The Future

by Naomi Alderman

There were no clicks or eyeballs in the sensible, reasoned middle ground, and all the money in the world in encouraging users to rush to treat the extremes as if they were the center.

She’d thought of her mother, of what could still be found and preserved, of the way that anything her mother had owned was precious to her now. How it is only time that makes things precious.

“That’s what these social media and big technology companies have done. They’ve found a way to siphon off something that no one used to be able to own. They invented a new kind of fence to make a new kind of enclosure. Ellen Bywater and Lenk Sketlish and Zimri Nommik and the rest have taken something that used to belong to each of us, put it together into usable data chunks, and used it to become very, very rich.

“There never used to be a way to own the contents of everyone’s address book. Or the list of things you bought at the store. Or the words you’d used to talk to your friends. Or the data about where you are. Or the pictures you’d drawn and put in a gallery or on your wall. They’ve taken all that information—scraped the data. They’ve amalgamated that and made it more efficient, but they haven’t used that efficiency to benefit us all; they’ve used it to enrich themselves and keep the rest of us poor.”

They believe they can survive a global environmental breakdown. They think they’ll inherit the earth after it’s done. They don’t want to do the things it’ll take to fix this. They don’t want us to think about it. And they can direct our attention where they want it to go.

A Malaysian woman marched past in high-heeled boots, giving a list of tasks to her ChatAI assistant as if we might not be educating the bots into killing us right now.

The human race isn’t getting any better, we’re just getting different and more and faster and if you’re not getting better then more and faster is just the same as getting worse.

“Mike used to say: how life happens is a letting in. When he was trying to convince me about the baby. He said every time it was an act of ridiculous trust. The sperm buries itself in the egg and stops being able to move. The egg lets down all its defenses and allows a foreign object in. That’s how it happens, every time. An absolutely unjustified leap of faith. Open up, let in, be let in. Opening is dangerous, every single time. But that’s how we’re here.”

A huge wash of information. Unprecedented. The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are. And humanity doesn’t have time for four hundred years of bloody war right now. There are so many emergencies to deal with.”

We walk into illusions gladly, eager for release from our encircling selves.

What comes after despair? Hope, if you’re lucky. It is dark before the dawn but the dawn always returns. At least on this planet. If you’re not lucky, what comes after despair is brutality. “Whatever has been done to me, that is what I may do to others; and whatever others have done, that is what may be done to them.” That’s how people live on the internet these days. It’s the golden rule’s dark twin. If I were feeling fancy, I’d call it “the rule of salt,” because it crumbles at a touch and lacerates the hands every time it is used.

A world made up of tiny pieces, like a pointillist painting; the truth is that everything is both pieces and a whole. And if you’re really going to understand anything, you have to be able to go between the very small and the very large because neither one is the whole truth.

And certain warehouse workers had their pay docked for spending longer than forty-seven seconds in the bathroom, and certain jurisdictions agreed that Anvil should pay negative tax in exchange for siting a warehouse in the region, and certain quantities of carbon were pumped into the atmosphere. The wealthy became even wealthier and the poor even poorer, despite all historical indications that this type of situation leads inexorably to violent revolution. And although many people experienced a momentary twinge of anxiety at throwing out more plastic wrapping, very few of Anvil’s hundreds of millions of customers and very few of its DaySave subscribers gave enough of a shit to dent its profits by one-hundredth of 1 percent.

And certain slaves mined coltan in the Congo, and certain sleek and beautiful objects of glass and metal were far easier and cheaper to throw away than to repair, and certain chemicals leached into the groundwater in certain places. And while many people signed petitions on Fantail, very few Medlar users gave enough of a shit to sway its share price one-tenth of one penny.

The mental health of humanity continued to be strip-mined. No advertisers moved elsewhere. The board did nothing.

Some creatures are driven to kill even when they cannot eat. Sick animals do this. And humans. We keep on pressing the button long after all pleasure or satisfaction is gone. More money, more influence, more fame, more power.

That was what capitalism got you. The war of all against all could make you safe, as long as they were fighting each other and not you.

A million boring opinions screamed with angry urgency.

If the problem is “I don’t know what’s going to happen” it’s often easier to make sure you do know what’s going to happen even if that means it’s going to be bad. They preferred to look at a mud patch of crops and six scrawny goats and say “There, that’s what I’m going to eat” and be certain than deal with the uncertainty of the hunt every day.

The only way to know the future is to control it.

This is always the secret; this was how these technology fortunes had been made: make it all so easy and enjoyable and frictionless that you never start to ask yourself the big questions about whether this is really how you want to be spending your life.

Do we drive relentlessly toward the future because we don’t wander the world anymore?

Wherever you are, the richness and complexity and inexhaustible, unplumbable thereness of the whole rushes in through your eyes and your ears and your nose and across your skin. Every single thing around you is right there and so are you. The teeming world is right there, and all of it is neither good nor bad, it just is.

We want to connect one to another; we cannot help ourselves. We cannot live all the days of our lives not trusting in another person. We must leap even if we fall. We must.