Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 260.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-12-10 12:02:34+00:00
        From: Andreas Gálffy <andrisgalffy@gmail.com>
        Subject: A distopy or the "Chronicles of the Books and Leather/Levi's Uniform Fanclub"

Good afternoon everyone,

like Prof. em. Willard McCarthy uses to seed very interesting thoughts, I
would like to do likewise. Me, that is a 32 years old (former) student of
Digital Humanities at the university hosting this list - the University of
Cologne - and currently working as software engineer.

The recent development in AI, in connection with the last posts in this
list finally gave me courage to pitch the following dystopy I intend to
express in a radio play. The base ideas to this reach far longer and I
would not like to overload the dear reader. But if s/he is interested in
"analysis cities" (there are readers who know about it since my BA/MA
thesis have been reviewed by regular writers of this list), I can write
more about it in a different post.

On a fictive planet, we write the year 2430.

In that time, a "modernisation" wave was going on in the academics as well:
informations/holdings/stocks of archives, museums and libraries are
mass-digitised while their analogue counterpats are destroyed, under the
pretext of reuse of material. Moreover, a so-called modernist regime wishes
to "clear" the memory of the past, pretending that they are from a time
when violence ruled the world and that way, violence should be extincted.
But that is never communicated officially; the information rather
"disappears" under mysterious circumstances. Not only the analogue bases,
but also their digital counterparts: "technical errors" make them
unaccessible. The situation gets worse because of the emerging of AI, the
need of educating people to maintain the systems ever growing in complexity
went lost. There was simply no one any more who could fix a machine broken
down. And it even occurred that one AI system inferred with another: an
unaccessible database was believed to be clear for erasure and has been
overwritten.

In that epoch, a student, interested in many various fields, feels lonely
among his fellow students who are rather interested in "content-creating"
and becoming "fashion queens" and "kings" instead of the fields they are
actually studying. Reading books or thinking the analogue way was regarded
as something anachron.

He thus searches for connection, for people of his age, where he could
share his thoughts. He felt moreover attraction of mental power (he missed
in the people around him) and that was excited by a special wardrobe,
possibly inspired by the rocker/biker scene: (vintage) leather and Levi's
Jeans, worn on Earth between the 1980s and early 2000s. Inspired by a
documentary he saw where artists in an oppressed regime met at seemingly
everyday places, having agreed on unimpressive signs (windows or so) as
meeting points, he decides to invent an "uniform by pleasure", worn by
those in a biker club-like fanclub where books are being learnt by heart
and thoughts exchanged so that the human brain remains active as well.

By an unbelievable series of miracles, he meets students, journalists,
solicitors and other academics sharing not only his ideas but also his
wardrobe resp. his idea to use the "uniform by pleasure" as unimpressive
sign of recognition. And so, the "Books and Leather / Levi's Uniform
Fanclub" [called slightly different in the play because of brand reasons;
the name itself is inspired by the Breeches and Leather Uniform Fanclub]
opens up and manages to connect scientists et al. from the whole fictive
planet. The members manage to rescue information marked for "modernist
preservation" from the digital nirvana and after the fall of the modernist
regime, their interconnected library survived. Their legacy are amongst
others the so-called "analysis cities", which are normal towns where the
town quarters are named by subtopics of a course subject. Sketched on a
graph, they give a usual mindmap.

I write the script of this radio play on a typewriter; there are currently
105 typescripted pages (in German).

I am very curious about the comments and remarks!

Kind regards
András Gálffy


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