The Cell Phone Tribes

Not vampires, but every so often, I get a little cyberpunk.

The Development of Cellular Tribalism

Many scholars of the pre-post-secondary-modern period (generally agreed to have begun with the Reagan Administration in 1980 and ended with the Biden assassination in 2016) have spent several careers analyzing the science fiction published within this span for their predictive accuracy. Most have agreed upon Philip K. Dick as the prophet of post-Millennial period, with William Gibson coming in second to Isaac Asimov. Neal Stephenson completes the quad.

One of Stephenson's predictions, a popular 'cyberpunk' prognostication, was the eventual granting of national sovereignty to multi-national corporations. And had the Wall Street Wars not occurred, with the bloodless Data Wars following them up, he might have been correct. Stephenson further predicted post-Millennial humans would self-select their own tribes, loosely based on these corporate nation-states.

Stephenson came so close, and yet ended up missing his mark entirely in the long view.

While the Wall Street Wars were devastating to most sectors of business, telecom was smart enough to remain aloof from the fracas. As such, these companies emerged virtually undamaged from their pre-post-secondary-modern incarnation - though they were not unchanged. To better weather the chaos, Bill Gates of Microsoft allied with Verizon Wireless and the company then known as Sprint/Nextel. A rapidly declining in health Steve Jobs took this move as a threat. In retrospect, his paranoia was likely unjustified and was in fact the first sign of Jobs' eventual descent into insanity. At the time, however, few questioned his business decisions (it is unlikely Jobs had his now-famous alligator pits built at this time, most historians place the construction of the pits at sometime after the Biden assassination).

Jobs' reaction was to initiate a hostile takeover of AT&T, the company which provided phone service for his iPhone, the first iteration of Apple cellular phones we know know as iOmega. AT&T, being the weakest of the major telecom companies, had no choice but to accede to Jobs' demands. The most salient was denial of service to non-AT&T customers. Before this momentous decision, a customer with an active cell phone could place a call to any other person, regardless of service provider. There were few distinctions at this time between the various service providers - only socioeconomic signifiers: how nice a phone a customer had. Now, users could only call those who also were Apple-T customers.

Bill Gates, suffering his own mild insanity as the result of then-unknown Wicketts' Syndrome (ironically traced back to a swarm of mosquitoes he released as part of a business presentation), responded in kind. Had he refrained, it is quite likely that prevailing market forces would have forced Jobs to recant his decision - perhaps sparing countless interns and programmers the alligator pits. But Gates held as firm as Jobs, and the result was: Verizon and Sprint/Nextel customers could now only call other Verizon and Sprint/Nextel Customers.

Landlines, at this point, began to earn their current sacrosanct status. While Apple-T could only call Apple-T cell phones, and the same was true for Verizon and Sprint/Nextel, no one wanted to anger Ma Bell. Courier services began to be set up by young entrepreneurs - an Apple-T customer could call their landline-based courier and have a message relayed to their Verizon friend. This method, however, was clunky and almost as expensive as getting a second phone - which many did in the early years.

Again, things might have fallen out differently if not for Gates' untimely death due to Wicketts. After Gates' death, the scramble was on, earning him the posthumous title, "Charlemagne of the 21st Century." His vast empire was divided up into three pieces as Microsoft, Verizon and Sprint/Nextel each re-formed into their previous individual corporate identities. While Verizon and Sprint/Nextel attempted to maintain friendly relations, their treaties dissolved during the Data Wars and the Sprint/Nextel split. Nextel, now calling itself WorldNet, had absorbed what some were calling the Boost Ghetto - the collection of prepaid cellular users left out in the cold by the upper and middle-class skirmishing between the Gates and Jobs camps.

Energized by the absorption of Boost, WorldNet instituted it's own service boundaries, forcing Verizon to adopt the same philosophy. Around the time of the formation of WorldNet, dual subscriptions dropped off sharply. Few had the inclination or financial ability to maintain three separate cellular identities, and chose to cancel the extraneous as well. With the success of Friends and Family plans, the lines had been drawn.

After only half a generation after the implementation of service boundaries, the social implications became clear. One's cellular service provider became as much an indication of one's tribal identity as ethnicity or religion. There were distinct geographic and class divisions, though racial divisions petered out within two generations. These tribal identities were only solidified during the Second Data Wars and the Great Internet Divide.

Which leads us to our current social climate, which some have likened to the class structure of Victorian England. By and large, we only consort with those who are in our 'cellular class,' and there is rarely deviation. Large companies, with their preponderance of land lines, are somewhat free of this bias. However, small business, families and informal social networks are all defined by who one is able to call. The rivalry is certainly not as dire as Theoderick Coppola-Kinsey's recent re-interpretation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, with Romeo as a Verizon member and Juliet a WorldNet woman... but they are not so far off, either.