In a world dominated by fewer than one thousand billionaires, can mankind resist their all-encompassing stranglehold or be distracted until it is too late?
No technology can exist in a vacuum absent of agendas. After all, technology itself is driven by agendas, from striving to achieve greater comfort and production efficiency to conquest and control. The latter tends to create its own arms race in which technology is then created to resist control.
This is what brought Bitcoin into being, following the 2007–2008 Financial Crisis, bank bailouts, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is no understatement to say that decentralized cryptocurrency represents the counter to historical power imbalance. Prior to modernity, it had been held in the hands of kings and warlords. Now, central banks controlling money supply pose as the only truly sovereign entities.
However, despite DeFi and cryptocurrencies gaining traction, central banks still hold all the power. If they can pump trillions to fund governments, they have effectively infinite money to pump a financial price of any asset — including cryptocurrencies and blockchain-derived projects. In turn, governments can regulate specific DeFi platforms out of existence if there is no off and on-ramp to pay for services needed for life.
Most importantly, if central bankers and power-hungry billionaires stem from the same exclusive social circles, is there really anything to stop them from enacting their will?
20 years from now
After people have relinquished their basic liberties under the pandemic framework in the early 2020s, centralized power has never been more entrenched and wider in scope. Vaccine passports had walled off social participation and economic activity. Never-ending “strains” of a virus with a 0.02%–0.6% (only for age groups close to avg. life expectancy) mortality rate, had been greatly leveraged to completely re-engineer society.
- The emotional and economic pain of lockdowns had been dangled in front of people to trade in for digital vaccine passports.
- Lockdowns had eventually triggered runaway hyperinflation, wiping out most of the wealth from the regular citizenry, transferring trillions from the working class to the billionaire class.
- As saviors for the economic hell they created, governments started issuing CBDCs — Central Bank Digital Currencies — tied to vaccine passports and online behavior.
- Mask-wearing had become the global norm, inducing further atomization and social debilitation, shunting off large portions of the brain responsible for facial recognition. Children — those least likely to even notice “C-19 variants” — suffered the most as their healthy psychological development had been crippled.
In 2040, vaccine passports had long outgrown their initially purported use. They graduated to carbon footprint passports and then to internet access and online behavior passports in order to combat “misinformation”. This is now all combined within the Citizen ID (CID) app, the core tool for access, sustenance, and control.
CID evolved into a master tracking app, containing blockchain records of health, social and financial activity. Of course, CID also serves as a digital wallet for CBDC tokens.
With CID evolved, the need for banks to exist had long ceased. CID wallets contain advanced robo-advisors, informing people how to best utilize their CBDCs in accordance with the new world order.
Evolution of lockdowns
Likewise, pandemic lockdowns evolved into intermittent climate change lockdowns, whenever the billionaire-funded expert class deems it so.
Commercial air travel had long been abandoned, as it was never of any use to the billionaire class. Those who had accrued sufficient Carbon Footprint Credit (CFC), in addition to their Beneficial Sociality Credit (BSC), could on occasion embark private jets to serve the global order. However, for the vast majority of humanity, travel is restricted to small, compartmentalized regions stacked with 5G sensors.
Although most residential areas are comprised of dilapidated shanty towns, the Internet of things (IoT) is in full swing. Under this total surveillance and access-mediation grid, one could receive further BSC if opting for subdermal CID microchips instead of the CID app on an external mobile device. As previously happened with the introduction of vaccine passports, the vast majority of people accept this new morsel of convenience to trade in for extra monthly CBDC tokens.
Trading tokens for perks
In such a completely cashless, tokenized economy, extra BSC and CFC could further be exchanged for CBDCs. In turn, one could lose BSC if deemed to have unsanctioned thoughts and expressions. This could even lead to the loss of allotted monthly CBDCs, which had become absolutely vital to access a wide range of services, from housing and utilities to food.
This is a digital, blockchain-based incentivization and control system conducted:
- The world’s billionaire class informs experts what is appropriate for people to think, eat and behave.
- The expert class implements these edicts by tokenized economy and AI bots tracking down unsanctioned behavior.
- The science behind dopamine-driven social media engagement is leveraged to make people seek ways to earn more tokens, creating subservient and pliable humanity.
Needless to say, one of the ways for people to earn more tokens is to spot and report those with unsavory thoughts. This creates a self-sustaining ideological hegemony, just as the ruling billionaire class envisioned.
Hyperreality as the new economy of the neo-feudal era
Mask-wearing had served as a pivotal part of submissive dehumanization, breaking social bonds and trust, inducing one to seek the refuge of solitary confinement and avoid social gatherings. In such a culture of remote work, shopping, and entertainment, much of life is unfolding in the digital space. After all, to earn CFC, one is incentivized not to travel.
