The Final Crash #5: A Credit Tsunami

If you missed Part Four of the Final Crash series you can find it here: The Final Crash #4: The Infinite Crypto Bubble

Cold wars that simmered for decades turned violently hot with a single bullet.

Was this the sound of the bubble bursting? Echoing around the world as a quadrillion dollars of toxic credit rained down from the now insolvent off-world industries?

Or was it the unheard gurgles, from the millions of people whose lungs filled up with fluid — the result of a superbug that became a pandemic? The state-of-the-art predictive modelling simulations and rapid immunization development technology didn’t reach these people, often simply because of politics.

Did it sound like the deafening snap of human bones cracking and disintegrating as murderous mobs of the disenfranchised erupted in rage? Their poverty masked reports that failed to include those who “chose not to participate in society.”

Or was it the sound of one hundred-year-old Champagne bottles popping as those who hedged their bets made a killing and were set to become the new lords of the Earth — if the violence didn’t sweep them up as well?

Taking A Step Back

Historians will argue over what exactly triggered the Final Crash in an effort to prevent a repeat of the chaos, war, disease, and deaths; and to ensure the long-term stability of the new global system that emerged from the ashes of the old.

Now it’s important to note that “historian” is a misleading term given that the post-Final Crash world is fundamentally different. Life beyond the event horizon of the great bubble is impossible to ascertain, even to the elites with access to all the world’s data and technology. What we do know is that by definition the Final Crash leads to a world where the vast majority of the population has no real power to influence their environment, or the system that produces it. They are, by definition, slaves, though, by design, most don’t realise it. In a post-Final Crash world, they would not have access to the real history. Only those who had devoted themselves like monks to the survival of the system would gain access to the true history.

These “historians” will pour over the near perfect recording of all human activity through history crystalized in the Mirror archives. They will be able to enter the mind of someone living in the year 2084 and see a world incredibly connected through technology that brought the solar system to everyone’s fingertips.

The Bubble

The Bubble is a financial frenzy that grew to astronomical levels, with nearly every material resource in the solar system claimed in the race to develop it. There was so much credit flowing through the system that parents were purchasing opportunities for their great-grandchildren. The future had been commodified and its value was soaring, meaning now was the time to pre-register that home for your children in an as-of-yet-unconstructed development, or donate to that prestigious University your descendants could attend. Futures Crypto opened up a new dimension to capital, creating the potential for an exponentially larger bubble. In 2084, the value of Futures Crypto was a trillion times larger than the total of all real-world exchanges in the present. New forms of immersive technology opened up fantastic opportunities for people to live as their truest most unique individual self.

A Hyper World Order

Historians call the late 21st century, “the hyper age.” A confluence of hyper-individualism, hyper-reality, hyper-currency, hyper-capitalism, hyper-everything, including, of course, hyper-bubble. The hyper age was fueled by a belief amongst the global elites that true sustainability, in all forms, could only be derived from a pursuit of maximum power. Sustainability was important to them because they were still surviving the effect of climate change, which reinforced the terrifying potential of humanity everyday. There was no question, we could and would destroy a planet perfectly tuned for our existence. This generation of global leaders said: “Sustainability can only be derived if you have the means to attain it and the power to fight off competing systems.” Eternal sustainability through maximum power was the mantra of good-intentioned trillionaires who believed they were leading humanity to a permanent golden state. Then their bubble burst.

The Immediate Effects

When the 2084 burst happened, quadrillions of dollars worth of wealth simply disappeared from the market, life savings (or more accurately multigenerational savings) were wiped out in a second. Citizens found themselves at risk of losing their homes and creditors came knocking. What followed was a mass global negotiation on how to settle the debt.

The Great Reset

On one end of the spectrum, there were those that felt that the crash was evidence that the system was broken and pushed for a complete reset of the world order — some even pushed for the clearing of all debt and starting over. Some of the more democratically-structured countries enacted these policies. The corporations and countries with the most to lose from the “Great Reset,” sought to punish these outlier nations like Sweden, who enacted debt-clearing policies, making an example of them to any countries considering similar actions.

The scale and complexity of the problem compounded the situation: What would you do? Your life savings were gone and everything that you believed to be true about your future had evaporated. You were now confronted with a very depressing scenario. All of the skills that you had developed, the technologies you’d mastered, and the money you’d earned were now useless. All of the post-apocalyptic fiction you’d consumed was starting to feel prophetic.

You’re starting to panic that you don’t have enough supplies to survive more than a week. You think of your family members and what fate awaits them. It’s not feeling like the year 2084 anymore — more like the dark ages. The panic is paralyzing because there is no action you can take to solve the problem you’re in. You only have your faith in whatever you believe.

