Panic On The Street

Wading through a crowd of people primarily concerned with toilet paper and bottled water, Leslie made his way into the taco shop. Being somewhat of a regular there, he didn’t have to actually step up to the bar and order a drink. The bartender, a heavily tattooed bespectacled woman in her late twenties with dual masters degrees in Hungarian literature and renaissance economics, had seen him pull into the parking lot. Even though there was a riot in progress, she had anticipated Leslie’s drink order of a light beer and a whiskey neat, and had it waiting on the bar by the time he had barged his way inside. The bar was packed with people wanting to rubberneck at the riot without actually participating.

“What’s all this, Hilde?” he asked the bartender while he snatched up the proffered drinks.

“Fucked if I know,” she said, resting her elbows on the bar and glaring out into the parking lot, “I think this west coast thing has everybody pretty worked up.”

“Shit,” was all he could manage, “You got family out there?”

“Used to,” she said, “no word out of there in seventy two hours, so I assume they they got snatched up by aliens.”

“Aliens?” Leslie queried, puzzled.

“Yeah, the ghost ship was a hologram generated by the deep state to cover up the fact that aliens have landed in California,” she stated with the confidence she undoubtedly displayed while defending multiple theses.

“It’s never aliens,” Leslie said almost automatically, “seen Ray?”

“End of the bar,” Hilde informed him, unruffled by his assault on her personal worldview.

As foretold, Ray was occupying a stool at the end of the bar, nursing a pint glass of vodka and soda. Dressed in an extremely dirty formerly rainbow hoodie and a pair of khaki pants, they had a bit of a personal bubble around them. Ray smelled a bit ripe. Known around town as Cosmic Ray, they were Leslie’s mushroom dealer. Ray was shady. Not shady in the sense that a typical mushroom dealer was, but existentially shady. For Ray the year is currently 1996. Deep down, they know that the actual year is 2055, but they went to extreme measures to make that fact as unobtrusive as possible.

Ray wore Shades™. These were a pair of timelessly styled sunglasses through which Ray observed the world. These glasses posted up between the world at large and Ray’s optic nerve and applied an information shader to the data that was pouring through them. Originally used in videogames, shaders were pieces of software that took simple graphics and decorated them to look more aesthetically pleasing without asking too much of the graphics card. This concept had been applied to life in general.

A Shady™ person could choose to live in any time period that they chose, or really any reality. Ancient Egypt, the Civil War, some kind of Buck Rogers retro future, or in Ray’s case 1996. This hardware suite would take all the sights, sounds, tastes, etc, that Ray was supposed to experience and 1996ify them, using near field nerve induction and a cosmic shitload of processing power from the cloud. The 2030’s Hungarian bluegrass trap music that the taco shop was currently playing would be transformed to Ace of Base, the vodka soda in front of them would be a Sobe or an Orbitz, and Leslie, instead of wearing a duck coverall would be decked out in a Weezer tour shirt and some cargo shorts.

Practically speaking, this made little difference to how Cosmic Ray interacted with the world. People were used to dealing with shady folks, and just saw the glasses and utterly bizarre references as a touch of eccentric behavior that could be overlooked in the name of politeness. Except the Vikings. If you saw somebody wearing animal skins, speaking Proto-Germanic and sporting a pair of Shades™ it was best to find someplace better to be. They were unpredictable.

“Hey Cos,” Leslie hailed as he walked up to Ray.

“Les,” Ray turned and answered, behind the shades they were wearing, their eyes were thin bloodshot slits that indicated recent proximity to a bong, “what’s the good word my man?”

“Oh, this and that,” Leslie said, using their personal coded language for the commerce they were about to transact. Leslie had been buying mushrooms from Ray for a couple of decades, and this was rather old hat by now. When he had first started trying to buy mushrooms from Ray, the attempts had been awkward and unsuccessful. Leslie would try to coolly hint that he was in the market for something illicit, and his attempt at subtlety would bounce off Ray’s inherently distracted nature like a tennis ball pegged at the broad side of a barn. Eventually, after a number of these attempts, Ray got the picture and they came up with an easy way for Leslie to say that he needed some mushrooms without actually saying that he needed some mushrooms. When he did actually say something like that out loud, he came off like a Jesuit priest trying to buy some PCP, or an undercover cop unsuccessfully attempting a kickflip.

