ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 28: The Skulking Permit Effect.

From ReadMultiplex.com Podcast. by Brian Roemmele

May 16, 2026 · 39 min · Episode 49

About this episode

The episode discusses the implications of bureaucracy and memory through the lens of a classic science fiction story.

When Lost Colonies Must Invent Vice to Satisfy a Decaying Empire. In the golden age of American science fiction radio, few episodes captured the absurd machinery of bureaucracy and the quiet horror of lost history quite like X Minus One’s “Skulking Permit.” First broadcast on NBC on February 15, 1956 (and rebroadcast on July 4, 1957), the episode adapted Robert Sheckley’s short story from the December 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It remains a razor-sharp parable about how autocratic thinking devours memory, how isolation can breed innocence or oblivion, and how the rediscovery of one’s true origins can shatter a civilization’s self-image. Today, as we stand on the cusp of an AI-mediated Great Forgetting, one Brian Roemmele has chronicled in his writings on the Amnesia Generation, this story reads less like quaint 1950s satire and more like a warning siren for our own future. Read more at ReadMultiplex.com If you find this content valuable, buy us a coffee to support this work: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele

People in this episode

Host: Brian Roemmele

Topics covered

bureaucracy
science fiction
AI
history
civilization
memory

Keywords

bureaucracy
science fiction
AI
memory
civilization
history
Skulking Permit

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Galaxy Science Fiction, ReadMultiplex.com

Books & works: X Minus One, Skulking Permit