Less stable countries have descended into chaos. You’ve watched scenes of murderous brutality in cities that were once popular tourist destinations — and these are only the clips that made it on the more mainstream news aggregators you subscribe to. Totalitarian governments are using the chaos as an excuse to further entrench their surveillance and security measures, taking away what few rights their citizens once had. Even before the crash, you’d heard news of massive prisons that allowed people to “Virt Mine their way out of debt.’”

It’s a terrible environment to negotiate in, which is not good because you have a billion dollars worth of Futures Crypto that may be worthless. There is a part of you that wishes that even a fraction of your credit could be reinstated. You’d be happy and just go back to your old life. Oh, to make the daily commute into Mars, to spend your day in a simulation of the future, to find those micro-creative moments in your job, to drink that delicious morning beverage that got you going.

Then you think of all of the people you know who failed to integrate into society, who either toiled away on the fringes or left altogether (both physically and digitally). You can empathise with them on a level you failed to in the past. What seemed like character flaws and failures to rise to the challenge, are cast in a new light. Now that you’re just another failure of the system, possibly cast out yourself, you ponder a life in the brutish Tenured Lands. You hope that what kindness you gave to the less fortunate will find its way back to you.

You venture out for supplies, terrified, and hoping that your government can survive long enough to mitigate the impact, that the supply chains will hold. But, you have a sense that you’ve relinquished your control to people who will not stand by you when their interests are on the line. There are conspiracy theories flooding your feeds with disinformation that not even your high paid bots can filter because it’s everywhere: Talk of the global elite conspiring to consolidate their power, to take control of everything. It’s impossible to determine what is fiction from fact. Your entire reality has just come crashing down and even the algorithms are confused. It doesn’t really matter what the elites are doing because you have no agency to stop them. You failed to fight for the system you believed in, before the one you don’t believe in was taken from you, and replaced with something worse.

Zoom Out

Now you must deal with the Final Crash. The Final Crash is final because there can never be another system crash. This is not because global society learned from the Final Crash to finally develop a system that served humanity. No, financial crashes are good. They are natural corrective events that occur when the values of one or more commodities are mismatched with people’s actual needs and purchasing power. Where crashes become toxic, is when the system itself is able to utilize the destabilizing effects of crashes to consolidate power into a few who control it. This tuning of a system would lead inevitably to a final consolidation of power.

It’s not like there is one giant big crash and then the world is changed forever. No. The Final Crash is simply an event that pushes the system beyond the point of no return, through the event horizon and towards the singularity, where the rules will be crushingly different forever.

The Events

So what caused the crash?

A single virus. A mutation, of a mutation, of a mutation of a few lines of code. The origins of the virus are lost to time, but the virus was first diagnosed on a small drone ranch in the Kong region of the asteroid belt. By the time its severity was identified, it had already spread through enough drones that the rapid recall and resetting of the infected drones would be impossible without completely destabilizing the supply chain.

It took weeks for the implications of the virus to reach average everyday people whose lives were entrenched in the off-earth colonization industry. By then, the market was in total freefall and opportunities for hedging bets were long gone. This one event made a small group of elite traders incredible sums of money while the majority bore the brunt of the downturn. And the Drone Crash was still over a decade before the Final Crash would occur. But the anger over how the governments and corporations responded were never forgotten and led to a distrust of the system.

After the Drone Crash, there were attempts to change the system that clearly favoured multinational corporations. The Earth First movement rapidly grew to dominate global discord with its focus on reprioritizing human quality of life over off-earth colonization. But, once the economy started up again, it was hard for people to rationalize not going back to work, with debt and families to feed.

The activists didn’t go away though. They only grew more emboldened, and their actions grew more overt. For example, the Friheart, an anarcho hacktivists collective, grew famous for its technologically advanced pranks on the most despised abusers of power. Its crowning terrestrial accomplishment came in 2076, when it blinded the Mirror in thirty different world capitals for thirty seconds. When the Mirror came back on-line, it was greeted by three-thousand naked “Friherts” mooning it.

The leaks and hacks did little to change the system. The economy was nearing its zenith and the abundance was drowning out the growing resistance from an increasing number of those the system had left behind. This included those locked into indentured servitude working their debt off in industrial Virt Mining compounds; and the increasingly organized communities in the Tenured Lands, who were tired of the police raids breaking up the compounds they built to protect themselves; and the masses crowded into the mega cities, suffering from Future Fatigue, or the effects of spending the vast majority of their time working inside of an incredibly real simulation of humanity’s collective future. The system demanded loyalty but the silent majority secretly wished for revolution.

So the bubble grew, and grew, and grew, inside of a system no longer working for the vast majority of those inside of it. The warning signs the bubble was about to pop were everywhere. The system left a wake of disease, mental health problems, and environmental degradation. Yet, it continued to produce wealth — a lot, a lot of wealth. The system was operating on a scale so large, and producing credit so fast that it was no longer possible to fix it. It was now a question of how many people would die or be seriously harmed when it crashed.

The pin that popped the bubble was a steep but routine market correction, like swerving your car on a mountain road to avoid an animal and flying off a cliff. For many, the chaos the crash produced was the medicine they were looking for: it was a release from the highly ordered world they had struggled to survive in.

For those who’d been left out completely, like those from the Tenured Lands, the Coastal Cities, and the Wastelands, they saw a chance to reclaim a life of liberty, and to get some sweet revenge on mega-city folk who were fleeing towards them.

The Final Crash was triggered by an unpopular leader in China, the global superpower, and his attempts to maintain control in the face of mounting competition. China was punishing the off-earth colonies that were increasingly exerting influence over global politics. In particular, China could see the future written in the Futures currency. Their dominance was coming to an end. The dream of an Earth unified under party philosophy was ending. On Earth, they controlled the real-world flow of people and goods. Their social currency was the dominant token that regulated who and what could travel where in most parts of the globe. The Chinese had played these games for years, toying with the market, holding it hostage, desperately flirting on the edge of destabilizing everything. This time; however, the markets did not bounce back to their regular crescendo. Instead, they began a long painful journey to the demise of civilization.

With their actions, the Chinese broke the psyche of the entire world. Chinese trade sanctions reminded everybody who was in control of the party. It caused mass hysteria. By overemphasizing their power, they fractured an illusion of control that the masses held. It revealed how illusory Futures was, how ephemeral. Futures hopeful potential diminished, accelerated by its rapid drop in value. With the fall of Futures, came the loss of each individual’s belief in their future, at least as it was written in their Life Path. It was like the entire world was suffering from a depression, unable to get out of bed because they lacked purpose and motivation. Generations of planning evaporated into nothing. The insanity of putting so much faith into an imaginary and invisible power was soul crushing.

In the fall of 2084, you lie in bed unable to sleep — or do anything for that matter. You and your partner are terrified for your future and want “normal” back again. It’s been four weeks since the economy collapsed, since chaos descended upon Earth.

At this very instant, the Ecclesian Council is meeting in an attempt to navigate the problem of the collapse. All the most reliable prediction engines had caught wind of the confluence of events that was creating an impossible-to-navigate scenario. They’d been working for at least a year on identifying the exact threat, and working on plans, and contingencies for contingencies. But, if there was one thing their systems got right, it was just how monumental this wave would be. The Ecclesians were not ones to use profanities, but they did when they saw the reports.

Even the Ecclesians themselves would not escape this event un-fucked. Up to the moment of the Crash, they didn’t know what their future held. Some of them hoped that their contingencies might see them rising in status within the Council, maybe even achieving a place on the inner council itself. But no, for the vast majority of the Ecclesiastes, the fate that was handed to them was death. And the death of their family. If they came forward willingly they would not need to witness the crimes against their sons and daughters. This was not enacted by the Chinese in power. They too were victims in a play for power that was impressive on a galactic scale, if not for the banality of the motivations: revenge.

Those who orchestrated the Final Crash were those who bartered in that which could not be quantified, tracked, or anticipated: anger, jealousy, hatred, and self loathing. These emotions were far more influential than any hitech crypto, genetically-targeted disease control, or a global-spanning predictive engine that collects, analyzes, and predicts the actions of nearly every sentient being on the Earth.

These pitiful individuals were everywhere. The system had done a very good job of manufacturing such loathsome creatures. The most powerful among them, held seats on the Ecclesian council. Others had been removed from the council, and even more who never had a chance of attaining a seat. Together, but independently, they each planned for the exact scenario that China kicked off, which would allow them to finally achieve control over those amongst the powerful who had held them back for so long.

They would not be ignored anymore. Their system for control would finally have its chance to prove itself. There would be no more pacifying the masses and trying to make everybody happy — especially when the data proved that human independence and equilibrium could never be achieved. There would be no more considering a plurality of opinions that only created uncertainty for everybody and the opportunity for anarchists to take even more control away and to create chaos in the process. This new model for global power would be stable in its simplicity. Its security would be so perfect that it could not be undone because their simulations explored every possibility for revolt and stopped them long before they happened. The Final Crash would be the womb that birthed the reign of the most powerful few, and even the historians could agree on this fact.

UP NEXT

How could this hyper-dystopian event not have been anticipated and prevented by the masses? Surely, humanity could agree on a better way and it’s true: there are an infinite number of paths forward to the year 2084. The next article, The Final Crash #6: The Path To Paradisia is coming soon.

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