Thread by @doctorow

When the lockdown started, I got a ton of messages from readers who were thinking of my 2005 story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," set in a sealed data-center where network admins struggle to keep global comms going in the midst of a global biowar.

craphound.com/overclocked/Co…

1/

I revisited the story then, recording a special reading of it on my podcast, where I recounted the circumstances of writing it, in the midst of the London 7/7 bombings, which hit my usual morning bus and my wife's usual morning train:

pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/mas…

2/

It was indeed timely, and as the new edition spread around the world, I started hearing from IT workers who were living out a real-world version of the tale:

pluralistic.net/2020/04/09/all…

3/

A year later, the story still resonates. Christoph Jansen, a German reader, used the Creative Commons Non-Commercial/Share-Alike license and made an open access German edition ("Als Sysadmins die Erde beherrschten"), which I've hosted here:

craphound.com/als-sysadmins-…

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fig…