The Resisters

by Gish Jen

Of course, Netted lives were full of pressure—I had heard that. And I did think I could see it in the way these people trudged up their beautiful stairs. They were not lighthearted; they were preoccupied. Where we Surplus had to concertedly consume, after all, they had to concertedly produce. And what a life it could be, I remembered—the meetings, the conferences, the politics. The anxiety about success—how you fought to define it for yourself, even as others blithely defined it for you. People said that the Netted looked at our lives with envy. To be state-supported! To draw a Basic Income for doing nothing! Gwen once showed me an online chat in which a Netted, somehow crossing into Surplus Space, claimed that he’d change places with one of us in a heartbeat. Naturally, he was missing a lot of the picture, as Gwen could have pointed out. Instead, she had simply collapsed his 3-D figure, first into 2-D, and then into a point. “What an asshole,” she said. She was contemptuous. Yet as I watched the people file into their beautiful house, I could not help but notice their air of exhaustion. Maybe they had just had a long day. But they did not exactly walk as if reveling in their good luck in being Netted. They walked as if they had enormous boulders to roll up a hill and no RockBots to help. ◆