We Saved the World
We Saved the World
The future Tech Bros dream about...
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The people stood in a cavernous hall, grouped together by their occupational designation. Although dimly lit, it didn’t matter as they dressed much the same in cheap, machined linens sporting one corporate logo or another. Nothing else on their uniforms identified them; their Saviors had long ago prohibited the use of identifiers like pronouns or even names. In these days, discerning one human from another extended no further than their assigned mac addresses—a hardware code etched into the device the law required each of them to carry (and pay for) at all times. In days past, when a virus ran rampant across the population, the Saviors quietly funded a campaign to convince the populace that the antidote to the virus would allow nefarious actors to track them. With this stroke of genius, they fooled the people into forgetting the tracking devices the Saviors used against everyone daily. Anyway, oral communication among workers was by this time forbidden; the confiscation of control long since accomplished. The allowable electronic discourse assured that each knew to whom they spoke, but it ensured that the Saviors did too. The same went for the content of that discourse. ‘Cancelling’ in this day took on a whole new meaning.
At every week’s end, the crowd dutifully assembled in this place, prepped to hear the Savior’s judgment of the people’s production. Work units had a duty to produce under the law, whether sick or injured, old or infirm. Calling it the week’s end only served to deflect from the fact that the week’s beginning commenced the very next day, same as always. Regardless, the forces for the ‘rightful ordering’ (RO) of society had previously so thoroughly destroyed any resistance to the notion of an everyday work week that no one bothered about it anymore. In fact, no one even shuffled with impatience at these weekly events, conditioned as they were for the brutality of the response should the RO take notice. Instead they awaited in utter stillness the emergence of whichever of the Saviors would commence the ceremony. Some would never witness it, collapsing under the strain of humidity and heat. Without any meaningful ventilation, the room cooked under the intense tropical heat from the outside and the sea of inhumanity inside, despite this location sitting deep in the northern hemisphere. Bodies of the collapsed were quickly whisked away by monotonous, masked figures whose long-nosed visages were reminiscent of plague doctors.
The Saviors had chosen this geographic location not first, but after several migrations, each precipitated by many unbearable summers prior, each of those seemingly occurring ever so slightly further north year-upon-year. Northern lands had seen intense population increases before then as water sources in the south dried up, vacuumed away by massive data centers, cryptocurrency mining plants, and scorching temperatures. Most people hardly complained, though, because the Saviors promised them a futuristic utopia with each new widget they tossed their way. Fancy trinkets entertained folks interminably, promoted by advertisements aired on every entertainment platform, nearly every minute, irrespective of the content disruption. Connected to the vast satellite network that stained the night sky with innumerable random blots of light, on this ‘new’ internet (slower and less robust than in the days of yore) they contentedly spent their evenings indoors, blissfully unaware of the molten metals that rained down through the atmosphere nightly, slowly poisoning them as the cheaply made spacecraft regularly failed. Over generations of development, the widget-world steadily obliterated external attention spans, properly gluing users to screens of varying sizes, representing the latest generation of ‘new’ tools that looked suspiciously like older ones. No one noticed.
Back in the hall, the spotlights flared to life illuminating the center stage, indicating the festivities were beginning. Every event commenced with the arrival of the robot: A supposedly autonomous creation of exquisite artificial intelligence. No one commented—aloud anyway—about its curiously human-like movements as it pranced across the stage, or of its spandex “skin” that clung to a remarkably anthropoid shape. After all, the creation was the darling of one of the Saviors, emblematic of the future utopia in which they all now lived. Questioning its authenticity violated the law as severely as complaining about the ‘revolutionary’ solar roof tiles powering the worker barracks that somehow still rarely had working electricity. Likewise, no one argued against paying more for air conditioning in those barracks during the regular brutal heat spells, even though they could only purchase it on days exceeding 50 degrees centigrade, and typically it didn’t work well, if it did at all. Speech was only free when directed against those criticizing the Saviors.
After ten minutes of noxious music during which the robot gyrated in very unmachinelike ways, a new song blurted over the speakers. At this moment, the crowd jolted to attention, flamboyantly paying homage to the Byzantine notes pummeling their ears. Unironically, the people in the hall sang along to the piece titled “Justice for All,” a cacophonic mix of older tunes meant to instill pride in nationalistic tendencies that proudly worshipped acts of barbarism and rebellion against entirely imagined oppressions of freedom. At its crescendo, two more spandex-adorned robots wheeled out a gallows, replete with a glowing series of nooses adorned with a tattered flag that read “vermin” upon it in white, scrawled across a blue X on a field of red. The rising notes coupled with this symbolic instrument of victory stirred the crowd a bit, many of them eager for what they knew would come next.
