Let’s Put the Future Ahead of Us

For those of us who misspent our youth at the nexus of poverty, crime, and technology, the cyberpunk stories of the 80s and 90s held a special draw. State surveillance was ubiquitous and accepted, but evading the dragnet was second-nature to any decker worth her salt. The criminal underworld was ruled by techno-oligarchs, abusing the desperation and naivete of their underlings to rise in power. The military industrial complex operated outside of the rule of law, relying on technology to project kinetic force well beyond their armored bunkers. Anyone with a computer could become a pawn in someone else’s game of power. The credit replaced physical currency for shady deals of all types. Any hacker with sufficient motivation could change the world.

And they did. Everything we do is recorded. Technology crime is booming. Drug cartels use Twitter. We hack people’s phones and then kill them with armed drones operated from thousands of miles away. Botnets leech resources from the soft underbelly of consumer devices. We can buy furniture, pay ransoms, and obtain just about anything else with Bitcoin.

We got here one purchase at a time. We love our smart homes, our fitness trackers, our connected cars, our laptops, our credit cards, our video games, and especially our phones. We complain about our privacy while spending our money on things that spy on us. We blame our vendors when they lose our data, but think nothing of giving it out on our own. We are giving up.

Technology is getting cheaper and the world is becoming more connected, all the while our data becomes more valuable. We continue to opt for convenience over privacy, the shiny over the secure, and inaction over resistance. Our cyberpunk dystopia is all around us, but it feels like just another day.

We still have time to build a better future, but do we want to?