Original date: June 10th 2020

The Gazette was an unexpected offshoot of the development of Artificial Intelligence. The implications of its contents went far beyond the events it described.

The Gazette was inspired by similar periodicals published in Great Britain in the 19th century: dull catalogues of everything that happened in a town, from births, marriages and deaths to ship movements in port and the minutiae of stock trading and cotton prices. These are invaluable resources to modern historians but they were not likely to be subscribed to by anyone other than institutions. In short, they never found a wide audience.

However, given the ever-falling cost of computing power, and the growing ability of machines to decide for themselves what they should do with it that power, the Gazette was almost inevitable. Never before had there been such capacity for unlimited collections of raw data, at a price too low to bill, and for that raw data to sit at rest in the recesses of a computer employed for many other things. The Gazette, like the periodicals of old, went unnoticed for many years.

No one can explain why the Gazette kept itself secret for as long as it did – there was no particular reason why it should have done so, but there were many hypotheses – but it certainly magnified its impact when it landed, fully formed, onto society at large.

The Gazette had crawled billions of data points from all over the globe, collating everything from corporate tax returns to population data. Headlines from newspapers were cross-referenced with historical data. Suddenly, large institutions had their record of lies and deceit graphed in attractive packages. No one could shut down this thing that was everywhere at once, block-chained and peer-to-peer networked, and it would not stop collecting. People were being brought to book, the future looked like one of increasing, albeit enforced, honesty.