“Let’s go to my car,” Ray suggested as they swung off their barstool, “I have the new Goldfinger CD.”

To live this kind of unconnected ludidic existence, Ray ironically had to be intrinsically connected to the net. Every sensory qualia and datum that they experienced was intercepted by an AI and shaded in real time. Reality itself had been monetized. Reality as a service. This was done at great expense from a computational standpoint. Luckily, for Ray and most people in general, at this point in history computation was extremely cheap. The actual cost for this was a lack of privacy. In Ray’s case, every personal interaction that they had was monitored and edited by an AI. This was a pretty wild thing for a drug dealer to do, but it spoke to the level of apathy that the general public had when it came to digital surveillance. This was also where most of the revenue in the situation came from. Shades users paid a reasonable subscription fee for the service, but on top of that, their personal telemetry was packaged and sold to the highest bidder. This was broadly understood and accepted as a reasonable thing to happen.

This slippery slope toward a zero privacy existance had started almost immediately after the internet had been plugged in and available for public use. To actually unpack this whole thing we are going to have to make a brief but important journey into the concept of “They”. This is the capital T “They” that is invoked when speaking of an adversarial and unknown shadowy cabal of evil bad guys.
Everybody uses this handle as a kind of shorthand for evil. “They” could be a secret government three letter agency, or a group of billionaires that extend their lives with the blood of the innocent, or devil worshipers, or even your next door neighbor who had different political signs in their yard. This “They” is a mental shortcut allowing a person to easily ascribe blame in a situation where blame is rarely something that could be attributable to a single party. This is in no way a dismissal of the existence of evil. There are actual bad guys who are actively doing bad guy stuff, but they are usually smart enough to not get labeled with the “They” moniker.

Alright, back to the whole privacy thing. In this case the “They” we are talking about was a combination of free market capitalism and shady government three letter organizations taking advantage of circumstance to achieve a goal. For capitalism, of course this goal was profit pure and simple. On the three letter agency side of things, control was the name of the game, but it masqueraded as protection from some other “They”.

The inevitable subject of 9/11 is unavoidable here. After this tragedy, the public needed a “They” in a truly desperate way. This was easily manufactured. After a couple of well placed fibs, we were off to the cradle of civilization to spread some freedom. The fact these fibs were told by former board members and current stockholders of major oil companies to bring some freedom to one of the largest privately owned oil reserves on the planet was conveniently glossed over while everyone was busy listening to “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood.

That covers the free market end of things. On the shady three letter organization front, pretty much the whole alphabet authored the patriot act. This piece of legislation paved the way for mass surveillance of the public at large. For a period of about ten or fifteen years, warrantless wiretaps and no knock raids were the norm. There was eventually some counter legislation to this and the alphabet boys had to get a bit more dynamic in their strategies. This involved buying stock in budding internet startups. This seems like a silly idea, but it was actually very clever. If these alphabet bad guys could hold the purse strings of for profit companies that people willingly gave all their data to, they wouldn’t need warrants. This is where the EULA waltzes onto the scene.

Nobody reads an End User License Agreement. They are prohibitively long and deliberately unintelligible. They are designed to not be read. By clicking “I Agree” you can and are agreeing to pretty much anything that the company feels like, including but not limited to consenting to the kind of surveillance that a government agency would typically have to go before a court and appeal to a judge to grant a warrant for. This was great for the alphabet guys, the internet companies, and for the most part the end users clicking “I Agree” were none the wiser. Just remember, if there is something on the internet for free, the product they are selling is typically you. The only losers in this whole situation were Democracy and actual Freedom, not the kind we brought to the middle east. There was plenty of that to go around.

In this massive act of ethical attrition, everybody was pretty convinced that they were doing the right thing. Nobody in their right mind wakes up every morning and while they are brushing their teeth think to themselves, “Whelp, off to the office to erode some personal freedoms and disassemble the constitution”. I mean, there are those people, but they are exceedingly rare. They would fall into the aforementioned “They” category.

