Thinking in the future
At this point of time, there are only a few people alive from the generation that was last known to be able to think creatively and come up with innovative ideas seemingly out of the blue, having had a considerable number of real life social interactions and kept up with the ever increasing speed of technological developments. Most rare are those who are “good” guys with all that knowledge, not having turned to use that against society. Some of these good guys are called upon for a cause…
No, this is not about global warming. That’s already taken care of. There are sustainable models now to keep the environment green as much as possible, but much of the contribution comes from K-Balancers, there’s one in every mid size city, balancing the surrounding environment for greenhouse gas levels. Actually, when it came down to it, when it was absolutely essential to act against it, when the possibility of extinction became real, people and governments acted on it, keeping the economy aside for a while. Unprecedented steps were taken to encourage green area management, incentives were declared for coming up with scalable, viable solutions. This revolution started in 2030, ‘the year of environment’ as it was called, has tons of books written around it. The actions of a few ‘rogues’ to create a sense of urgency, pushing governments and more importantly people to take action. The sense of ‘act or die urgency’ was not real, at least not back then. They just figured out ways to make it look real, at some costs of course, to themselves and others, and a whole lot of craziness, but for the future of humanity it was the right thing to do. There’s always been a debate about the ethics of the way they acted and like most debates it’s still inconclusive. What they actually did and how they did it, that’s an entirely different story.
So this has a backstory. Social media trends took a new turn in 2040 when human interactions became obsolete, with everyone adapting to Z- Space, an Interactive virtual World with AI backed characters and places designed based on personalised data sets from years of social media usage.
Concept of Z Space, when it was initially pitched, was enabling people to relive their best moments of the past, to have that feeling again. Tell the system your wish(fantasy) and it will create a space accordingly. (There was a weirdly high number of instances when an employee imagined firing their boss). There were a lot of medical applications also, especially for mental health problems. Creating a Z-Space would help them analyse the patient’s response to that condition.
This sounded good, and stayed good for a while. But it came at a cost.
By the time the next generation came along, Z-Space was dominant in every major aspect of life: Education, Travel, Friendships, Entertainment. It had removed the requirement for human interactions.
Humans are inherently lazy and find ways to avoid heavy physical or mental effort as long as there isn’t a significant requirement. ( you wouldn’t get down to calculating 347 x 629 just because someone said so)
So they choose to sit on the couch, place the Z plugs on your forehead sides, and voila, everything they want is there. With constant feed of curated content and ever decreasing actual human interactions and discussions, the scope of everyone who spent a lot of time using Z-Space had a very limited view of the world. According to the bosses, it creates the best experience for everyone, but in essence it takes away the reality from people. People become lazier in their physical and mental activities, there was a predictability introduced in their experiences, so that life would seem “easier”.
The way the social media, social spaces work is not parallel to our normal brain functioning. There are mismatches. Human interactions have an absolutely essential role to play in development of the brain, which the virtual kind of interactions simply cannot replicate, at least not at a normal level. So if a person is exposed to this virtual space extensively, especially during developmental stages of the body and brain, there are dire effects to their development. Further years of observation has shown that the most worrisome effect it has is on the parts of the brain associated with creative thinking. This concern was widely spread and raised, but industry giants with a lot of power(from money and data) were involved and there was no concrete way to compare creativity among people, this was thrown in the cold bag and usage of Z-Space remained dominant over time.
There was a great shift in the economic and social structure of the society. People who couldn’t initially, now got gravitated towards that also. Part of the reason was cost cutting, because people themselves became the products. The Z Inc. practically controls the whole internet, makes the government policies malleable, generates revenue enough to run a dozen countries on it’s own.
However dark a corner seems, there’s almost always a darker one. On the surfaces, the issues discussed above were at least visible to everyone, but some remained unnoticed, even to the creators of Z-space. The dark web managed to swoop inside in the realms of Z-Space.
