Frank Russell’s Discursive Facilitator Module
By Anthony Lee Gregory
I always found it funny how the books told the story:
The Federal Government ran its first comprehensive study on human interaction beginning in July 2067. In the years that followed, a growing number of prominent economists, political thinkers and pundits adopted the General Theory on Human Behavior, first written by Dr. Paul Williams of Harvard University in 2063. The theory was that all human behaviour occurs according to comprehensible rules, and the widespread appeal of this theory shined through in public policy, which increasingly reflected an attempt completely to control in almost every way what every human being did, for the sake of expediency and the social order. The most common instrument of public policy occurred on the federal level, under the national Department of Human Interaction.
Oh I could tell you all about this "Department of Human Interaction." But I would rather tell you about the end than the beginning. I wasn’t there at the beginning, anyway.
I was there, though, long before Frank Russell was. But not long after.
And Frank does deserve the credit. But I feel it’s a shame that I don’t get any credit myself. You don’t see the name "Theodore Fisk" nearly as often in print as "Frank Russell". The only way I can get anyone to read this, even, is by resorting to using his name in the title. But as I said, he deserves it. Russell was the one who finally did it.
I remember when I got the zap on my AllBox from the Department of Human Interaction. They liked my dissertation on Optimal Social Productivity Prediction. I had only done my project on something so boring and arrogant because I knew I could get federal grants for it. This was in the late 60s, so the government had not yet resorted to controlling graduate work so directly. But they were controlling it indirectly through federal grants.
"Mr. Fisk. This is excellent work. We’d like to fly you into D.C. on Monday."
"I don’t know. I’m not sure it can actually be done. It was just an idea."
"You’ve convinced us it can be done. What will it take us to convince you?"
It went something like that. I never had thought that I could actually build a Productivity Predictor. I knew it would take such an overbearing survey process to collect all the information. I knew that it would require a very strict enforcement structure in place. I didn’t think it could be done, to tell you the truth
The goal, after all, was total control of everything. It happened slowly at first, but it was clear that the only reason they a given aspect of people’s lives wasn’t in their control was because they hadn’t got around to it yet. That’s what I believed, and yet I couldn’t help but be flattered by the department’s insistence that I was smart enough to build the Predictor that would optimize national production and decide what was best for the common good.
So I decided to go for it. And eighteen months later, I had built it.
For the first few years, they tested my Predictor against social trends to see how accurate it was. It was able to predict very well the numbers of people who would end up being doctors, lawyers or teachers. It knew what the crime rate would be. It was able to predict stock market ups and downs. So they began implementing policies according to its predictions, starting with certain rules regulating stocks and tariff rates. At one point we outlawed the selling of stocks in corn, and there was a resulting boom in the entire American agricultural industry. So we moved on to other industries, commanding the economy according to absolutely proven scientific rules.
Eventually, we entered in personal health information from every citizen of the country. We knew immediately who should stop drinking and when, where low-fat foods needed to be subsidized, where we needed to give more kids heroin and where we needed stricter enforcement of cigarette prohibition. And soon, the country got much healthier.
Then we realized that it was time for the nation to be directed at the best possible focus possible. At birth. So we began central planning of marriages. Let me tell you, this was one crazy project. But look at how the books tell it:
For years virtually no dissent existed against the attempts of the Federal Government to claim this much authority in people’s lives. The policies were sold easily to the public, for the most part, who liked the idea of centrally planned marriages and friendship units to the difficulty of finding friends and mates oneself. The early 21st century ideals of free will and private property became supplanted by changes in the political climate pushed through by a strange coalition of social conservatives and sexual Marxists. This latter group was the most appealing voice advocating centralized sexuality to leftists and to the youth.
What a gross simplification! It wasn’t " conservatives and sexual Marxists"! It was all of us, the whole shebang.
And it worked to. We got rid of unwanted pregnancies, doing much to subdue the abortion controversy where the Second Civil War failed miserably. Families were better. Gender relations seemed to be improving. And we finally got rid of gonorrhea.
