I feel like there were a bunch of guys who read the story and thought “What would it do for Omelas’s stock price if we shoved a bunch more kids down there?”
Omelas can't just be *static*. It has to be up this quarter over what it was last quarter. It has to grow. It has to move fast and break things. It has to be the next gen New Omelas that people don't know they want till it's there. It has to be a kid in one room in *every* city, town, village...
Of course these would have to be outside private investors. And since the reader was invited to imagine Omelas as being perfect in whichever way suited them, as soon as these speculators showed up in my Omelas to implement their plan they would immediately be escorted to the guillotine.
Been saying for a while now that it's getting more and more clear that the people in charge of commerce right now think that the only issue with how the Stasi went about its business is that it didn't charge enough money for it.
Yeah, I think there were a lot of people who read some things and took the wrong lessons from them.
Except Garak in DS9. He got the right lesson from Boy Who Cried Wolf.
As Cory Doctorow put it: "These people are saying 'we finally created the utopia of Neuromancer.' And I look at them and I go, 'I don’t think you read Neuromancer.'"
‘Sure, we have paradise, but we could have logarithmic infinite paradise if we just shove an ever increasing number of children into the machine. It’s so simple, why did no one think of it before!’
Yeah, right on the money.