For muggles, the Dark web is the dark sibling of everything you see on the surface internet. Again the ethics of the dark web is an inconclusive debate, let’s not get into that.
The expert cyber criminals exploited the ignorance of normal people to a frightening extent. The most worrisome effects included people hiring these criminals for attacking other people. Injecting their Z-Space with traumatic visuals, stealing their identities and credentials was the least of it. The virtual con came into being. The idea was to inject someone’s Z-Space with certain seemingly harmless characters and a few story tidbits. Inherently, Z-Space isn’t designed to be unpredictably harmful in any way, but a con artist would do exactly that. Make the victim feel extreme emotions like heartbreaks, harassment and guilt. This would leave the victims traumatised and vulnerable. ( A tragic example from one such case in Bathinda, India in 2045 is when the victim was made to feel responsible for the suicide of a clever con character, even though it was virtual, it felt very real to her and ruined her life, a few months later she took her own life)
Z-Corp proactively got involved in resolving this after that case became a worldwide sensation, injuring the reputation of their best product till date. They proposed 3 solutions:
- Monitor all the incoming and outgoing traffic from Z-Space and surrounding activities the users are involved in (for their own safety) more thoroughly to identify points of suspicion and persons of interest and take appropriate action in collaboration with the authorities. This will be effective in preventing rather than reacting to such instances.
- Develop Artificial Intelligence powered backtracker to trace activity logs and try identifying the sources and neutralize the threats. This will take time for development because AI is data dependent.
- Run awareness campaigns and educate people on safety while using Z-Space. There will be dedicated SPOCs for reporting suspicious behaviours who will take further appropriate action.
Of course, owing to the urgency and evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed solutions, the first one was the fastest achievable and looked most promising. Although there are all kinds of speculations that Z-Corp suppressed other proposed solutions( including ‘stupid’ ones like taking Z-Space out of existence), the other two solutions were designed to be ineffective, but at the end of the day they are just that — speculations.
They did manage to neutralize the dark web threat using all the data they were gathering. But that wasn’t even a speck of what the data was useful for. Their revenue tripled in two years owing to newer ad contracts, tie ups with governments, and a promise to create a more personalised people’s experiences and make them more pleasant. The conversations like how they manipulate people through highly targeted content, sell people’s data and a lot of other such things never get much more traction than being punchline of a lunch time joke. Remember how there’s always a darker corner…
Okay, Now cut to the year 2057.
Z-Corp has now grown into essentially the biggest and the most powerful organization in the world. They thrived this much and for this long because they have influence over anything, huge amounts of liquid and non-liquid assets and more importantly the ability to learn from past mistakes, owing to massive amounts of data. They have been constantly monitoring for decades, their data gathering bypassed the encryption boundaries after the 2045 dark web fiasco. In reality they didn’t neutralize the dark web entirely, they just managed to keep some of their own links to it, because it could be useful. And it was useful for them.
No matter how expansive presence a system has, there are always outliers, people who can’t afford Z-Space, or who don’t want to adapt to Z-Space. These outliers can cause some “issues”, when they don’t follow the regular patterns, effect patterns of Z-Space users. So Z-Corp’s solution to these anomalies was to either buy them or neutralize them using their dark web connections, and covering up the tracks well. They wanted to suppress these anomalies as much as possible. But they weren’t always successful.
In 2053, a group of people calling themselves the frenzers decided to take a stand against Z-Corp. They started to share with some people how their data was being used and manipulated. How their private conversations were being used to decide what stream of content will nudge them to elect a particular delegate, how likely they are to act against the norms of the Z-Corp influenced society and what particular virtual experience will make them choose or reject a particular course, country to migrate to and a career choice. They were virtually giving them a slight push regularly until they adapted to the ways Z-Corp intended them to.
