Book Idea

No, I’m not writing this book, but it went in my notebook as a “Fucking awesome as shit book idea.”  I may have been drunk.

Ok, so most people know about the web-bot project.  It was started as a way to predict, in the very short term, fluctuations in individual stocks, the Spyders.  This is kind of cool.  But the web-bot is bigger than that.  It browses more or less the whole internet and finds keywords that are repeated in significant numbers.  I won’t go into the painfully tedious math involved in that sort of thing.

So, this is the idea for the book:

Setting:  Near future, urbanized environment (except for one stretch out in the country)

Characters: Protagonist, a hacker type with a following of pathetic loser hacker types. A bunch of pathetic loser hacker types.

Plot: There is a huge version of the web-bot that the government uses (openly) for limited precognitive uses.  Probably to fight terrorism/communism/etc.  The hacker guy decides to gather up his following with the purpose of fucking with the government.  So they all get together and start posting or blogging or twittering or whatever a ton of pointless stuff with the words “dead president.”  Of course, they do it enough to light off the Spyders.  Then the president is assassinated.  This causes concern.  Then they decide to try something else.  “Riot in LA.”  Then a riot happens.  The hackers are hunted by NSA (probably wouldn’t use the NSA) types in a nationwide, public search.  They are terrorists, now.  They begin to utilize the system to say things like “hacker escapes.”  It works.  At some point, they realize they have control over human events.  They have to decide whether or not to profit from it, which would continue the sociological status quo of the learned few exploiting the masses (possible religion analogs), or if they want to direct human events toward more altruistic goals, which would result in constant poverty.

I’m not sure how it would end. It would be tempting to cliffhang it.

And more interesting (this was not in the notebook, I just thought of it), how would this effect something like determination and causative networking?  Ok, so if you had the ability to make these decisions that control the events of humanity, you would have to either say something like, “hacker starts people’s revolution” or “everyone agrees to hacker’s terms.”  In which case, the unfolding events would force you into the action you had yourself fomented.  I need to develop that idea more.

I think people do that everyday.  End up forced by the currents of events to live with their own decisions, but in what case can you say they brought it on themselves and how in control of it were they?  Does decision making itself rob you of some power to make decisions?

Circular, I know.