the snowflake project

Anybody out there writing a dystopian epic (or short story or screenplay)? I had a neat idea today that could be useful in rounding out your government controlled isolationist nightmare.

Encrypted mailing addresses. The idea came to me randomly, as ideas do, as a possible solution to people not wanting to give strangers on ebay (or craigslist, etc.) their residential address. Because, you know, ax-murderers.

So I thought – suppose everyone had an encrypted version of their address they could give, which the post office or courier service had the key to. Stuff would get delivered, and addresses could be kept secret. And fewer axes would be murdered. Win-win!

Then I thought – what if this became the norm, and the government controlled the post? And conventional addresses became things of the past. You could have a pen-pal who lived two pods over and never even know that’s who you were talking to.

Anyhoo – maybe that’ll get some of your brain-goo chugging away. Anybody else have any cool dystopian elements or ideas? Put them in the comments!