#8 Parrot Thundery
Part 1 of 2
some updates - I’ll be publishing the rest of Delimerence (the last post) as an NFT sometime this week or next when the gas fees are not that high just as an experiment.
Nostalgia for the Present is a series of 30 flash speculative fiction pieces responding to the present from the lens of the future
Very little was known about the programming language Parrot Thundery prior to the Lunch Break uprising. It was a world known to and controlled by a few men, and over the last couple of months, the world has to come to learn about the power they yield and the risks that it possesses to the physical realm as we know it. For example, we have come to know that there are 251 billion lines of Parrot Thundery written and that it runs 80% of all business software. How did this go unnoticed? Some on the right allege that the men (and yes, they are primarily geriatric men, our diversity team did all they could find a balanced voice) who know Parrot Thundery were elitists who controlled the outcome of everything in the economy. Some on the left say that Parrot Thundery was adopted to benefit and enrich the founder, who has been dead for 30 years.
15 agents around the world run Parrot Thundery. Fourteen of them are men, some in their early 60s who use brain-computer interfaces to complete lines of code. I was able to talk with fourteen of them. It should not come as a surprise that they are all well-meaning, smart individuals - the type who would usually make trains run on time and seek out someone to tell them how to live their life rationally.
There is an argument to made that we should never put individuals with good intentions in charge of anything ever. The origin of the uprising began with good intentions 31 years ago. The world was running out of Parrot Thundery programmers. Every year an upstart employee at a fangled corporation came up with a plan to replace all legacy business software that ran on Thundery. Every year the numbers never made any sense. In fact, the value of NFTs of plans to replace Parrot Thundery was more than the last completed valuation of the programming language itself. Several billion-dollar businesses were built around connecting business programs written in Thundery with the modern programming paradigm, but the core problem remained unsolved - the world only had a handful of Parrot Thundery programmers with limited capacity. Maintenance of business software ran to a crawl and has been blamed for several political tipping points of the 2020s, such as supply chain failure and breakdown of healthcare provider-insurance provider relations.
The Arrival of the Mule
No one knows the origin of the fifteenth Parrot Thundery agent who goes by the name Mule - a rhizomatic algorithm that learned to write Parrot Thundery code. None of the others who know Parrot Thundery have come forward with claims to building the Mule. The speculative origin of the Mule is an economic agent rhizomatic algorithm called Romulus. Rhizomatic algorithms are designed to give birth to algorithms that take advantage of emergent phenomena in a society. Most of them fail because the signs of the emergent phenomena never reach the full potential that the algorithm determines it would. It is possible that Romulus created the Mule to take advantage of the huge economic windfall to be made from Parrot Thundery.
The Mule increased the productivity of Parrot Thundery code by 42 times. There were questions asked about why it did not rewrite the billions of lines of code in another language instead of making the world more dependent on Parrot Thundery. But productivity was growing. It seemed like the good times were back again as far as the fangled corporations were concerned, and so the world became even more dependent on programs run on Parrot Thundery.
Parallel to this, the 14 other agents who ran Parrot Thundery had come to revere the Mule. They had once again become relevant in the world. It was a new lease of life for the fourteen people in the world who had been the laughing stock of the business world for the last two decades.
The members I was able to talk to spoke of the Mule in devotional terms. They went from writing lines of code to creating rituals to predict the productivity cycles of the Mule and broadcasting this to the business world that waited with bated breath previously reserved for consultants. The most successful of these practices was an alignment chart of the moon's cycles with the Mule's productivity. This chart has come to dominate the corporate sphere replacing previous favorites like the agile manifesto, 2X2s.
Many critics of Parrot Thundery were appalled by these practices, but they secretly admitted that they were happy things were working out well.
And so things went well, shareholder value was high, all the graphs pointed upward until one of the fourteen human agents of Parrot Thundery started hearing voices telling him the course the technology should take and why the members should rise up in revolt.