alternative futures: the culture core - part 2 (DRAFT)

note: this is another draft for a piece i’ll submit to the alternative futures project i’ve launched with my friend grant. i think i’m going to string this piece together with two others (the clock and the culture core) to make a single story that is three different places at the same time. we’ll see if it works…

Instantly things began to change. Genie had seen the changes happen from outside of Washington, D.C., but she’d never imagined what it would look like from ground zero.

The Office of Cultural Exchange was created just four presidencies ago after a surprising political power struggle. Genie had been a teenager at the time and she only vaguely remembered the series of events. She remembered was that there had been a massive popular movement to make the United States a truly multicultural society, but it was messy process.

In the public debates that followed the national ballot initiative, a majority of people were convinced of two things. First, that many of the problems the country faced at the time were due to a longstanding, mostly unquestioned, single dominant culture. Second, that the solution to creating a multiculural society would be best done technologically. From that point, the population at large had, more or less, left figuring out the details to government.