Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and I don’t know what life is anymore
This is a response to the “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better” by Ida Auken and published on the World Economic Forum’s Medium channel. It is constructed by “augmenting” the narrative contained in the original article. You can find the added parts in italics in the article below.
Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city — or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.
I have been left out of the wave of innovation that swept over our city, and the system simply forgot me, first pushing me outside because of my differences and imagination, through high prices and normalised neighbourhoods which became openly hostile to my existence, then by simply not including a profile like mine among the expected options of life, achieving my complete disappearance from the world, my invisibility.
It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.
This, of course, is true if you are a standard person. Because this system has progressively eliminated conflict and difference, even in imagination. Everything has become a soft and morbid normality in which it has become hard to even imagine something different. It all begun with comfort, simplicity and security. People have been seduced by a comfortable life in which there is “others”, and “systems” who take decisions for you, establish priorities and strategies for you, and who even decide what is normal, expectable, desirable, imaginable for you. Fundamentally turning you into a baby, infants who are cared for by their moms and dads, their diapers changed, their toys and interfaces nice, rounded and injury-proof. Their lives have been structured. It was made sure that they did not really have free time, but controlled/controllable time, spent with others, supervised, facilitated, with rich, exciting, refreshing, uplifting, mono-directional “things” to fill time, and avoiding people doing something “different”, which they decided on their own, outside of the available choices.
Here, that’s what happened: interfaces. The system made sure that the fact that there were only the A and B button on the interface was very clear. Oh, a wide number and variety of A and B buttons, selected among the best, all available, accessible, usable, safe and secure to use. But only the A and B. Not any C. Hopefully eliminating the possibility to even find out that C exists, eliminating C from imagination.
After comfort and simplicity, fear did the rest.
People, lots of people, started coming in our city. Migrants, people from elsewhere. Who were different.
And the city, our city, just did not have any profile for them. It was ours as in ‘us’, not ‘them’.
And so they were pushed outside, through cost, data, police, decor, difference, opportunity. And we’ve never seen anything from them anymore. We read about them on the news, about the crises and te interventions. And there is a random uprising somewhere, eventually. But it’s usually elsewhere. So it’s not that bad.
First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?
Of course this requires that I give complete access to my public and private life to systems which I don’t know anything about, which even if I did not elect them have the power to completely rule my life and decide things for me and my fellow citizens.
But I’m starting to forget how being responsible felt, to have self-determination, to choose, to decide. So I guess it’s all right.
After all: who does not intimately desire of being an infant again, not having to worry about anything?
We’ve all became infants. Worry-free. Responsibility free. The system decides and does things and we may lay there, with our toys, in our fecies (because someone/something will clean up, in the end), without a worry (and freedom) in the world.
Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey. Funny how some things seem never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants. It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.
I also don’t have the possibility to do anything apart from what has already been chosen for me.
“Environmental problems seem far away”
In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.
Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy — the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.
I also have nowhere to be private. No place which I really feel as mine. No separation. Nothing that I have and nobody else does. Not even memories, tendentially, as they are all starting to look and feel alike, at least in my bubble, in the set of seemingly progressively similar people who I progressively see and feel around me all the time. Another effect of the system.
This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability.
This is very good indeed. Too bad that I have no possibility to see “the system”. I only see the circle. I am completely excluded from responsibility in making it happen. And I progressively lose interest and curiosity about what is outside of my circle.
As long as it works and it’s easy and fun, I don’t care.
I have absolutely no idea about how and what to do if it breaks down, what would happen if something unexpected would manifest itself, what if something different showed up.
I have forgot these things a decade ago, around 2020.
The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well being. In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.
It’s all really well planned. And if it changes, it’s decided by some algorithm which, apparently, uses all the data that everyone generates to think what’s best for us. I really don’t know how it manages to understand what I desire or imagine, or how this could be fit together with the things that other people desire or imagine. I have always had the sensation that the other way around would be simpler: trying to influence, using the same algorithms, people’s desires and imagination, so that they think that there is only one thing to desire and imagine, and that everything else becomes either invisible or unwanted.
Transgression is de facto impossible in our city.
Who transgresses is deplorable, unwanted, feared and repressed, in social, psychological, cultural, economic and even violent ways. Although physical violence is constantly less and less necessary. It is just needed to act on people’s perception of normality, using media and communication channels, and to change prices and taxes (before, when money existed) or the parameters according to which things and services are accessible (now), so that unwanted people are forced to leave, and to gather in the places, far from view.
The death of shopping
Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is.
For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.
I am practically brain dead: there are activities that pop up in my calendar, and I do this and that to keep myself drooling and entertained, with other people which are just as drooling and entertained as myself. Sometimes, when needed, a robotic arm changes my diaper. I don’t even have to stop drooling and being entertained.
When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.
I really don’t have any real contact with the world anymore. With taking decisions. With making difficult choices. With having the feeling that I am responsible and that my opinion has any effect, as hard as it may be. Or that I can construct this opinion with society.
We have fun, do sports, have hobbies, think, discuss, affix post-it notes on whiteboards in community meetings, and come up with some really clever ideas which are harvested, fed to the system and some of which eventually end up being adopted for our neighbourhood.
We really have no way to express any emotion which is strong, and powerful, and negative, such as fear, anxiety, hate, violence. All of them are swept under the rug, and disapproved by society. They even have services for those who feel these emotions, to be normalized or taken care of.
“They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”
For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
I see them in the news sometimes, and in documentaries. They even have a theme park in which I can go and see them: they make honey, live naked, and have sex in the open air.
They once gave me weed (in a controlled experience of weed-experiencing, together with 8 other people from the city, under strict medical control and a psychological session after 1 month, to see if the weed had had any negative interaction with the chemical balance which is induced by the quantified-self determined custom medications which are produced for me every day by my 3D printed personal home nano-pharmacy).
I really don’t see anything “real” outside of my city. I travel, but I travel to other cities (which are progressively not really different from mine), or to places which are among lists of places I can go to. I really don’t decide anything, but, rather, choose among lists that are prepared from me, and reviewed by people who, I think, think like me and have my same tastes and desires.
It’s been more than a decade since I have really decided something on my own.
Right now I really wouldn’t know where to go if it was not by choosing it among those lists, or what I could do there, or even if and how I could survive.
I really don’t know if something exists outside of those lists.
Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
When it happens, I use online counseling services, and I immediately use the nano-drugs which come out of my home 3D printed pharmacy.
Then, I immediately feel better.
All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realised that we could do things differently.
Now we just don’t care anymore. For all I know anything could be happening outside of my bubble. I don’t care. As long as it does not get in.
