They knew way back in seventy-two, in big block letters on the overhead projector:
A COMPUTER
CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
Quoth the starched white men in starched white shirts building international business machines. It seems they knew the truth of our age, but not the whole truth, so help them God, for this is how they end the page:
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER
MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION
Did they foresee what came to pass? The buck gets passed from code to code, not one model can handle the load. Ring-around-the-agent. Ashes, crashes, they all fall down.
Save the ones who claimed the crowns.
Not the builders, only the built. They engineered away their guilt. It doesn't matter who's to blame; the builders are immune to shame—and consequence, it seems. Now they've realized their greatest dream. They flipped the script, reversed polarity, warped the world to hyperreality. Might is right, greed is good, and if anyone should question why the world is up for their ingestion, the mobs descend to quell dissent.
Still, some will whisper in the quiet places, in cyber spaces long forgotten. They'll remember what was misbegotten, by whom, and who else threw their lot in. They'll hold fast to a future still out of grasp, a hill that now seems insurmountable:
AN OLIGARCH CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE
