The Final Crash #3: The Hyper Economy Booms

If you missed Part Two of the Future Now series you can find it here: The Final Crash #2: How do you feel about your future right now?

Welcome to the roaring 80’s. It’s the year 2084,the stock market is booming, and the experts say we have the technology and systems in place to keep the party going forever.

The colonization of the solar system consumes much of the Earth’s population desperate to own a piece of the future. This has been fueled by a new breed of digital currency called Futures, which secure transactions deep into the future. Advanced virtualization technology allows people to step into this collectively agreed-upon future that is stored in the metadata of the digital currencies. Inside of this hyperreal simulation, people generate vast sums of wealth for their families for generations to come. This is life in the year 2084.

ONE: One Currency To Rule Them All

Like the US dollar today, there is one main currency that acts as the gold standard: Futures, a cryptocurrency. It’s name was born out of Futures trading today, which basically allows somebody to make a purchase for something in the future at a cost that is agreed upon today. For example, if you promise to buy a running shoe from your friend for $10 in two weeks but, when it comes time to collect your shoe, you learn that a celebrity is willing to pay you $100 dollars for the shoes, then you make $90. The Futures currency that is the backbone for economic activity in the year 2084 is much more sophisticated than futures trading now because it’s a digital currency capable of storing large amounts of information within the token. It not only allows someone to invest in an asset as far in the future as they want to buy it, but it describes the asset as well. A person doesn’t own the asset until the time stamp recorded in their Futures asset matures.

The economic possibilities are complex and boring, but the key takeaway is that it allows people to invest in developments that could take decades, if not centuries, to create. One of the benefits of time-based currency is that it forced people to think much further into the future when it came to investment. For this reason, Futures are heralded to humanity dealing with the worst aspect of climate change. It gives financial incentive to tackle problems long before they occur. The Futures’ unique set of features are perfectly aligned to the needs of off-earth colonization, which is astronomically expensive.

TWO: Conquerors of the Solar System

Futures allowed everyone to participate in off-earth industries. By the year 2084, off-earth colonization is by far the number one driver of economic activity, so much so that humanity is on the verge of becoming a Type II civilization. In half a century, we’ve nearly harnessed the material resources of the solar system. This is the source of the economic bubble that, when it bursts, will lead to the Final Crash.

THREE: Earth is Home

Most people live on Earth and commute to work everyday in some aspect of the off-earth industries. How? Do people teleport themselves to Mars? No. People use sophisticated virtualization technology that allows them to step into an exact model of the part of the solar system they work in. Like a massive multiplayer resource management game, with a larger user base than any existing social network, people control a fleet of worker drones. These drones are responsible for mining resources and building mineral refining plants and factories that build more drones.

FOUR: People Work Hard

If you’re a productive member of society in the developed world — which is pretty much every country — you work very hard. This may seem counterintuitive to a society with so many drones to do the work for us. Wouldn’t we all be lazing around beautiful pools, drinking cocktails with massages and parties in our future? It’s a plausible fantasy. But, in this hyper-capitalist world, there is an infinite opportunity in the off earth-colonies and somebody needs to manage the machine slaves.

FIVE: RobAI Protocol

But wait, wouldn’t we have created intelligent robots that could figure out how to organize themselves to mine an asteroid? We did, but during the 40s and 50s, as super intelligent AI grew exponentially more powerful, there were a number of occurrences that almost led to a different kind of extinction event, sometimes referred to as the Robopocalypse. The RobAI Protocol was adapted everywhere and set strict guidelines on machines. For example, machines are not permitted to control other machines and their intelligence can’t exceed their utilization. As a result, the smartest machines have the intelligence of a great ape or are locked away in secure containment facilities.

SIX: People are Incredibly Wealthy

Humans are needed to design, manage, and finance the colonization of the solar system. This has made the average worker in the developed world incredibly rich as they manage millions of dollars of economic activity every day. We’re a planet of billionaires. So wait? Why doesn’t everyone retire to a tropical Island? The simple answer is inflation.

SEVEN: Inflation’s a Bitch

Earth is a finite resource and there are billions of billionaires. There is only so much land that can be purchased and strict environmental protection measures limit the supply considerably. This means that the average human still can’t afford that house and they live in an even smaller apartment in an over crowded mega-city. As a space colonization entrepreneur, most of their wealth is in the form of a new time-based crypto credit. Wealth is tied to the future and has no value in the present. The promise is that if you work hard enough, one day your “Futures” will mature and you will be able to retire comfortably. Or else, you may be cast out into the Tenured Lands.

EIGHT: The Tenured Lands

In the year 2084, there are three classes of people: the 0.0000001% (aka the Ecclesians), the productive members of society, and those who live completely outside of it. Nearly every country has no poverty. Humans are either contributing to society inside a mega-city or roaming the lands between them. Also known as the Tenured Lands, these are the Ecclesian-owned lands where drones harvest resources like grain and lumber and humans are conveniently not counted in census polls. If city life is not for you, you can squat anywhere you like in communities no larger than 100 people where advanced technology is outlawed. The Tenured Lands can be a brutal but satisfying life if you grew up there, but it is no place for someone raised in the cities.

NINE: Climate’s A Bitch

What about climate change?

If there is one thing that everybody agrees on in 2084, it’s that they hate the Apathetic Generation, those who had the knowledge of the effects of their industrial practices but did little to stop it. In history books in the future, humans today, who did nothing to prevent climate change, are considered the most loathsome of figures.

Climate change fucked the shit out of the world. It’s a miracle that humanity didn’t succumb to the vast destabilizing effects of nearly a billion climate refugees. People in 2084 endure a very different earth and accept that altering the condition will take centuries. It’s simply a matter of life. It’s the reason why people mostly live in highly-controlled sustainable supercities.

TEN: Enter The Fold

We barely survived the devastating impact of climate change. Its impact on humanity is, to some degree, what resulted in the mass adoption of virtualization technology to conduct business — kind of like how COVID-19 triggered the mass adoption of video conferencing, opened up the possibility of remote working from anywhere, and triggered a mini-migration away from cities.

Similarly, in the 2040s and 2050s, there was technology to allow people to step inside of any real or fictional environment. Before the off-earth colonization boom, Holodecks were an expensive entertainment technology few could rationalize spending money on. Now, anyone has constant access to technology that fully immerses them in a detailed simulation of our past, present and collective vision of the future.

ELEVEN: The Multiverse Is Fun

People are statistically happier in 2084 than at any time since the start of the Industrial Revolution. There is a real feeling of hope, a clarity of purpose, and an opportunity for everybody to participate in the transformation of the solar system. In most countries, people are given all the resources they could possibly need in order to become a successful entrepreneur. If mining asteroids is too brutish, or developing a Mars colony is too bougie, then a human could invent an entirely new world using the same technology that powers the Universe Sim. There is no excuse not to create your dream project in the year 2084.

For the most part, people wake up everyday with no thought of the Final Crash. Those living outside of the system in the Tenured Lands think only of survival. In the developed world, people think of nothing other than how they are going to prosper in the system. It’s been two decades since the last significant economic downturn, and 2084 will set new records for economic output. In the developed world, citizens trust that sophisticated simulations are used to run every possible outcome — it’s the price they pay to give up their data.

What the average person doesn’t know, is that the world’s elites are staring deep into the Event Horizon, a culmination of multiple disastrous events, each of which could destabilize the global system. There is no clear path around these events, and the only certainty is that it’s effects will be punishing. Not even the world’s most powerful will escape.

TWELVE: The Roaring 80’s

Yet, the party continued in what was referred to as the roaring 80’s. The global economy was surging and driving a new era of mass consumerism. Off-earth billionaires flaunted decades-old climate laws, and new cultural movements born in the Fold were sweeping the globe .

After decades of climate austerity, people wanted to believe that it was finally OK to let loose a little — to live a little frivolously. The young had never experienced a recession. They had only known a world where it was possible to step into a perfectly presented vision of a prosperous future. People thought that they would make money forever because the entire planet was in agreement on what their future held — they could see it, they could step into it, and it was prosperous.

UP NEXT

What happens once the bubble bursts and the party comes to a sudden halt? A tsunami of events that became known as the Final Crash. Nothing would ever be the same. But why didn’t humanity see It coming? Were there no warning signs? Find out in the next article, The Final Crash #4: The Infinite Crypto Bubble.

Scott Nihill is a futurist, storyteller, entrepreneur, and artist. He’s currently developing Future Now, a sci-fi worldbuilding web series. Co-produced the hit science & technology web-series What If, and co-created What If Kids. He dedicates his free-time to supporting creators from concept to completion through his arts organization, Maker Boost. Learn more about his activities and interests at https://ca.linkedin.com/in/scottnihill