The Good Book

Damon Frank (Anarchist)
The Inevitable Failure of the Modern Nation? Of course I had a copy of it. Every anarchist worth his fucking salt had a copy of that book. I know Nakamura even had his copy signed by the author.

Koji Nakamura (Former Anarchist)
That used to be one of my interview questions: Do you own a copy of or have you read The Inevitable Failure of the Modern Nation? If the applicant answered no to both parts then they weren't ready to join us. Simple as that. Of course, I would give them directions to the nearest Market Bookstore or whatever other shitty, corporate book depot there was nearby and tell them to look in the tiny and hard to find “Science” section near the back. The book was a bestseller with the public and not just with us anarchists but you couldn't tell by most bookstores. Seriously, if you had gone into a Market Bookstore and looked at the "Featured" rack you would have found books like Inspiration: Letting God Rule Your Life, Basketball and Love, and Nights in Apalusia. Ephemeral garbage and feel-gooderies. I'm pretty sure it won a Pulitzer prize but God for-fucking-bid that that would earn it a place on the “Featured” rack of those intellectual wastelands.

We didn't really catch on to the book at first though. Well, I did but I knew almost nobody else who had even heard of it for the first couple years after it came out. I'd love to say that I had something to do with the fact that the book caught on so strongly in the anarchist crowd but I really have no idea if that's true or not. As far as I know everyone else picked it up independently and saw in it the same things I did and just sort of ran with it. Dickinson didn't intend for that to happen at all. He wrote it almost as a sort of exposé or a cautionary letter to the governments of the world. Turns out most of what he said was true and the book became our unofficial manifesto.

Elias Dickinson (Anthropologist/Author)
The Inevitable Failure of the Modern Nation was most definitely written with the intent of pointing out the flaws of the implementation of the concept of a nation as we knew it in 2034. My book enjoyed great success in the first few years on the market and it even won a Pulitzer prize. If only the target audience had not ignored the message of the book and my recommendations for how to fix the issues I illuminated then maybe none of the events of the last couple decades would have occurred. It might have been too late by that time though; maybe our nations were beyond repair. The fabric might have already been too damaged.