Not only Apple LVIII: The future.
Future is that word that everyone uses to refer to the present. We always have “the future now”, and the references can be multiple. Even Bill Gates used the stylistic twist already in the title of his book “The road ahead” (The road ahead), where he talked about fantastic things that normal humans didn’t even suspect at the time. But the future, now, may be a little weirder than it seems. Much.
I guess the series will sound familiar to you Black Mirrorwhich has become known for being especially disturbing (à la “At the limits of reality” but with more contemporary stories and adapted to the current nihilistic style. Specifically, I want to refer to the chapter 1×02 (I tried to delete 1×01 directly from my memory, but it is persistent…), “Fifty million merits”, which tells the story of two boys in a world in which most individuals are dedicated to pedaling exercise bikes while watching videos, playing video games and watching advertisements in exchange for earning merits, which from what can be deduced would be the equivalent to current money, and which of course are a totally virtual element. The girl in this story is pushed by the boy to participate in a talent contest (in the style of Got Talent) to try to have a better life than the one they have, which obviously, as can be deduced from the first minutes of the chapter, simply it is a technological form of slavery.
But things get complicated when they discover that you have to pay 50 million merits, that virtual currency that is earned by watching videos, playing video games and watching ads (mandatory also if you do not have many merits). It turns out that the boy had inherited many merits from her deceased brother, so he decides, because he believes in her and, of course, he likes her, that the girl is talented enough to go to the contest and win. So he passes them on. The girl goes to the contest, but the judges decide that she is mediocre and offer her to dedicate herself to the industry as a way out. Even though she goes against both of their principles, she desperately wants to get out of there, and she leaves the boy in the lurch. Since then, the boy decides to “take revenge on the system” by recovering the 50 million credits again, training to perform a show and when he finally arrives, committing suicide in public, which the judges manage to avoid, making him another offer that he cannot refuse… And I can read up to here, because the ending, which I won’t count, is a lamentable summary of the world we live in today. In itself, the whole chapter does not stop constantly reminding us in a “fictional” way of the world today.
Anyone who has played MMORPG (What WoW, archeage either Black Dessert) can feel frankly identified with what happens in that chapter. They constantly give you medals, merits, gifts for performing repetitive tasks over and over again, without apparent meaning and with the theoretical objective of improving your character, it is not clear in what direction. But beyond video games, exactly the same thing happens in the world of social networks. The social media they have become a world totally apart from the real one where people who in the real world are nobody suddenly become celebrities, where each follower gives you new abilities to reach the public and where you can even set a chair. Now it is perfectly possible to find sites where they give you prizes if you take surveys or celebrities Travel Club, where you earn redeemable points the more actions you take in the real world. companies like Manzana, Microsoft, Google and others have established the way in which we can do this by participating in the show with their products. Without their computers, their systems, and their websites, it would be tremendously difficult to do all of this. And you have the impression that all this technological evolution has actually been manufactured in offices for a long time, and that we simply use it because it is “given” to us, in the form of devices and programs, so that we are increasingly moving away from it. from the real world and we live in a world apart where, it seems, all we can do is “earn merits” to keep going. Disturbing, right?
A somewhat obscure article has come out, but we have to be aware that this is going in this direction. From here we come to the division between technophiles and Luddites, in a constant struggle in which, it seems obvious, machine lovers will win. When I discovered a few years ago that 3D cinema had been invented since the fifties, I began to question myself if what they call “inventions” really are something real or they are simply being put before us according to the agenda of large corporations or worse, of governments. . It is possible that anti-gravity has already been invented, or that teleportation has been used for decades without our knowledge. The autonomous car can simply be a smoke screen and that episode of the Simpsons where Homer discover a conspiracy of truckers to make their routes without touching the wheel could have been running for many years now. And go find out what more things may be to come and that, in reality, already exist. For our enjoyment.
PS: actually, this article is intended to be the prologue to a series on the computer industry, how it has affected our lives and to what extent, the current moment has been planned for decades on the tables of political and military strategists. And the truth is, it scares you a bit… I leave you a video so you can see where the shots are going to go…
