by Bill Adler
Research Report on the Cleveland Park Listserv, February
30, 2213
I was hoping to deliver a complete report on this service
called the Cleveland Park Listserv. But there are few records about this vast
and seemingly omniscient connected portal that was part of the landscape known
as the Internet (before cerebral communications chips replaced the crude, slow,
and often unavailable Internet.)
I had planned to write a complete and colorful report
about the Cleveland Park Listserv's role in American journalism, but it appears
that the organization's leader, Bill Adler, went "paperless" in 2013.
The records of his achievements were kept in a place called "the
cloud," which was a collection of computers run by companies that included
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Dropbox, Evernote, Justin Bieber Advanced
Technology Corporation, and AOL. None of these companies has existed for over
125 years. When the longest surviving company, AOL, abruptly went bankrupt in
2088, all the data that was stored on its computers disappeared.
Sadly, the only few remaining documents about the Cleveland
Park Listserv come from printed copies of communications from 2035, when the
listserv reached 1.2 million people, 90 percent of the population of the
District of Columbia. These papers were found during an archaeological dig in
2190, when parts of the Cleveland Park Library, a building that housed books
and other papers, was unearthed. (At the time, nobody knew how advanced the
storing of information on paper truly was.)
Bill Adler was a proponent of the Paperless Movement, a
trend that started in about 2010, and which reached its apex in 2045, when the
sum of the world's knowledge was put into computers. In 2045, most books,
magazines, newspapers, and college theses were converted into a burnable energy
source for those living in the Arctic and Antarctic, the two place in the world
that needed heat.
The Paperless Movement was all about digitizing not just
documents, but photos and videos, too. As a result, we don't even know what
Bill Adler looked like. We can only
guess, from other reports, that he must have stood over two meters and had the
physique of an Olympic swimmer.
The Paperless Movement was proposed as an efficient way
of storing information; it was supposed to save time. It did that. It wasn't a
bad thing, because going paperless gave people more time in their lives, and
made their homes and offices into clutter-free spaces. But nobody foresaw the
long-term consequences of the Paperless Movement.
Surprisingly, the Paperless Movement survived the Great
Solar Flare of 2027, when roughly one third of the world's computers were
destroyed by the global electrical surge that accompanied the flare.
I should add one footnote to this sadly sparse report on
the Cleveland Park Listserv. When I wrote that no digital documents remain,
that wasn't entirely accurate. We found a hard drive (another kind of storage
medium). The drive itself works, but unfortunately, the documents on that drive
were in a format called "Microsoft Word," and the photos were in
something called JPG. Two hundred years later, nobody knows how to read these
forms, rendering them useless.
---
Bill Adler is the co-publisher of the Cleveland Park
Listserv, www.cleveland-park.com.
He is the author of "Boys and Their Toys: Understanding Men by
Understanding Their Relationship with Gadgets," http://amzn.to/rspOft. He tweets at
@billadler.
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