Brilliant Days  

by Bill Meikle
bcmeikle@shaw.ca
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   "You have a picture of Larry Brilliant on your wall" I said to the girl
"it's almost like a religious effigy...in a 3rd world cafe next to the picture of the president..."

    "It's 2050, we are all saved, and he helped us down that path..."
said the girl with reverence...


"Jeesh, he's only been dead a few years...I can say for SURE
that he would resent being hung on the wall..."


"Did you...know him?" said the girl.

"..a bit. 'I was just a guy' is what he would say..of course he was the guy
who single handedly (with a billion google dollars to start) doubled universal human rights every year for 3 decades to the point where...air,water,food, clothing,shelter,education,are all guarenteed universal rights when you're born on earth today...

 "now they're fighting over universal 'self actualization'
as a human right in the papers today.."

"go Bzek!" said the girl.

"even animals have had ever expanding rights for a few decades now..."

"we are all saved and it's thanks to him..." I said as we walked out of her place.
"maybe at school today we should look back at Larry Brilliant's work.."

...down to the school...I'd picked her up on my way as a favour to her mother...
"saved,you gotta be kidding! he wasn't jesus, he was just a catalyst..." I thought...

     I mean I guess you could call it a 'school' and me a 'teacher'. in another way it was a library,community centre where young people gathered to study and take tests. Tests were still the thing in 2050, but how you learned the material didn't matter.
    It had a kitchen to make food in.An art room to do art in. It had a gym and a swimming pool.Compared to schools of 50 years ago it had a lot more outdoor play and work space...there were skateboard parks and research gardens, outdoor loafing areas, soccer fields, obstacle courses, zip lines..really a school WAS a huge outdoor playground.
     There wasn't much in the way of lectures or sitting in rows...you could view lectures in the media library but they were never delivered live. They had really complex and involved production that took months
to do.Also they were highly interactive(you could ask questions of the movie). Some of them were 40 or 50 years old, but still very high quality...

I was just around to answer questions...mingle...of course there were some incentives. The amount of money
I earned was based on the scores the kids got.
Kids took tests when they felt ready, not when someone else told them to.
 I had an office with complex media-basses on each child.
Kids would come and go to different 'schools' but that record of them was universal. In a way that dataset was what a kid worked on every day in school,and for their whole life...

       Any ways on the day in question I gathered a few kids around me and we started to talk about Brilliant.
     "He liked a rock band called the grateful dead." said one of them.
     " He was an epidemiologist." said another.
     " Google gave him a billion dollars to do great things."
said a girl
    "He did great things. " said a guy.
    "It's 2050, we are all saved, and he helped us down that path..."
said the girl I walked to school with...

     "ya but he also farted and sweated and took dumps" I said.

     there was a stir amongst the group. How dare I talk about the holy one like that?

      "Look, it wasn't rocket science. What he had was rare common sense.
He got the google earth model into some very dense feedback loops where people could see change in a very vivid modelled way, and he had them change things..."

       "seems easy now" said one girl.
       "but then, it was different. George Bush, the Age of Orchestrated Oil Interest Blindness. Larry saw through all that."

       "No-one cared when he got a bunch of poor people some water and food, but it was how he kept score that made the difference." (this was a quote from a documentary on him...)

       This is where I jumped in. "So you guys know about feedback?"

        "sure, it was the key to how he did it. It was like a 30 year telethon where people could see on google earth the outcomes of their donations"

        "and eventually they voted for governments that were for the Brilliant path...but at first it was just average people on the internet...adding a little money, seeing a model change as a result."

        "Do you guys know the apple story?" I asked. There was silence.

        "See Larry was a hippy, from the 1960's. At one point he was in india at an ashram, seeking spiritual enlightenment. But he could never quite concentrate because his guru kept throwing apples at him..telling him to go cure smallpox."
       
        "yes he was sort of forced into the real world by his talent. He wanted to be a spiritual seeker" said my girl.
        "another way of saying it was he wanted to opt out of society but was forced to evolve it." said a boy.

        "All I'm getting at with the story of the apples and how he farted, is that you shouldn't treat him like he didn't walk on the earth, rub his hands in this same dirt" I crouched down and grabbed some earth.
"He made mistakes, took bad advice, but in the end got things done"

         "so any of us could do it too..." said a girl.

         
 

         "exactly." I said. "he wasn't born with a glow around his head or anything. (although some of us thought we sensed a brilliance to the guy) any of you could do what he did."

         "not really, there isn't the need." said a boy.
         "have you read 'a billion easy tasks' the book about the first things they did?" said another.
         "I mean in those days there was so much obvious suffering to relieve, people were such savages even to live on the same planet as such abuse."
         "well that's the thing, they didn't really know. One of the things that happened around then was life-swapping on the web."
         "oh ya I heard about that" said another boy.

         "It was pretty simple" I said "James Crayborn was the first. He was an executive in the states who said poor african villagers were just lazy and stupid. People challenged him to try it. So there was a reality tv. show where Crayborn became a poor african villager, and George, an african villager came to the states."

        "The funny part was how well george did as a ceo!" said one girl.
        "my mom told me he boosted profits by 3%..."said a girl.