Z-Corp deployed a lot of resources to remove the frenzers threat. Frenzers couldn’t stand up to them for long, some got bought off, some were handled in other ways, blackmailed or made to disappear. Their information was widely discredited with the constant stream of the good that Z-Corp brought ranging from personal quality of life increasing, better and more personal education, crime rates decreasing because people just don’t go out much now and healthcare systems improvements, among other things.
One of the frenzers that died was Aket’s son. His son Eric took his own life a few months ago because he was fed up of looking over his shoulder all the time. Avid called upon his old crew, they have been in contact, although not like before. Berny, Cain, Dean and Eddard. He now has a beef to settle with the Z-Corp.
Aket— They are evil, I am sure you’re convinced now, you saw what they did to Eric.
Eddard— Agreed with you Ak, we gotta teach them a lesson. I’m sure you have some plan as always, Dean.
Dean wrote Z-Corp on the board, circled it and then sat on a bench.
Dean — “The final aim is to take this thing down. Now, I have a few ideas, I wanna hear your thoughts”.
Berny — Okay, still waiting for the punchline.
Dean “No, this is the only way, if the evil cannot be changed, it must be destroyed”
Berny— There’s this thing called common sense, we can’t destroy Z-Corp entirely, it practically owns the world. It is invincible. Maybe we can put in a few dents to it here and there, but this seems impractical.
Aket — Do you remember 2030, Ben? A worldwide problem, almost unrealistic to cope with, but we managed to do it. I called upon you guys because I know we together are the only ones who have some chance of pulling this off. At the end of the day, even if we don’t actually succeed we’d have at least done some good work.
C — Global warming plan was wild man. We actually lost a lot but in the end it was worth it.
Dean — right? I am assuming you’re in for it now. What about you, Ben?
Ben— My life has been difficult since the day I lost Alena. I always tell myself it was all for a good cause and she didn’t die in vain, this gives some comfort but the void never gets filled, does it? Darn it, As long as I am with you stupid people, I am ready for anything. At least I will die for a cause, I think that’s what Alena would want.
Ak and Ben shaked hands rather compassionately.
Dean — Alright, looks like we are on, because I’d rather not do this if I don’t have my crew with me. So, let’s break this big target into building blocks.
Dean wrote Money, Data, Reputation, People on the board.
Dean — Let’s take it from here next week.
The next week…
Dean — “That’s all of what they are made up of, these are not necessarily independent of each other, but that’s a macro level view of our target. So, What you guys think? Ak, I hope you note this all down. We are old now.”
Ak — “Aye, captain!”
Ben— Take reputation for example, we need to attack their reputation in a huge way, at a very large scale. In my view only platforms with this scale are either Z-Space itself or Meests. At the end of the day, the data flow into the Z-Space is monitored by AI, we need to slowly start sinking in data which doesn’t look harmful to the Z-Space. Then amplify it further. We can do a lot more on the Meests side, but it’s reach is limited, but for start it’d be good enough. We need an inside man for Z-Space, Dean, we need to know what their mysterious algorithms are, what all filters they use and then come up with a plan to bypass it.
Dean — I’m sure you can take care of it. What are you thinking, C?
C — So let’s take the Data angle. There’s a storehouse of data available with them, and a large number of sources constantly streaming data. Data is power. No single entity should hold that much power. We would want to destroy their data storages and connections, as much as possible. Physically destroying their machines, data centres or manually deleting the data is not feasible, at least not right now. We gotta find a way to pollute this extensively. Something that beats their system recovery speeds. A virus, or rather a series of them that passes undetected through their firewalls. This will be pretty hard to pull off. Our inside man can come in handy here, even if we manage to bring down a region’s worth of data by simply sabotaging, that’d give us a window to pollute Z-Space with enough corrupt information to initiate a chain reaction of damages, since everything’s connected. Also, I’d try to get in touch with my “dark” contacts for the virus part, seeing if some of them still have a sense of adventure along with a death wish.
Dean — I have always admired your optimism C.
