The Year is 2030. The USA did not fight the Vietnam War, and instead invested money into high speed railways, teletext, and 10-storey modernist carpark-trainstation-airport-mall megaplexes. There’s one in every town.

Everybody is an urbanite, all farming is done by agricultural robots with their solar panels glistening under the haze of high-power irrigators.

You can vacation in the countryside, but residing there is illegal. However, penalties being as light as they are (a public spanking during the now-revived festival of Lupercalia), it has become an adolescent rite of passage to play-act as Thoreau.

Again, the Breached forum will not be coming back. If it’s back for any reason, you need to assume that is an attempt to target our users and is not safe. I will not suddenly come back online and tell everyone I was just kidding and we will bringing back the forum, so please use your best logic here. Baphomet

TLDR: Stay away from the Breached infrastructure.

In case you didn’t already know, one of the Breached forums administrators, Pompompurin, got arrested on cybercrime charges in the land of the free. The other admin, Baphomet, posted several updates on his website regarding the future of the Breached forums.

The inability to enjoy loneliness leads to the desire to communicate with idiots.

Or is it

The inability to enjoy communication with idiots leads to a desire for loneliness.

Can’t remember, just press play, friend, and read on.

The feeling of loneliness derives from the (false) perception that experience is “my” experience. Without the identification with the feeling of “me” as a basis it is impossible to feel lonely, even though there is awareness of the fact that your experience is indeed unique. Your personality is not yours and it is not you, it is just another element of experience.

On the other hand, it is possible to perceive the being of others as an extension of your perception of your own being. It is like a isomorphic relation between elements of two spaces.

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. William Gibson, Neuromancer

If you really want to know the answer to this question, look around. Increasingly we live in a world controlled and manipulated via the net, the wired, the metaverse. Where content and creators, programmers and artists coalesce into vast seas of content. Evermore our youth are lost in the infancy of the virtual worlds that our tablets, screens, and now headsets provide. You need not look at the specific technological forms or functions from these stories to see how well they predicted the future. If you look at the broader picture, the broader result of the technological singularity our civilization is undergoing you can see they were dead on.

How do point-of-sale systems work? Via the net. How do modern humans communicate, even those born before the net. Via the net. How do government and military organizations communicate? Via the net. How do criminal organizations and rebel insurgencies communicate? Via the net. How are business and financial transactions, managed, monitored, and completed? Via the net.

Then remember that while one is on the net they are interacting with any number of hidden algorithms, ad trackers, as well as the websites and services they are using. Our entire financial system at this point is essentially just predictive autonomic algorithms trading money and stocks in such quantity on a minute by minute basis that it would make even the rubber barons of the earliest 20th century blush.