So one day I go to work. I guess I should explain this. I worked at the Department of Human Interaction. I sat in an office. I didn’t do anything at all, but I got a twelve-figure income and great benefits for the rest of my life, all for inventing the Productivity Predictor. Now back in the early 70s, a trillion dollars was a lot of money, mind you. So one day I go to work, sit at my desk, and turn on "roses," "Beethoven," "massage" and "New York Steak" on my AllBox. I’m enjoying my AllBox experience, when I get a zap from headquarters, telling me to go down to the Predictor.
I hadn’t done this in years. The Productivity Predictor never needed fixing. It always fixed itself.
I went down to headquarters and met the Secretary of Human Interaction, Charles Pole. He told me that that morning the Predictor had printed the strangest instruction ever, He showed me the slip. It was slip 5,309 that morning, printed at 7:00 AM exactly. It said:
Zap Franklin Russell. FranklinRussell793-47-9483-29@citizen.gov
We zapped Franklin, and told him to come in. He lived in Florida, so he was up in less than an hour.
When I first met Franklin, the first thing I noticed was his feet. He wore no shoes or socks, and his feet were long but his toes were small. His nails were well groomed. Looking up I noticed that he wore sweat pants and what looked to be an old plaid sweater. He had a raggedy beard and wore glasses.
"Mr. Russell," said Secretary Pole, "do you know why you’re here?"
"No. I haven’t done anything wrong."
"Do you know much about the Department of Human Interaction?"
"No."
"We have reason to believe we would have a great interest in your work."
"My work was stopped by the University."
"Starting tomorrow, you can resume your project. Soon we can talk salary."
"I’m not interested in that. I will continue with my work, if you let me, though."
Let me back up a little. After we zapped Frank but before he arrived, my Predictor printed up another instruction saying that we should allow him to complete his research. The government began directly controlling research in 2071. Frank’s work at the University of Florida was some of the first halted in such a manner. But this was before my Predictor began making decisions on research. Frank’s work was stopped completely by human discretion.
But the Department of Human Interaction overturned that ruling. So Frank developed his theories further, under the condition that he not tell any unauthorized people about his work. And the Predictor said we should let him build the machine he was planning. Within nine weeks, he had the Discursive Facilitator Module.
The Discursive Facilitator Module is a very simple invention by today’s standards. But you need to look at it from the right perspective. It was small enough to fit in your pocket. It ran signals to an eye cover, giving you lines of choices. You got decide which choice you picked in your head, and a mere quiet mumble of a certain type, according to your own individual program, was received by the module and told it which choice you picked. And what were the choices? You got to choose to what extent you wanted to know a person in your proximity, and that person, if they had a module, got to do the same. If you matched up, the modules would tell you. And then, the two of you would do exactly what the two of you agreed on, no more and no less.
So it could revolutionize business. Marketing. Politics. Friendship. Sex.
If you see a woman you’d like to kiss but not have children with, and she has the same opinion of you, the two of you would know instantly, could kiss each other, and all embarrassment would be spared. And she would only know you wanted to kiss her if she wanted to kiss you, so you wouldn’t be nervous about telling the module so.
Now, they had this type of thing in Japan for a long time. But the tariffs and Big War made the Japanese versions of these inventions very hard to find in America. Besides, Frank’s machine was far better anyway.
Charles Pole absolutely hated it.
"This is crazy!" said the Secretary of Human Interaction, "Absolutely preposterous!"
He did not like the idea at all that people could have such ability to communicate such secrets with each other. It was lucky for him that my Predictor told us to arrest Frank and lock away his secret. And we did.
And within a month, millions of people had their very own Discursive Facilitator Modules. But they came to call them Frankiln Modules.
Needless to say, the proliferation of Franklin Modules created anarchy in the United States for the first time since the 1980s. The government hated it, and yet could not do anything about it. Secretary Pole thought that Frank surely let the cat out of the bag to unauthorized people in violation of the terms he was given to do his research. But the Predictor kept telling us not to prosecute him or legally bother him any further.