With automation having rendered hundreds of millions jobless, many have become dependent on CBDC payouts. For them, permanent sterilization had become the quickest way to earn much CFC and BSC. Then, they could trade these credits for CBDC tokens. Inevitably, the bulk of this influx of tokens goes into virtual entertainment.
This spurred thriving gaming and virtual-lifestyle marketplaces, powered by blockchain smart contracts. They provide people with virtual assets that otherwise couldn’t be bought — mansions, vehicles, planes, land plots, untethered social arenas, extravagant clothing — all that was extinguished from the real world in the eternal battle against climate change.
These assets can then be used to construct one’s cyber persona, far removed from the bleak drudgery of residential shantytowns. This way, the ruling billionaire class maintains a mechanism to drain the will for potential rebellion. When violent skirmishes do occur, they are expediently crushed by military-grade robots. Culprits of these one-off incidents are portrayed as demented maniacs, if mentioned at all across tightly controlled media platforms.
50 years from now
With mass, incentivized sterilizations behind, thanks to the tokenized economy, BSC and CFC incentives, CID microchips, and hyperreality, the world’s population had been drastically reduced, almost half to what it is now.
Protein-insect paste, restricted travel, and compacted housing had further reduced humanity’s toll on the environment. Furthermore, much of history had been rewritten and deep-faked by AI bots to make hyperreality the only reality that truly matters. Such alignment would’ve put Edward Bernays to shame.
As a result, rivers and oceans have become to heal under the ever-watchful eyes of the ruling neo-feudal lords, safely ensconced in their palatial fortresses, guarded by their private mechanized armies. Stepping up from subdermal CID microchips, neural implants have been sufficiently perfected by the expert class. In conjunction with implanting false memories, it has never been easier to enact edicts that govern both the physical and digital realms.
100 years from now
Humanity had been reduced to under one billion. After much genetic experimentation, planetary neo-feudal lords had bioengineered and divided humanity into two classes of beings with distinct features:
- Enhanced successors of the rulers, bioengineered in artificial wombs and further cybernetically enhanced after birth. These humans either take the role of rulers or experts.
- Un-augmented humans, but bred for absolute obedience through generations of mRNA vaccine injections, often taking the role of palace servants, sex slaves, or test subjects.
With monetary and ethical concerns out of the way, the only arms race transpiring is now between the rulers of various planetary regions.
Biocybernetically enhanced lords of the planet seek life’s excitement in pitting their human cattle against each other. With the planet as their playground and the pretense of ethics and the “will of the people” long since extinguished, their imaginations and idiosyncratic desires are the only limits imposed on them.
(Editor’s note: This article and the corresponding NFT (NFT#192) were produced as a part of BeInCrypto’s Star Edition NFT Series. This exciting NFT series consists of nine pieces of digital art by Exquisite Workers, all of which will be auctioned off alongside letters written by industry professionals sharing their thoughts on the future of NFTs. More on that below.)
Introducing BeInCrypto Star Edition NFT#192
To celebrate its third year as a globally trusted blockchain and cryptocurrency news platform, BeInCrypto is launching a non-fungible token (NFT) charity auction in collaboration with Exquisite Workers. All proceeds generated from the auction will go to the Open Earth Foundation, a non-profit on a mission to leverage the latest trends in digital technology to help increase planetary resilience.
The Star Edition NFT Series includes nine pieces of digital art by Exquisite Workers. Each of these NFTs will be auctioned off alongside letters written by industry professionals sharting their thoughts on the future of NFTs.
POWER by Pavel Valseca is NFT#192 in the series.
Peerless, glossy, and simply impeccable colors by Mexican illustrator Pavel Valseca transport you through this unique NFT into the Hyperreality that BeInCrypto masterfully examines in their letter to the future that you cannot miss!
About Pavel Valseca
Pavel Valseca’s use of color is peerless, glossy, and simply impeccable. Graduated from the Mesoamerican University of Oaxaca, Pavel is a Mexican illustrator who has largely worked in the advertising, cinematography, and videogame industries creating the design of characters and environments.
Having explored various subjects on his way, he has a real soft spot for science fiction, terror, and fantasy that gracefully implements the human figure and nature mixed with technology and the supernatural.
Pavel has always loved to express himself through drawing, looking for inspiration in works of such classics as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Saturnino Herrán, and contemporary artists like Kim Jung Gi and Ryan Jia. Learning and improving his skills govern much of the beauty of his work. It is with this sharp eye for details, great sense of color, and passion for cosmos and outer worlds that Pavel creates the illustration for the BeInCrypto 3rd anniversary.