Ed — We want to hamper their money aspect. One way is to steal and run, we can do some of those, thanks to our dear Spanish friends, but they’d recover quick enough. A small ratio of their assets is liquid(hard cash). We need to involve industries that are big enough to at-least look into their eyes and give them a well and good reason to sabotage Z-Corp financially, either buying off their assets, manipulating stocks and simply rendering real estate undesirable.
Dean — I see where you are going with this.
Ed — We need to involve the Colombian Cartels. They own the drug markets all over the globe. The kind of drugs kids use these days man, it’s wild. But the hyper happy experiences Z-Space has started offering hampers their market considerably. They have been overproducing and taking huge losses for more than a few years now. And let’s not even think about the numbers, not meant for us muggles’ small imaginations. We need to bring drugs back in business!. To maintain their image, Z-Corp doesn’t have any sort of open or covert connection with any of the illegal markets. I think the cartels would jump at this happily.
C — Leaving a lot of downsides and risks aside, how do you plan on doing it?
Ed — Cartels have people everywhere, what material damage they can do to Z-Corp will certainly get their attention. They can basically occupy a property and no-one dare lay a finger on them. They can blackmail people out of contracting with Z-Corp, with a bad or a worse way. This will hamper Z-Corp’s money power. Supposing our Spanish friends come through on the stealing, Z-Corp would need to liquidate assets, and Cartels are just the people who can give them a hard time doing it. That’s one possibility. And one such industry. There are a lot of small scale businesses which can’t afford Z-Corp so they have been marketing in ineffective traditional ways and making little to no profit. We should be able to convince them to invest in Z-Corp stocks, and drop the ball just at the right time, when we hit the Reputation aspect of it. That’s gonna add to their damages. I will think of more ways until next time we meet.
Dean — So we have Money to Ed, Data to C and Reputation to Ben. I have some inputs there, but we’ll discuss this next week. Until then you guys should try and scope the connections you wanna reach.
I’ll deal with the People situation. I am planning to scope out as many outliers as we can, Ak will help me with this. We need to get some of them inside Z-Corp, thus providing our inside men. In the eventuality of things, if we do succeed, the new world will be different. We’d need smart and capable people to lead others through it. Thus, somewhat relaxing future concerns. We’d need to educate them, and motivate them to educate others as they go along. They’d help our Spanish and Colombian friends, from a distance of course. I have identified some outliers in the elite community, those part of Z-Corp but not happy with it. There’d be more of them. We’d need them for all our technical needs and insider information on how they are managing the threats that we raise. Next steps, we’ll build on as we go along. From our experiences, we should know by now that it takes a single point of fault to make everything fall apart. We’d build on the plans as we go along, just like we did with the global warming thing. One more thing, as we know the generations that came after the inception of Z-Space, lack a sense of creativity and handling surprises, we all have realized it by now. So, we need to document this and build the action plan for them, as comprehensive as we can, Ak will handle it.
Aket — I am ready to do anything for this cause. Even if it gets down after I die, I’d be happy to have helped bring it down. They killed my son, and a lot of other people. They are on a way to destroy humanity. We should destroy them first.
Dean — As far as the big fishes, the board members, are concerned, I will deal with them, I have a plan, trust me with this.
Dean finally wrote down on the board their names with the things they are managing. The board looks somewhat like this:
The essence of humanity is to make choices. They are taking that away, slowly but surely. Not everyone is strong enough to force their way out of constant biases they are being exposed to. A majority would just give in. If nothing changes, this is only going to get worse. Is that the world we wanna leave behind?
Afterword
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for your most valuable asset, your time. 😊
I tried to the best of my ability to word down the essence of the story. It’s kept open on purpose. It can be built upon in n number of ways. Just like Life. Probably as I go on with my own life, at some point in the future, I may pick the story at this position and try to build upon it in a good enough way.
Please feel free to give any feedback, suggestions, mistakes or anything else that you wanna say.
Thanks for reading!
