Another Great Depression! Hardly are those words out when vast images straight out of Walker Evans trouble my sight: Hoboes! Okies! Hoovervilles! Women who resemble Harry Dean Stanton! It's all so very... 75 years ago. Our go-to icons of abject, debilitating American poverty are so nostalgic, so sentimental, so analog. Our recurrent national nightmare deserves an upgrade. Let's face it: Flat broke and rattling a mug full of pencils, we'll still be the same wiki-addicted, diversion-craving exhibitionists we are now. Of course, I'm no futurist. Just a hysteria-prone pessimist. But I don't want to live through another Great Depression. I want to experience the Awesome Depression: classic destitution with a whole new interface. I believe the Children of the Petabyte are perfectly capable of reviving classic Depression-era pastimestrain-hopping, bread-liningwhile making them uniquely our own. So climb aboard as I, your neo-hobo guide, unfold a day in the life of the future unfortunate.

It's a typical morning in 2011: I start my day by bumming a few joules off a pal's bicycle generator to power up my BlackBerry and surf over to FoodTube, where starving viewers like myself salivate over clips of the "carbo-rati" noshing on hoarded snacks. (I try not to read the comments: "omg she is such a ho for eating that Combo!" "shup azz! u go girl! eat dat Combo!") One stray click and I'm rickrolled, prankishly diverted to the now-familiar footage of Rick Astley being devoured by a pack of London cannibals.

I decide to use my remaining juice to log onto Facebook, which has been looking frightfully gaunt since the Identity Panic of '09. (Friends? Who can afford friends now anyway?) Millions of "Favorite Albert Brooks Movies" lists and "Hero Abilities" requests were decimated, and we were left scrambling for whatever chums were left on Orkut. (This was before the Linden dollar crashed and Second Life avatars started jumping out of windowsand not flying.) I'd check my email, but browser-based email is a thing of the past: Vagabond freeconomic refugees now communicate by personal ad, and sex acts are routinely traded for, say, maki rolls and Pilates classes. (Craigslist, it turns out, is largely unaffected by the Awesome Depression.)

Dejected, I head downtown, a busted Guitar Hero ax slung over my shoulder. On the corner, a pack of surly former programmers dressed in surplus CES hoodies are warming their carpals around a single dingy Dell. I give them a wide berth. Farther on, a ramshackle Cubeville has sprung up in the parking lot of a burned-out Ikea. Delirious drones sit at cardboard desks and pretend they still have office jobs to complain about, tapping out "IMs" on their "keyboards"old pizza boxes.

I nod and push on. I'm hoping for a handout at the Bloggers Assistance Administration. Alas, when I arrive at the decaying loft space, the cupboard is bare: The BAA can't keep up with the sheer numbers of jobless Americans whose only skill is chronicling the minutiae of their own lives. (At least when they whine about how existentially awful their lives are now, it's probably true.)

I sink into a trashed Aeron chair, pull out my trusty ax, and click out "In the Great Big Google Mountain," a rueful utopian ditty about a fanciful wonderworld in which "aquacultured catfish feed the masses," and "electric cars cut greenhouses gasses," and "more transparent global markets function semi-rational-la-la-la-ly." The song brings tears to my eyes. Sure, it could be from drinking far too much bathtub Red Bull. Or maybe I'm weeping because this guitar is just so awesomely depressing to play when it's not actually hooked up to an Xbox.

Email scott_brown@wired.com.

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't seen or read 2001: A Space Odyssey, this article contains details that reveal important plot developments. So, if you like to be a tabula rasa when you view a film or read a novel, stop here.

1992, or maybe 1997: HAL 9000, the master computer aboard the Discovery spaceship in the fictional film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, becomes operational. He will inspire millions of dreams and some nightmares of artificial intelligence.

First, the year: When astronaut Dave Bowman is removing the hardware modules that govern the computer's higher cognitive functions, HAL regresses to his infancy and begins an eerie recitation of bits of his earliest knowledge: "I am a HAL 9000 Computer Production No. 3. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January, 1992."

At least that what HAL says in the 1968 film. Director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke co-wrote the screenplay, inspired by Clarke's 1950 short story "The Sentinel." The film was not based on a novel, but Clarke soloed the novelized version of the screenplay, and he changed HAL's birth year to 1997.

Now, the name: Chapter 16 of the novel clearly states that HAL stands for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer." Many film viewers, however, thought HAL was a one-letter-ahead cypher for IBM. In his book The Lost Worlds of 2001 Clarke dismissed that idea as embarrassing, given all the help IBM had given to the film: "We ... would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence."

In fact, HAL's original name was Athena, goddess of war, wisdom and fertlity, but Kubrick decided a male personality and voice would be better for a menacing supercomputer. Martin Balsam was cast first for the role, but was dropped because his voice was too emotional. Canadian Shakespearean actor Douglas Rain won the role with neutral, unctuous tones.

The place: Urbana, Illinois is home to the University of Illinois and since 1986 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which developed the first web browser, Mosaic. HAL's lobotomy monologue in the book mentions his first instructor, Dr. Chandra. In fact, the only Chandra at UI in 1968, at least, was a Mr. Shasti Chandra. He was writing his thesis on spacecraft attitude control, but told a reporter he had nothing to do with making the film.

The movie, which cost $10.5 million ($64 million in today's money), premiered in New York City on April 3, 1968. The dazzling special effects did not impress all the critics: The New York Times described 2001 as "somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring," while Pauline Kael deemed it "monumentally unimaginative." Kubrick promptly cut 19 minutes from the film, and the final cut debuted three days later.

HAL also appears in three sequels: 2010: The Year We Make Contact (aka 2010: Odyssey Two), 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey. In 2010, Dr. Chandra further pooh-poohs the IBM-HAL name theory.

Source: The Making of Kubrick's 2001, ed. Jerome Agel, Signet, 1970