two mixed reality dystopias.

1. Gravity 3.0 didn't turn out to be such a good idea, did it Professor Sheckley - I mean superficially, the notion of an inverse cube law force so that people on smaller planets, but nearby, get a strong attraction and don't drift off into space, looks OK - but then look at the terminal velocity - not good for the robot ships landing delivering out food....gasp gasp
Of course, it wasn't such a terrible mistake when you compare with Gravity 2.0, the result of the Campaign for Real Gravity - attaching everyone to the surface of an apparently zero mass planet, by colored elastic looked cool - but we didn't reckon with people customizing their g-strings, to have different h-indexes - Hookes' law is amusing, but then when they started playing paddle-ball with the alien, and we had to tell them to turn down the space-trance remixes of Phil Collins and eventually called in the Cruel and Unusual Ludic Police, it took a turn for the worse.

2. The entropic viral pandemic of 2012 has run its race, and now we cannot rely on the value of bits to be discrete any longer. Unfortunately, it was detected too late to do anything about backups, and so we cannot state the meaning of any program or data with any certainty any more. Such diseases of meaning were unanticipated in the early days of the semantic web, so that elementary precautions, like repeated recall and re-enforcement of what we were saving
were not taken. Now we have to rely on humans to memorize entire sections of the Internet, including music, live performance of movies, and physical versions of VR games.

The cause of the emergent entropic virus will never truly be known (just like every other piece of what use to pass for online human knowledge) but it is suspected that it was the mean temperature of the time series of arrivals of Youtube videos, exceed Centigrade 451, the point at which binary systems move to a higher, ternary state.

Cooling the system down will do no good now. It would be like telling Schroedinger to open the box and finding one and a half cats, one half dead and the other half alive.

This has been a Horizon special