And then one day the Productivity Predictor gave the instruction that changed the course of United States history.
I was sitting in my office, enjoying "vodka" and "Russian blonde" on my AllBox, when I got zapped from headquarters with a request that I come immediately. It was the first time this happened since I had first met Frank Russell.
When I got to headquarters, I was told to wait until Secretary Pole arrived. I waited what seemed like half an hour. Of course, it wasn’t really that long, but it seemed to last forever. I passed the time looking at the poster of the ten most wanted people for crimes against the Department of Human Interaction. This was around the time that the Department was going after Edward Langston, the Milpitas Smuggler.
Mr. Pole finally arrived as I was done reading about Langston’s famous underground cigarette ring. He began his speaking in the strangest way:
"I sure hope you took debate in third-graduate school."
"I skipped third-graduate school," I replied.
"Well. Your invention gave us a mighty strange instruction today, look."
He showed it to me. It said: "Debate between TheodoreFisk923-34-1489-88@citizen.gov and FranklinRussell793-47-9483-29@citizen.gov. Topic: Discursive Facilitator Module. Put on every American’s AllBox."
"Well, I don’t want to do that," I said, "there’s no reason to do that."
"You have to do it. The Predictor tells you that you must."
"I made the device. I don’t have to listen to it."
"Yes you do. The Productivity Prediction Act of 2069 says that on all matters on which your Productivity Predictor gives an instruction, failure to obey the instruction is a Schedule A offense against the United States. That includes you."
"But why would it be in anyone’s interest, let alone the public’s best interest, for me to debate that loon?"
"You need to show the world that his invention is a distraction from the common good, and that your invention is our doorway to it."
It was to be on everyone’s AllBox on New Years, 2072. I would be debating Frank Russell on the nature of his Discursive Facilitator Module. As far as how that national event went, a portion of the transcript says it all:
Moderator: Our format for this next part of the debate is as follows: I ask a question of one of them, and then they talk casually among themselves. Mr. Fisk, is there an intrinsic problem with Discursive Facilitation?
Fisk: This is artificial Discursive Facilitation. What’s at stake here is the integrity of the entire United States. We can’t revert back to 20th century incivility and selfish individual interests. If we want real Discursive Facilitation we need to facilitate discourse in a manner that benefits the public good, and my device was designed and has been proven to do just that.
Moderator: Mr. Russell, rebuttal?
Russell: What is so wrong with a girl having the luxury to know whether a boy will slap her if she kisses him? What is wrong with a business man knowing what terms a client would be willing to agree to without having to face financial rejection? What is so wrong about the homeless knowing who will give money, so they can spare the humiliation of asking those who will say no?
Fisk: What’s wrong with it is that what people want isn’t necessarily what’s best for society.
Russell: And sometimes what’s best for society isn’t what people want.
Fisk: You think you’re so clever? What happens when some poor guy out there who bought your module from some smuggler uses it when he sees a beautiful lady. The module tells him that she wants him, the way he wants her. He begins to talk to her, and asks her out. She says no. He’s embarrassed.
Russell: And she’d be embarrassed too, probably. If she kept lying to her module, she’s be embarrassed when her unrequited lovers constantly hover over her because of the false expectations she implanted. It would be silly to lie for kicks. People would grow tired of the joke. They’d get over it. Besides, we could add a part that would make the thing legally binding. Perhaps failure to go through with your designated interaction preference will be punished by a cash payment. Or perhaps, as this man sees the woman, and enters in that he wants her, he can communicate to all the others that he won’t laugh at them if they don’t laugh at him. If he gets that guarantee, he can spare embarrassment.
Fisk: What if she doesn’t want him to talk to others modularly about her?
Russell: Her module will tell his module that she’ll only have anything to do with him if he agrees not to talk with them. But the point is, people should be allowed to do this if they want. If they don’t like the new responsibility the Modules bring, they could refuse to have one.
