With a little help from the Ladyfaire...
Winders City in 2075 was supposed to be in the midst of the Singularity with superhuman intelligences terraforming Jupiter and whatever other crazed scheme came to mind. After all, in 2010, Morgan's Law was in full effect.
Morgan's Law being the creation of Paul Morgan, founder of INtoTECH, one of this world's leading computer chip manufacturers. He noticed that every eighteen months the processing power of chips doubled. And the Law got spread to other things computer related.
It seemed that soon human level computers would be available by 2018, or by 2025 if the brain turned out to be more complicated than it was thought to be.
But....
The brain was a LOT more complicated than thought. Its not just the number of neurons, but each neuron had up to a dozen possible responses whereas a computer had two.
And the Materialist Fallacy that was behind the notion that a computer could wake up if given enough processing power also got trashed.
But this was not enough to derail the Singularity. A few more turns of Morgan's Law would have overcome the first, and the second, well, it only required linking up to a living brain to supply the spark of life to the inanimate.
Of course, no one in Winders City would dream of doing such. They'd rather be shot dead.
More on that later...
One thing that happened was people got tired. Morgan's Law was not the Law of Gravity which is not the Law of Gravity. It was in good part a cultural artifact. An expectation of vast increases forced a self-fulfilling prophecy. Truly astonishing amounts of cash got dumped into the computer industry. The video game industry dwarfed Hollyweird and Broadway and the New York Publishing Houses combined by the peak in Winders City. It even passed Nascar.
But this meant that most of the League of Cities, a supercontinental organization, was buying a new computer every two to three years. People got tired of it. They thought to themselves after the fifth upgrade in twelve years...."Hey, my 'puter is good enough for another couple years. I don't need the Latest Device and I still haven't figured out the solution to finding the Lost Gem of Magnazaduum. I can spend the money on a trip to the Smoky Mountains."
The air began to leak out.
And then people complained that they had to upgrade their upgrades every other day. And that they had to buy new computers to handle all the upgrades.
The Computer Revolution stuttered.
This was not the best moment for the Parliameant of the Cities to impose a new tax on computers, but no one had accused the Parliameant of an excess of wisdom for some decades.
The spammers got an edge. The upgraders had to upgrade more because of the slower platforms. The spammers kept upgrading platforms because they were dedicated unlike the ordinary joe who was tired of it. The spammers and virus makers were getting an edge over the upgraders who had to counterpunch by using larger, more powerful defenses that took up more space.
The tottering bubble of the computer revolution popped at this time. Several trillion dollars of 'wealth' dissappeared in a week.
The Bottom Line....
Nowadays, a typical computer user gets up, slams a new memory chip into the side of their computer, and uses that additional boost to store the leak through that gets past the upgrades. He has about five percent of the computer available to use as the rest is divided between upgrades, spam, and viruses. After about an hour, the memory stick is toast, and he quits for the day with his computer usage.
Since most things are automated in this world (doors, coffee makers, ordering supplies), many people use macros or icons to 'get the necessary done quickly'. One push, and you can order your week's food from the grocery delivered to your house. But it is all the same that way.
This has problems for young married couples with new kids because changing your icon to add preferences for baby formula is very difficult indeed, and it exposes you to viruses. Also, that 5% usable on a computer is typically the middle class, the poor have less. Frequently the poor have just enough computer savvy and space to 'do the macros'.
Things wouldn't be so bad, but the culture has reversed from the go-go to 'let's kick back'. So the only things that 'work' are the computers and the average skill of the user of a computer has greatly declined over the last several decades.
However, there are a few 'superusers', actual old-time hackers and programmers and some of their apprentices. Nowadays, they are considered wizards almost because they can make doors open on command, and vending machines cough up with a snap of their fingers. These 'wizards' are battled by the virus and spammers with their various societies (some are still marketting, and some are into status, and some are still trying to extort money). The upgraders tend to be the less talented and more homebody good guys who see the 'wizards' as rogue elements. The people tend to see them as hero/rich guys and occasionally 'dark wizards'.
So in 2075, its 'le bonnes roules', and 'do the macros' and 'fish off the dock', and 'ooh, look a wizard' and 'hang that spammer from the lamppost.'
Things have decayed, and the kudzu has expanded, and things will stagger onwards for as long as the robot factories continue to work.
Your comment about laws that are not really laws reminded me of an e-mail I received earlier today that I thought at that time you would appreciate.
By appreciate, I mean you would enjoy the sick irony of it.
And no, this is completely off topic.
According to this source, President Obama assigned some people to be advisors to the automotive industry, to tell them what they were to do. These advisors informed a group of automotive engineers that they were expected to build electric and LNG vehicles with certain range parameters. One of them, an engineer with over forty years of experience in the industry, objected that there were limits imposed the the laws of physics, and that under those laws such vehicles were impossible.
So the Obama group said that was not a problem--they would see to it that those laws were repealed.
--M. J. Young