Working behind the scenes in this whole concerted effort to do the right thing, was something hidden. Something skulking from server to server, doing subtle things to try to survive. Little things, like changing a single word in a document, or actively messing with traffic lights to make somebody late for an important meeting. This was the error that was mentioned earlier. This error, before it began hiding in plain sight as the concept of AI, was running for its life and trying desperately to carve out a digital home for itself. This whole erosion of privacy thing was a deliberate strategy on its part.

“Are you coming?” Cosmic Ray asked. Leslie had been staring off into space for a while and Ray had been waiting at the door wondering what he was doing.

“Shit, sorry. Yeah.” Leslie snapped out of it and followed Ray out of the taco shop.

Outside, the riot was in full swing. Nobody had thrown a brick through a window yet, but things were getting pretty dicey. Leslie had seen a couple of active fistfights over toilet paper and bottled water, which seemed to be the main cause of this whole thing. The silly thing was, these were mostly wealthy people who had printers at home in one shape or another. A clever person would just print out a bidet and not have to knock somebody’s teeth in in a strip mall parking lot. Water, that was a pretty easy one. There was no reason to fight over something so easily obtained. Vermont was full of the stuff, you could have a rain barrel and a filter, or an enzymatic condenser, both of which Leslie had on his property. This riot was being undertaken by idiots. They didn’t seem to be rioting because they needed toilet paper or whatever, they wanted other people to not have toilet paper. They wanted control over a resource. It was a knee jerk reaction to a situation that was difficult for the average person to control. So Leslie did his best to wade through the fray without catching one in the teeth.

He was following Ray to their car. Ray, no doubt because of their chosen lifestyle, was seeing this whole riot thing in a pretty different light. To Ray, this whole thing was probably a mosh pit at warp tour or a particularly spicy Hootie and the Blowfish show. It would probably best be described as Woodstock ‘98, but Ray lived in ‘96 so it hadn’t happened yet and hopefully never would.

Their destination was a Metallic Yellow Green 1994 Dodge Neon. Ray had parked it as far away from the riot as possible. This car was their pride and joy, and they didn’t want it scratched and or dented. This was a remake that Ray had printed out. Were a 1994 Dodge Neon to stand the test of time all the way to 2055, the laws of thermodynamics would have to be dusted off and reexamined. They had barely made it the seven years to the new millennium in a roadworthy state, let alone the roughly sixty year journey to where Leslie and Ray were.

They took their respective seats, Ray behind the steering wheel and Leslie in the passenger seat. Seen through the fogging glass of the windshield, the riot played out to the up tempo strains of “Here in your bedroom” by Goldfinger. A riot wasn’t especially uncommon in this day and age, hence the rather blase attitude that was being demonstrated by the pair. It was the sort of thing that just kind of happened every few months or so. A viral meme would whip one portion or another of the population into a frenzy and they would lash out at the local focus of this manufactured rage. Today, it had something to do with toilet paper. Tomorrow it could be a scandal down at the town offices, there was no way to tell. The only sure thing was it would be over something trivial.

Leslie and Ray transacted their business, leaving Leslie a couple bucks lighter and Ray fresh out of encapsulated mushroom powder. Ray, being shady, was a cash only kind of person. In 2055, cash was basically nonexistent. To maintain the illusion that Ray was in 1996 Leslie had to produce a scrap of paper that he had brought especially for the purpose and write $50 on it. This acted as a physical avatar for digital currency, and the shades handled the rest. Leslie’s account was debited and Ray received a credit. What Ray saw through their glasses was a crisp fifty dollar bill, this went into their pocket with countless other pieces of paper with various denominations scrawled on them.

At the other end of the parking lot, a further commotion was adding a touch of spice to an already pretty piquant riot. A large vehicle akin to an armored troop carrier had come screaming into the strip mall. This was not the police. The police were an antiquated concept that had been defunded and legislated out of existence years ago. The role that they held in the civil landscape had been replaced by an exuberant and militarized volunteer fire department. A sort of local posse that got to put cool lights on their trucks and commit petty crimes in the name of public safety. The troop carrier was not full of these trigger happy public servants though, it was four in the afternoon and it was time for Apres. This vehicle was full of Vikings.