Fisk: You say that. But this is a true danger, is it not? I think I speak for most Americans when I say that some things just can’t be handled by people on their own. They need help. They need the Department of Interaction. You talk of this uncertain, reactionary utopia. The American People can’t have faith in that. They can have faith on what we’ve done. We’ve stopped venereal disease. We’ve fixed the economy. We even invented the AllBox.
Russell: Well, if your device is so accurate in respect to the common good, answer me this: why did it tell me to create the Discursive Facilitator Module? Why did it tell us to debate tonight?
Fisk: For the same reason it told us to arrest you. To show the world a potential threat to our national happiness, and rid of it before it ever caught us by surprise.
Russell: Mr. Fisk, do you want to be here?
Fisk: No. I do it for the country.
Russell: Well I do want to be here, rather than where I was. If we both had Modules, we could have entered in our preference regarding this debate. I would have wanted to be here, but you wouldn’t have. So we wouldn’t have had to meet.
Fisk: But I should be here. This debate is for the common good.
Russell: I know. That’s why I’d want to be here regardless. But you shouldn’t feel like you have to be here even if you really don’t want to.
Moderator: And now the time is up for this part of the debate. We will take questions from the audience. Beth Heyhill has the first question.
Heyhill: Mr. Russell, I’d like to thank you. I’ve been using your Module for a year now-
It was at this point that the guards restrained her and shut her mouth. Frank had a strange look in his eyes. I immediately began to talk.
"Ms. Heyhill," I said, "weren’t things running smoothly with the mate designated for you by the Department of Human Interaction?"
"Yes," she managed to say after biting an officer’s mouth, "but now I’m in love."
And that was when they shot her in the audience. She bled terribly. Frank gasped. I stood silent. And America saw it on their AllBoxes.
And now, of course, most people use personal discursive facilitation on an everyday basis. Smuggling made them very available even when they were very illegal. The modules themselves made it harder to catch smugglers. The Department of Human Interaction has been long gone. More and more Americans realized that they didn’t really want it there in the first place, as an increasing number of people communicated to each other modularly that they would agree to leave each other alone if the other agreed to do the same. That made the Department of Human Interaction, among others, completely pointless. The books describe it like this:
…and in the years that followed, government control of human interaction took a dive to its lowest point on the 21st century. In recent years there has been much concern that the reversal of political trends has been far too fast and has gone much too far.
And of course, Frank is a free man now. I see him often, and we sometimes do lecture circuits together. People in the audience often ask us if we have more freedom these days than we used to, and Frank answers, "That’s what they always say."
Now I know people want to know what happened to the Productivity Predictor. Well, soon after the debate I was sitting in my office thinking about how terribly I debated, and headquarters zapped me with an urgent request that I meet them for the third time.
When I arrived, Secretary Pole was blue in the face. He stared at the Predictor, shaking his head, holding a wrinkled instruction in his right hand. I asked to see it. He passed it to me, crossing his torso to the left, but not moving otherwise. His head stayed in place. He did not blink.
The instruction said: "Destroy Me."
I asked him, "well, should we do it?"
Secretary Pole said, "No. We absolutely can’t. This must be a fluke. It can’t be best for the common good to not know that’s best for the common good. We can’t destroy it. I want you to work on this and figure out what the fluke is."
"I might mess it up. It might no longer tell me what’s really best any more. Who’s to really know it knows best now, anyway?"
"Of course it knows best."
"You just said it didn’t now. What if it doesn’t as a general rule?"
"Fix it. Make it give more instructions."
"I don’t think-"
"Make it give more instructions."
I worked on the Predictor for a month, learning a lot about it. One night when the security was weak, I stole it. The Department was soon to be dismantled, anyway. But I wanted to make sure Secretary Pole didn’t have it.
And so I have it. It told me to destroy it. But I didn’t destroy it either. I don’t listen to it, I don’t do anything with it, and I see no reason to destroy it just because it tells me to. I just wanted it. And it’s no business of yours where I keep it.