexico, and even today in the current absence of the data, Julia remembered the line perfectly: “According to Peter Wiener, Elephant Butte is rarely wet.”
Of course, Julia knew the statement was innocent enough, but it still made her chuckle. So, on the occasion in which she happened to tell someone about it, she undoubtedly found herself back at home later that night, looking for the quote to make sure it was still there.
This time, it was not.
But it wasn’t just deleted from the Wikipedia page as extraneous data. Julia had drilled down into the edit history of Wikipedia, and she couldn’t find any evidence that it had ever existed on the site at all. There was no note of when it was deleted, and a deep search of Wikipedia itself turned up nothing else.
That’s not how it was supposed to work.
At first, Julia didn’t think much of it. She was sure it was an error on her part. Most likely, she just missed the revision in the page’s history (though she was quite certain she had searched far enough back and used the “Find” command on all the relevant history pages). However, it still nagged at her that she found no mention of her favorite Wiener.
Julia knew she shouldn’t let it bother her. However, it was a mystery that had presented itself, and as a novelist, she couldn’t make the creative side of her mind shut down. She kept thinking of a host of scenarios in which Peter Wiener had been wiped clean.
Plus, it was a problem with Wikipedia, and while that site was not a great source for a reporter from The New York Times chasing down a story, it was invaluable to her job when she had to look up a quick fact or two.
Almost reflexively, Julia picked up her phone and said softly into the microphone, “Call Eugene.”
The phone autodialed, and after three rings, the line was answered.
“Yeah,” a raspy voice said. “Mite here.”
Julia rolled her eyes. She refused to call her friend by his self-appointed hacker name. Eugene was quite good at computers, but he had always been terrible at selling himself. Even with a name like Mite (which he insisted on spelling in leetspeak as “m173”), she never quite realized that it made him sound neither threatening nor imposing. Instead, Eugene just made himself seem smaller and less significant to the rogue community.
Still, Julia knew no one who better understood how data information worked.
“Hey,” Julia said into the phone.
“What’s up Jules?”
“Wanted to see if you could use your special skills to find a piece of missing information for me.”
Instantly, Eugene came to life on the phone. Julia shook her head, knowing that when she explained what she needed, it would take the wind from his sails. She wasn’t exactly asking the guy to hack into the Pentagon... just to find a meteorologist with a silly name who had something to say about a silly place (or rather, a place that only someone with Julia’s sophomoric sense of humor would find particularly silly).
Julia explained what she was looking for to Eugene, asking for nothing more than a deep search into the Wikipedia databanks for Peter Wiener and his thoughts on Elephant Butte.
As expected, Eugene wasn’t thrilled with the request.
“You call me out of the blue for a search you can do yourself on the Wayback Machine?” he sighed.
“Look man, I may not know everything about computers, but I did the basic searches already.”
“Did you check –”
“Yes, I checked the page history on Wikipedia,” Julia said, somewhat annoyed. Then she added, “And I turned it off and back on again,” even though she had done no such thing.
“You’d be surprised at how many people don’t,” Eugene grumbled. He paused for a minute, then said, “Yeah, I’ll look into it for you. Can you email me the page?”
“Sure thing,” Julia said.
• • •
Eugene sat up in his chair where he had fallen asleep the night before. Sand crusted in his eyes, and his nose was clogged from allergy boogers. He had to pee something fierce, but he didn’t have the energy to stand up yet.
Eugene tossed his phone on his desk and reached forward to tap the keyboard of his computer. The monitor came to life with a picture of HAL-9000’s computer eye asking for his password. He typed it in quickly and launched his email client. Sure enough, buried between spam messages about Russian mail-order brides and the Dollar Shave Club, there was an email from Julia with the subject “Peter Wiener and Elephant Butte.”
Smiling a bit to himself because of the reference, Eugene clicked on the email and opened the Wikipedia link in the message’s body.
Even though Julia had assured him that she did the basic searches already, Eugene still looked into the page history and checked the Wayback Machine for any reference.
Nada.
Eugene cracked his knuckles. “Looks like I’ll need to work a little magic,” he said.
He was just about to stand up for a trip to the bathroom when he closed the browser tab that displayed his current search on the Wayback Machine, revealing his email client.
And that caused Eugene to pause.
Julia’s email was gone. Not opened. Not marked as read. Just gone.
