She walks through the door with a lazy stride but her face says it’s been a sour day.
She is absorbed on the screen of her mobile phone, uninterested in the world around her. The glamour of moving pictures on the silver screen has been poisoned by the gremlins of AI, marketing and content creators.
She is the future, a future of passive consumers that do not generate any other value beyond their interactions within their little bubble, and are reluctant and afraid of building physical connections with other members of society.
These citizens of the future are naïve and pliable; easily manipulated creatures that do as they are told by the messages on their screens.
Sheep with little empathy that laugh at each other’s misfortunes.
The discourse is a litany of fun-sized escapism, slapstick humor, propaganda, insults thinly disguised as pranks, and cynical observations. The provider and the platform they use matter much less than the abysmal content they enjoy.
In this world, dead people talk to you as if they were still alive, dispensing counsel and words of wisdom far removed from their original purpose. Historical events and trivialities of a bygone era are re-enacted to show us that our past was a horrible thing and that we were unhealthy, underfed and unhappy.
The present is portrayed as an endless moment of leisure, comedy and sports, where work and genuine value do not need to be created. Consumerism and ephemeral fame are to be celebrated above everything else.
The institutions and values that have been accepted as part of the social contract are being demolished in front of our eyes -sometimes with impunity, sometimes with malice, sometimes with collusion.
The economy of the world is on the brink of collapse. The powers that be promised us a long future of prosperity and many of us helped build what it then became: a rapacious present where hard-working people are replaced by entities that are not people, to fatten the pockets of those that already have very deep pockets.
The media bombards us with images of black helicopters chasing bad guys, bad guys pretending to be good guys, good guys being persecuted as bad guys, and countries at war for obscure reasons. In our modern reality -our flimsy and synthetic reality- any pretext can be fabricated and used to rally the masses around a Messiah.
We live in a synthetic reality -unlike any science fiction we have ever read about. Everything around us may be faked and presented to us as reality.
It’s hard to see a path ahead to a brighter world, as we are now surrounded by charlatans, grifters and dark models that are contrary to the common wisdom acquired as civilised humans.
The future is bleak.
Our lack of empathy, attachment and resolve will help it arrive sooner.