        "and of course the world got to see the exec really trying to make it as a smallholder near Darfur. He got a crop in, was all set to harvest, when soldiers arrived and burned it. He was near starvation when the show was called."

        "The cool thing was other people took it as a challenge. There were dozens of rich white people who gave being a poor african villager a try. Eventually they started cheating a bit, bringing new fangled water treatments, special compressors that could make bricks out of mud. When they were allowed to cheat, some pretty innovative solutions were found...solutions that spread through the markets of africa because Brilliant had an appropriate tech hardware distribution company that sold at every open air market."I said.

       "my mom says we could have been born into a world where people were allowed to starve, where people died every day from drinking bad water"

      "that's true. I mean people were OK with the suffering of others in those days. There is no reason it wouldn't have continued up to today. I mean now that the population is 9 billion it could have got a LOT worse."

        "but what about the collective/individual debate? wasn't it odd that he came down with the individual?"
       "what was that?" said a girl

        "well, there was a huge group-think going on on the internet in those days. While google kind of made the most popular meme the best, Larry stood with a few who said 'The best is the best, not the most popular'."

       that caused problems...How could he disagree with his funders?

      ...I dont think that was ever resolved, his programs success just overwhelmed its importance...

       really, for hard working middle class people, nothing has changed. You still have to get up in the morning and go to work. Its just if you dont, that's not so bad either.

      "oh b.s. we have pmmd!"everyone laughed.
      "I have 2 brothers.One went animal, the other is on the raft..." said a girl.

       pmmd was post material motivational disorder. Brialliant's work also caused a total outbreak of this new 'disease', where the person got lazy and depressed, and had way too much time to think...At year 20 he declared it an epidemic in some countries...

       'Going Animal' had only been around the past five years. A court case was won where a native american was allowed to be helidropped into a NHUA (no-human-use-area) and live there. He wan't allowed to take any metal objects or allowed contact with the outside world. He was dropped naked. Now there were at least 10,000 people living as animals in the world's vast NO HUMAN USE AREAS! they killed animals and ate them, with tools they made from rocks and sticks...

         The raft was where a revolutionary group called 'right to starve' hung out. They were trying to create a region with no universal human rights...A place where your motivation was getting some food on the table, not some 21st century abstraction...

          so these were 'brilliant backlash' for sure. When there was universal food and water and shelter, and I could go to the deserts of ethiopia and eat well and drink and stay in a nice place (as long as I booked ahead on the web) without any money, the world became one of refinement. Sure you could eat free in the middle of paris, but there were still fine french restaurants that cost a forture.

         sure a scraggly kid wandering around the world had free train rides, and hotels and restaurants to stay in, but the fine meals and rooms and rides still cost a fortune. Don't think that class disappeared when larry moved the minimum up! It probably became more pronounced! (although it also became chic for young rich university students to travel the world on universals for free, universals didnt even hit the radar of most rich snobs..)

         so everything was totally different and exactly the same.

        "he was smart that he only spent on infastructure at first" said a boy.

        "he didn't say, give money to hire a doctor for 20 years, but he built the hospital and got everyone clean water, and a school"

         "he took some criticism for that" I said.

         "my dad says he remembers a time when the news had stories on it about what a failure Brilliant's plan was!" said a boy.

         "maybe 30 years ago.."

         There was a time when infastructure was ahead of people, so food farms sat empty, (larry gave food farms, not food to hungry people) schools had no teachers, hospitals had no doctors... there was a great 60 minutes on how ahead of himself he was!

          well the poor had to learn how to grow food. Even in north america. That was a switch from the welfare state that just threw money at you to buy wonder bread and twinkies, Larry threw a farm at you and gave you the chance to grow food...

          "A saviour" whispered the girl.

          "Yikes" I said. "Maybe tomorrow we should look at deification and religious figures through the ages.
You have to understand that to Larry it would be an insult to make him a religious figure. "

The little girl smiled

"at what point does treating someone with reverence turn them into a religious figure"

"say, your great grandchildren" said a boy.


"so we have to hear this guy while he's alive and not insult Larry" said another...

"he's gone public domain in the webworld. They've built an ai of him and he walks the virtual worlds spreading the larry word."

"yeesh" I said.             
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I went for a walk down by the docks after that. Watched fishermen and guys who rented charged prius batteries...remote charged on manless sea kayaks...energy brough from distant bouys or waterfalls...

There were a couple of tents down at triangle park.There was a period right after high school and university where some people opted for THE BACKPACK, which was a high tech self sufficiency system you could travel with on your back.

In 2050 it was legal to camp in city parks and boulevards for one night...and one grew used to seeing a tent or 2 around.

This was also Brilliant Backlash in a way... as at first universal human rights were taken more literally. Lots of peole who weren't ready to settle were settled down...

...and who should I run into but the little girl handing out leaflets on a streetcorner!
"meet and discuss the brilliant light" she said to each person as they passed.

I took a flyer. It sure looked like a church to worship larry.

"So you didnt hear me, at all" I said to her.

"we have to celebrate the light..." she said.

I looked into her eyes, and I could see a brilliant light dancing in them. I think I could also see larry laughing at her and farting.