Once properly positioned centerstage, the spotlights zeroed in making sure no shadows impugned the view of the display. The notes blaring from the speakers shifted to some twangy rendition, with a drawling singer chortling about his pride in being a member of this utopia, where at least he knows he is free. At this, the males in the crowd cheered—not in a jubilant way, but with a certain acidity, much like the way hyenas ‘laugh’ as they surround helpless prey. The temperature in the room seemed to rise with the excitement. For at last, the moment had come. The Savior entered.
At each of these displays, the workers never knew which of the vaunted Saviors would grace them with their presence. Indeed, there was hardly much difference, and no one cared regardless. The Saviors all bloviated the same way, spewing words without meaning while sweat dripped from their fleshy brows as they worked themselves into a frenzy to deliver what routinely capped off the event. Today would be no different. Trundling out on the stage in a ten-gallon hat and sunglasses came one of the tech overlords. He was the genius who had brought about global connectivity that no plebe ever could. His orbital hotel careened around the Earth once per day, supposedly offering its patrons five-star luxuries that included a magnificent view of the planet below, built by the genius’s Space colonization company. Of course, none in the room had ever been there, nor would they. Indeed, none had ever even seen it, except via videos posted on the genius’s social media platform. But that also didn’t matter, as whatever the Saviors posted on that single remaining site was truth, no matter how utterly disprovable it might be.
This Savior wore a faded black t-shirt depicting a snowflake in the center, surrounded by what looked like some cartoonish satellites. Across the top arced an unquestionably phallic object, presumably a rocket, though this Savior’s idea of a sense of humor suggested it could be a flatulent pole. Traipsing about like a drunken circus clown, he finally gathered a microphone to utter his first words. They did not disappoint the crowd.
“Pronouns suck,” he stuttered, which gave rise to a tumultuous cheer. No one knew for sure whether he stuttered authentically or not, for his brand demanded that people recognize his genius that conquered every trial and travail, including his only moderately wealthy upbringing and his alleged defeat of the type of bullies he himself had become. As certain of the crowd cheered, others remained politely silent and unmoved. They had grown accustomed to this one’s idiotic antics. But none wanted undue attention for the selection process that would follow. After offering his brilliant recitation, and his mouth-gaping gaggle of fans eventually calmed some, the Savior—now invigorated by the initial response or by the speeders to which he was not-so-secretly addicted—basked for a moment in the bright lights, then announced that it was time to “pay dues.”
Many erupted again, only this time slightly more subdued than before. For at this proclamation, things would take a turn for some. Nevertheless, those that continued to hoot and holler knew they remained safe and could boisterously deride those who did not. Allowing a few seconds for the caterwauling to continue, the sunglassed Savior sputtered again into the microphone. No one knew for sure what he said, virtually incapable as he was in structuring a sentence, but his fans resumed their boisterousness regardless, yet again accompanied by another song. This one pronounced a stern beat—one, one-two-three, one-two-three—coopted from a rock band who had wanted nothing to do with the degradation that came with these exhibitions. Alas, for them, the Saviors entertained their protests only briefly. And the band was thus no more.
Synthesized rock notes continued to pour over the crowd, stirring certain of the herd into a mania once more, even leading to the infliction of injuries to some of the less enthusiastic. As the music blared, an image popped up on a screen at the back of the stage. No one took notice of its simplistic nature, a bar graph composed on a marginal program the government imposed upon everyone to use. It indicated the production margins for the week—which work group performed up to the standards of the Saviors and which did not. No real metrics adorned the graph, it simply supplied a “pass/fail” grade, illustrated by the height of the associated bar. Several dipped below the “fail” line, though all these possessed noticeable commonalities, as they did nearly every week. One could almost always tell ahead of time who would fail to meet the line before ever seeing this cartoonish image. To add the usual insult, the graph imputed upon the failures titles like “pedos” or “cucks.”
The besotted Savior uttered a guttural cheer and danced around in a manner one could charitably call non-rhythmic, to which certain of the crowd dutifully echoed and emulated. The whole affair looked like a CIA psychedelic experiment. As his dance-move-convulsions eased, he began pacing along the stage with two of his supposed cyborgs in tow. The Savior vomited some more unintelligible drivel into the microphone as the selected section of the crowd grew more fervent, moved as they were by what they perceived as words of brilliance, a brilliance unrivaled by even their own now-forlorn god. The spandex-clad creatures weaved a hypnotic dance around the Savior as he provoked the most visceral instincts of those members of the crowd, his loyal fanboys. While that portion of the people lusted for mass carnage, the usual practice involved selecting only a few victims. After all, taking too many would diminish the production returns. Even though the economic system preserved over 95% of the general wealth for the saviors, that still rarely seemed enough.
