In the novel American Democracy Forever, Charlie Durand created PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center) in 1968— two years before Xerox had in his Life 1—and hired the same computer scientists (Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, and Dan Ingalls) to create the Smalltalk programming language. This advanced its development by several years. He provided them with...
In the novel American Democracy Forever, the Forum Foundation is created by Dr. Charlie Durand to support the creation and maintenance of Forum Clubs. Here are some key passages from ADF: "... the Forum Foundation, a non-profit that provided the clubs with grants and guidance." "[Charlie] ... charged her [Julie] with getting Forum Clubs started at...
In the novel American Democracy Forever, Charlie Durand created the PEP Talks Bureau (People, Entertainment, Politics) as a subsidiary of the Forum Media Group (FMG). Patterned after the TED Talks, he had enjoyed during his first lifespan, Life 1, Charlie initially saw PEP Talks as a means of broadcasting Forum Club ideas to the general...
In the novel American Democracy Forever, Charlie Durand created Forum Publishing, Inc. as a way to economically publish The Forum, a magazine that publishes discussions held in Forum Clubs. He then realizes he must go far beyond this if he is to combat the hate radio being spewed daily by right-wing radio into the ears...
In the novel American Democracy Forever, Charlie Durand becomes extremely wealthy, a multi-billionaire, by using his memories from his first lifespan, his Life 1. He knows which professional sports to bet on, he knows which stocks and commodity futures to buy or sell short, and he knows the 50-year trend of technology, enabling him to...
In the novel American Democracy Forever, the OurTown social media app provides the glue that unifies the Forum clubs and supports their discussions and actions. It was developed by PARC in the late 1970s using the newly created Smalltalk programming language. It was prototyped in the San Francisco area on a private telecom network, and...
In the novel American Democracy Forever, Dr. Charlie Durand created the Forum Media Group (FMG) to own and operate a network of radio, TV, newspaper, magazine, and cable companies, to create a bubble of liberal thought over the United States. Knowing these entities would need a reliable source of graphics, videos, and other media products,...
The novel American Democracy Forever introduces a tax reform proposal developed by the Forum Clubs and indicates that extensive modeling is needed to validate it. A later chapter discusses the modeling and beta testing of the proposal, but the details of the proposal are not discussed; the reader is left to wonder what the tax reform...
In the novel American Democracy Forever, Charlie Durand creates a new corporation, the Civic Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise known as CARPA, in imitation of DARPA, the US Defense Department's Defense ARPA, DARPA. CARPA's mission is to work with the Forum Clubs to identify civic problems, develop technical solutions, prototype them and then market them...
The chapter of American Democracy Forever on education reform was the result of a discussion about the education industry with my friend Dr. John Wands who had been the chairman of the English department of a private high school for girls. After bemoaning the generally sad state of American education, ADF proposed a bottom-up approach...
