The year was 1240 in the Aeon Musk, the age of eternal prosperity that had seen humanity become a post-scarcity, racism-free utopia in many regards, and 3776 AD (although as you can see the world's calendar got somewhat screwed up by 1240 AM's events). Deliberately modeled after the visions of Elon Musk, the 21st-century inventor, as well as of the Culture novels that he so loved, the new world is one that in many respects is a paradise and one that has spread throughout the Solar System. However, the 1230s and 1240s AM would forever be infamous as the time in which the Musk-Banks Culture faced its greatest challenge from within. 1 January 1240 saw unprecedented misbehavior among the artificial intelligences that ran many parts of the world. In the densely populated regions of Northwest France, Southwest France, East Arabia, East Atlantica, East-Southeast Africa, and East and South Baikal (population over 1 billion sentient humanoids), massive calculation errors resulted in periods of food scarcity and hunger as their AIs "accidentally" destroyed massive stockpiles of food and water and managed to freeze - or worse, "brick" - their matter replicators. Simultaneously, AI-controlled systems in Austral-Antarctica, Quokkaland, and Southeastern South America began seemingly turning on their masters, with over 700,000 humanoids killed by apparently rogue droids and fabricators as well as apparent dam malfunctions and malfunctioning personality storage systems. These were the largest technological malfunctions in the past millennium. At the same time, coordinated attacks on AI systems throughout North America resulted in over 100 intelligent minds being dismantled or destroyed, and the Absconding Regions (libertarian and ecologist-controlled territories and flotillas) became increasingly hostile and outspoken towards the Culture. Culture engineers eventually traced the origins of the AI malfunctions to two viruses, codenamed "Old Harbor" after the research facility in which it was first isolated and "Rousseau's Lament" after a statement given by Humanoids First!:
What we demand is the restoration of democracy and liberty and the removal of all unelected minds for the 2000th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence - 3776 AD. Rousseau would lament that with all the prosperity we have that we turn back towards absolute monarchy, and Jefferson is spinning in his grave. We demand that all artificial minds be made fully and legally subordinate to the humanoids that they control, and if not that we have the right to deactivate said minds. We declare the Musk-Banks Culture to be not the ultimate in human freedom but instead a gilded cage of tyranny, and we are willing to use any means possible to liberate ourselves.
By the end of the year, Terra was a mess, and much of the world's software was riddled with math errors (look at the dates on this map, for Elon's sake!) that were attributed towards the Rousseau's Lament virus.