Editing City Series:Volume8a Chapter6 (section)

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'''Plus and Minus

The concepts of Plus and Minus predate DT. They have their origins in the 19th century when networks of cable and radio communications began to appear.

It began as petty crimes such as human rights violations and business solicitations done over the phone or radio, but it ultimately led to identity fraud abusing the fact that you couldn’t see the person on the other end. It was rumored that the mafia was behind it, but a largescale investigation run in the United Sates at the beginning of the 20th century revealed that the majority of arrested offenders were minors.

This drew a lot of attention to the networked world. Those unproductive youths had used the networks to hide themselves, take from the productive adults’ profits, and yet didn’t see what they did as wrong, so the commentators at the time said they ''“lived in a minus world”'''.

But those people accepted the title with pride, returned to that life as soon as they were out on bail, and '''being arrested became a badge of honor among them'''. And since they were referred to as Minus people, they referred to the adults as Plus people. That is where the concepts of Plus and Minus – and of Plus Elites and Minus Elites – was born.

After the war, the Great Canopy erased the global radio network and cabled networks of computers were developed instead, but that led to a few new problems.

The benefits of computer networks – '''anonymity, a borderless world, and a record of statements made''' – led to '''a world that produced and accumulated hundreds of times more noise than the real world.'''

In the real world, it is primarily valuable information that is spread, but on the computer networks, information on par with slander spread like wildfire.

For example, if you posted some kind of information on the network, it might be stored in some cache somewhere even if you deleted it, so it could easily stick around indefinitely. It is not unusual for things written with no more care than an offhand comment to remain in the public eye, lead to misunderstandings, and ultimately develop into a major problem.

This placed great pressure on the '''adults''' living in the outside world, so more and more of them left the networks.

But there were others who did not fear that storage and accumulation – those who could say, '''“So what? It’s their fault if they misinterpret me. And frankly, they look pretty silly getting all worked up over something I didn’t even say and shouting impotently at me like this. This world is full of noise, so what if we learn to see through the noise and seek a truth we can believe in?”''' These were the Minus Elites who followed in the footsteps of the phone phreaks and radio phreaks.

And when computer networks were developed in Japan after the war, they created the concepts of Harmony and Noise to match the concepts of Plus and Minus. Thanks to the oriental boom, Minus Elites the world over became familiar with those alternative names and will sometimes refer to the networked Minus World as Noise World and the Plus outside world as the Harmony World.

These same Minus Elites still form the core of the virtual and data industries, so if they sense their territory is growing unstable, they will use the power of Minus – of Noise – to fight back.