Eugene thought for a moment. Did he delete that? He retraced his steps in his head. No, he was pretty sure he just clicked through the link to the Wikipedia page.
Then where did the email go?
Eugene shook his head and stood up. Nature’s call was stronger than his curiosity about this issue.
By the time he returned to his chair from using the toilet, Eugene didn’t think again about Julia’s deleted email.
• • •
It had been a week since Julia had called Eugene about Peter Wiener and Elephant Butte. In fact, Julia had essentially forgotten about the issue a couple days after it had passed. As always, life got in the way, and there was more to think about in this world than meteorologists with silly names.
That night, Julia woke in the early morning to the buzzing of her phone. As her hand shot out for the phone on her bedside table, Julia shoved her face into her pillow and groaned. This wasn’t the first time she had been woken by a buzzing text message at odd hours. For the past three or four days, she had gotten text alerts on her phone only to find no message waiting for her when she picked it up.
She had been meaning to head down to the Apple Store this week to see if there was a problem with her phone, but she just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Julia had been turning her phone on Airplane Mode each night before she went to sleep because of the mysterious middle-of-the-night texts. Last night, she had fallen asleep watching television and forgotten to make the switch. Now, she was paying for it.
Julia looked at the screen, which was still illuminated from the text initially coming in. She woke up quickly when she saw it was from Eugene, and it read: “be careful.”
Julia sat up and slid the arrow on the bottom of her screen. The message center opened and showed Eugene’s texts. At the top of the page was a single text that read: “Found nothing.”
That’s odd, Julia thought. Even though she had just been woken up, she was certain of the “be careful” text she first saw. Plus, she noticed that the F in the phrase was uppercase. She honestly could not remember a time when Eugene put a single uppercase letter in a text or email. That’s just how he rolled.
Julia stared at the text screen for several minutes, looking up at the clock on the top of the phone. It wasn’t even 7 a.m. Should she call this early? After all, maybe Eugene sent this text last night, and some internal service glitch caused it to arrive hours later. Like so many other things surrounding this issue, that had certainly happened before.
Julia shook her head and touched Eugene’s name. The phone dialed.
Before the phone even rang, Eugene answered: “Jules?”
Julia heard the panic in his voice.
“Yeah. What’s up? Is everything okay?” she said,
“I haven’t heard from you. I was afraid something had happened,” Eugene said.
“Calm down. I talked to you last week.”
“I know. But after that. I’ve been texting you for the past three days.”
Julia pulled the phone away from her ear. She quickly accessed Eugene’s texts. Aside from the one this morning that now read “Found nothing,” the most recent text she received was two months ago on his birthday that read: “happy emerging from your mom’s hoo-hah day, turd bucket!”
Julia put the phone back to her ear.
“Seriously, man,” she said. “I haven’t gotten a text from you until this morning.” Of course, in the back of Julia’s mind, she realized that she probably just discovered why her phone had been giving her text alerts with no apparent text.
A chill ran up her spine.
“Are you okay?” Julia asked.
“No,” Eugene said. “And neither are you.”
He took a long pause, then Eugene continued: “But I’m not talking about this over the phone. Meet me at the alky dam as soon as you can.”
At first, Julia was confused at his request, then she realized what Eugene was talking about. Just south of downtown was the Brewery District, which historically housed local brewing companies. While many of these breweries had closed up shop years ago, the area of the city still held that distinction. At the bottom of the Brewery District, near the main freeway exit was a small dam, which the kids in their high school had referred to as the alky dam due to its proximity to the breweries.
It was an obscure reference, but one that Julia did catch onto rather quickly. Why Eugene refused to call it the Greenlawn Dam was apparent. He was acting paranoid.
At first, Julia was about to tell him to not freak out. After all, Eugene was a sucker for any conspiracy theory – from contrails to fluorinated water. However, Julia’s instinct told her to go with it. Just because Eugene was paranoid did not mean people weren’t out to get him.
“Julia?” Eugene said on the phone, a little bit of panic creeping into his voice.
“I’m here,” Julia said. “Ten-four, good buddy. I’ll see you there in about twenty minutes.”
Eugene didn’t reply. He simply hung up.
Julia sat up in bed, and she realized that Eugene’s fear had rubbed off on her. And maybe a little bit of his paranoia…