When the nation-states of the equatorial regions broke down years before, the Saviors bled off whatever last resources they could before leaving the workers to die in the degrading environment that routinely saw 60+(C) degree days. Through every megaphone they possessed they labeled those folks as “criminals” and “terrorists”—laborers, their families, grandparents, children— triggering a snowed public to laugh when their makeshift rafts sank at sea as they attempted to flee the unlivable conditions. To indemnify themselves, the Saviors engaged in their efforts discretely, holding ‘environmental conferences’ and other charades to guarantee that workers elsewhere did not (rightly) blame them for the death of millions. It worked because the first to go were always the poorest and least accepted of the global community. The middle classes elsewhere assumed, and sycophantic or duped media convinced them, that the people in those hard-hit places had themselves to blame. It was an extraordinarily effective campaign.
Things at last shifted for media, however, as the devolution continued. First to fall were the outlets that even just occasionally accurately reported the state of things. Outfits who held no inhibitions about blatantly lying survived longest, though they too fell when they could not sustain ratings by retelling the Saviors’ nonsense to an even slightly circumspect audience any longer. For a while, rational people resisted this new future the Saviors offered, and in places where weapons were eminently obtainable lying media talking heads became routine targets. Many public figures learned a hard lesson about trying to survive on a digest of lies during those times. Eventually, though, the entire enterprise collapsed; protestors—even armed ones—could not compete with 95% of the world’s wealth leveraged against them. Thus independent media and substantive resistance was no more. This is what the Saviors planned all along, and when it happened they gleefully launched their own brainwashing machines passing as news. They knew it was little more than a matter of time to infiltrate the brains of every servant, guided as they were with the model from previous platforms. Feed the same lies repeatedly, and soon all the people will believe it. And eventually it was done.
Upon the stage the tech Savior played to his audience once more, this time to sufficiently settle them to announce his decision. With a hint of theatrics, he quieted the crowd. Running a hand over his mouth to invoke silence, his pigish-face squinted outward from the brightly lit platform, seemingly struggling to put together a thought. Feigning an air of self-assurance, he gazed out over those he knew existed so far beneath him. Like a raptor selecting a mouse in a field full of them, he scanned the crowd of filthy underlings. He struggled to contain a curl of his lip, a sneer of contempt for these bags of flesh he both despised yet needed to sustain his empire of debauchery. After all, he was smarter than all of them; he was god’s gift to them whether they saw it or not. Nevertheless, he also feared them for they far outnumbered the Saviors and their security details. If ever these maggots organized completely, the Saviors would be finished—brutally.
Of course, this was not a conscious thought—this Savior rarely had one quite so nuanced. No, he operated on instinct, driven by the pugnacity he mistook for intellect or wit. Pausing momentarily to allow his visceral hatred to temporarily leak away, and afford his low-RAM cognitive power time to spool up, he finally made his choice. Raising a bloated arm, made flaccid by his avarice and sloth, he pointed to one block of workers, all unsurprisingly a skin-shade darker than him.
At that moment, he decreed their fate, and it was tragic for that lot. Still, some of the crowd cheered, though many of those cheerleaders would be given the infestus pollex, or "hostile thumb,” by another arrogant imbecile the following week for reasons other than their skin color. And so it would go. When the barbaric performance came to an end, the genius Savior waddled off stage while the people applauded. Satisfied by his authoritarian display, he would return to his mansion, to his yes-men and unscrupulous devotees, further convinced of his righteousness, fully embroiled within his self-delusion. Passing through a glass-enclosed corridor, he paid no heed to the thick black smoke belching out of nearby stained smoke stacks, the byproduct of the coal-fired electricity lighting his palace. Not once did he gaze upon the wilted stalks passing as crops meant to feed the workers. Instead, he focused only upon the gold-trimmed room ahead of him. He knew multiple supplicants awaited him, willing to offer whatever services to keep in his good graces, for however long he might tolerate them. For now though, he looked forward to the next bump of his powdered stimulant. Only then, could he continue to enjoy this fantastical world he had crafted.
***
I am a Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, Certified Crime Analyst, Certified Fraud Examiner, and Certified Financial Crimes Investigator with a Juris Doctor and a Master’s degree in history. I spent 10 years working in the New York State Division of Criminal Justice as Senior Analyst and Investigator. Today, I teach Cybersecurity, Ethical Hacking, and Digital Forensics at Softwarica College of IT and E-Commerce in Nepal. In addition, I offer training on Financial Crime Prevention and Investigation. I am also Vice President of Digi Technology in Nepal, for which I have also created its sister company in the USA, Digi Technology America, LLC. We provide technology solutions for businesses or individuals, including cybersecurity, all across the globe. I was a firefighter before I joined law enforcement and now I currently run a non-profit that uses mobile applications and other technologies to create Early Alert Systems for natural disasters for people living in remote or poor areas.
For more on how the rich hate you, as if you needed more evidence, click below to hear their own words. Stop lionizing these fools.
