The Most Accurate Rendition of Our Imminent Dystopia Thursday, January 7, 2016 I’m in the club. Our great nation has mandated that, in order to control suicide rates, all citizens under 30 must spend a minimum of 10 hours a week clubbing. My head reverberates with the music; the result of mathematicians running cooking hardware with evolutionary algorithms for thousands of simulated years to produce the trashiest beats possible. A drunk man sloshes some PepsiCo Testo-Buzz™ onto my hip as he swings in random arcs. The Dispenstron’s eyes flash red. Testo-Buzz is contraband in Coke™ clubs. How could he smuggle it past the nm wave scanners? The Dispenstron finishes chuting soda into a cup before clamping the young man by his shoulders. Before he can complete the mandatory disavowal protocol, the bot effectively mugs his possessions, thanks him warmly, and tosses him out the door. Civil forfeiture has extended to private enforcement of copyright taxes. To get out of here, I purchase a Game-of-Thrones 4™ Escapism Pack and swallow the grape-sized pill, betting the street-bots will drag my body back to my apartment. My dreams are swarmed with dragons and their financing options. I wake up. The sun strobe flashes my face awake to another miserable day at work. I consider stepping into traffic, but the AI has perfected collision-avoidance. The boss is talking about how “topological business strategies” that will stretch our resources in every direction while somehow preserving our product's features. I have to completely invert the code structure. The client is now the server and the server is the client. This is done in order to crowdsource all the responses to an array of underpaid, underpowered and clinically depressed AIs. I get told the tests are failing. This is ridiculous, all tests are passing. The boss says not those tests, the regression tests. I inform him we have no regression tests. He starts pouting, pointing at the array of robots and computers in the window, I inform him those are the production servers and seflets. "same thing" After welding new parts on our shitty, creaking robots I inform the boss we would net money on parts as well as labor if we just buy normal serflets that didn't need constant maintenance. The boss gets red and starts to explode at me, tells me not to question his decisions. I was worried the blood pressure fighting the fat might give me an early promotion, but the workplace is mindfulness-sprinkler that ID the "bad vibes" and douse is in "buddha blend" lisinopril. We proceed to give our undivided attention to the fully armed social work-bot. It’s Monday, my night off from club duty. I meet old undergrad friends at a very affordable, condemned café. Seth and Justin sit at a battered steel table. Seth studied algorithmic composition—specializing in kazoos. He makes a living producing corporate psycho-tapes and has a steady girlfriend. Justin double-majored in Applied Mathology and Transdimensional Physics. He is homeless. > Me: “How are you guys?” > Justin: “Dying. These numbers, man. You always have to feel greater than or equal to last quarter.” President LaBouf recently declared: “The citizen happiness index hit a record high last quarter, and we plan on making it even higher.” > Seth: “Relax, Justin. Nothing we can do. I’m doing alright though—finally landed another contract after weeks with nothing.” > Seth sets up a solar kettle. As the water boils, Justin and I circle the perimeter before reconvening at the table. > Me: “All clear.” We pull out smuggled paper netbooks, fresh from Shanghai. With them, we evade most conventional tracking and fines for using Linux. > Seth: “So what’s next?” > Me: “We’ve got three modules left: routing, the UI, and the classifier.” > Seth: “I’ll sketch out the UI.” > Justin: “Classifier? Easy.” > Me: “Remember—we can’t prove the classifier with induction or ring theory. Copyrights.” > Justin: “Got it. Just keep it quiet. Real MacBook-nonchalant.” We work in silence, encrypted dives only. > Justin: closing laptop “Prototype’s almost ready. Let’s wrap before shift three rolls in.” Me: “No one knows we’re here.” The last time we slipped up, our cofounder James was ratted out to the microsoft licensing cartel. Publicly, they accused him of “psychic harassment” for a comment he never posted, and privately they bagged him into one of their "blue sites". His devices were seized, and our prototype IP was stolen. Ultimately we rediscovered it a week later, rebranded, and publicly laundered through a senator's daughter as legacy admission collateral. James went back to work for a week, a walking ghost, left with a windows logo permanently etched on his torso. We split and I walk home. Before I can get my 6 hours of snoozing, I fill out the daily, ringing, consumer-review to rate my day. It's the government's metric of citizen happiness, but the dataset is sold to corporations as the nation's only source of revenue. They ask "How did you feel about your lunch?". Not wanting to have my sub-subletted Nature Space By Nestle™ rent "randomly" raised, I respond with the maximum number of emojis to each question. The survey closes with a jingle and a chibi clown wishing me an even better day tomorrow. The housing prices are so crazy that I don't know if I'll ever be able to afford a place with more hours of sleep. Some people think this new world hell was caused when trump was elected. Others blame the advancement of technology and scientists for the whole thing. Personally, I think it's all of our faults for throwing away our time on television, facebook, netflix instead of things that were actually in our self interest. Every little sin or weakness we allow as an individual, as a collective it adds up. But hey, dopamine pumps aren't all that far away, are they?