by Gerald Huff
“Places, please,” said AIStudio. “Five minutes to air.”
The countdown went smoothly and the red light on Camera 1 blinked on.
“Good morning, everyone!” said Megyn. “I’m Megyn Robbins and welcome to Morning Fresh. With me, as always, are my co-hosts Steve Brattle and Victor Langston.”
“Good morning, Megyn!” the men said simultaneously.
“We’ll get to our weather and traffic bots in a moment, but those human-operated vehicle lanes are clogged, as usual. Get yourself into a Waymo, people!”
Steve laughed and picked up the cue. “No kidding, Megyn. I swear I get half my work done in the back seat of a Waymo.”
“The miracles of modern technology,” said Victor. “Speaking of which, guess which Senator is trying to drive us right back to the dark ages?”
“Not again!” Megyn said, seeming genuinely shocked.
“Yes, our favorite Democrat Senator, Walter Scott, has introduced a bill that—get this—would raise the minimum wage, increase spending on handouts, and tax the people who actually earn their money and create all the jobs.”
“What’s it called, the Great Unemployment Act of 2038?” asked Steve.
“I don’t understand how people like Walter Scott keep getting elected,” added Megyn. “Can’t the good people of Taxachussets see that his policies are destroying America?”
“Well,” said Steve, “we’ve got a guest coming up who should be a real example to people like Senator Scott. He’s a young entrepreneur from Dallas who created an AI that uses satellite data to help energy companies find deep seams of coal without needing a lot of expensive geologists. Now there’s an example of someone working hard and succeeding. We’ll ask him if he’d rather be taking government handouts right after this, on the news channel that brings you the truth, and nothing but the truth.”
SAN FRANCISCO
“Good morning, Bay Area! You’re back with Calista Quinn-Jones here and the Bay Area’s only progressive internet call-in show. It’s a little chilly and overcast out there; don’t expect the highs to clear sixty-one today. Well, I’m sure you know what we’re going to be talking about. It’s all over the news. A new report came out today with absolutely shocking numbers on housing affordability in the Bay Area. Well, they would be shocking, if anyone was paying attention.
“According to this report from the Bay Area Living Wage Alliance, the median rent in the nine Bay counties has now reached a level where you need a salary of almost three hundred thousand to afford a place to live. And you know what that means? Only the executives and tech experts from down in Silicon Valley and Nano Basin can afford to live here. Everyone else is getting priced out of the market. What’s your experience? Give me a net call.
“Okay, we’ve got Talese on the line. What’s your story?”
“Hey, Calista, love your show, girl. My landlord just raised my rent to eight thousand a month! The couple next to me had to move out. At the open house this past Sunday, there were all these, sorry—don’t mean no disrespect—but these white tech dudes scoping it out, and some of them had bundles of cash in their hands. I swear to God and kid you not. They were offering six months’ rent prepaid, cash up front. It takes me a year and a half to make that much money, before any expenses!”
“I hear you, Talese. You’ve got these select few people lucky enough to get into some startup that makes it big and it’s like hitting the lottery. Do they have some skills? Sure, I guess they can program computers or DNA or whatever. But then they come into our neighborhoods with literally buckets of cash and drive out the working-class folks.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Calista. I’m going to have to move further out East, I guess, but then my commute is going to be murder.”
“Well, I know what we all can do, people. We need to vote for Deirdre Trellis for county supervisor because she is pro rent control. We can’t let this tech money flood our neighborhoods and jack up our rents. We can put a stop to it.
“Thanks for the call, Talese. Next up, Christina has something to say about the latest cutbacks in public education funding.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
AUSTIN - SEPTEMBER 28
Pam Townsend shuffled carefully across the broken concrete path leading to the pale-yellow clapboard house in Austin’s Montopolis neighborhood. She paused at the end of the walkway, then with great effort lifted herself and her bag of groceries up the three stairs to the porch, which was sagging somewhat to her right. A police drone passing by far overhead noted the lack of a medplant signal from the pedestrian, but gait analysis returned low probability of a threat so it flew on. Once she was safely inside the house with the door closed behind her Pam straightened up and kicked off the shoes designed to give her a pronounced limp. “JT! I’m back!”
“Coming!” called a voice from the back of the house. Pam put the milk, eggs, yogurt, and cheese in the fridge and tossed the bread on the counter. Her brother JT entered the kitchen and recoiled at the sight of her. He pointed to his face.
“Ah, sorry!” Pam peeled off the mask with its stringy gray hair and dropped it on the small dining table, revealing her twenty-seven-year-old face and blonde buzz-cut.
“I made some progress with RezMat while you were out,” said JT. “They’ve got damned good digital security but their contractors aren’t as careful. I think I may be able to find an unprotected internet tunnel that’s got broad enough access to download the RezMat operations database.”
“That’s great! We’ve probably still got a week or so more work on the manifesto based on how the drafts are going. Will that be enough time?”
He nodded. “Should be, I’ve got some promising leads.”
Pam smiled at him. Things were coming together. With the RezMat operations information and the manifesto complete, they’d be in position to execute the first set of attacks. It had been nearly nine months since she’d left her analyst position at the National Security Agency, disgusted by her discovery of widespread illegal surveillance and mass opinion manipulation via omnipresence. Practices the public thought had been stopped decades ago after Snowden and the 2016 election and the Facebook Cambridge Analytica mess. At first she considered going whistleblower, but she didn’t want to end up like Snowden, isolated in Russia until his untimely “accidental death” by Novichok nerve agent back in 2023.
Instead, she began to focus on the technology NSA was using and technology in society more broadly. The more she read from the anti-technology literature, the more convinced she became that tech was truly the root of society’s problems. While technology had definitely improved living standards, it was also increasingly being used as a tool of oppression. And people were themselves becoming slaves to tech, whether through omnipresence addiction or literally because AI programs told them exactly what to do.
When she started talking with her brother about these ideas she discovered that he shared her concerns. He was also worried about people delegating too much power and control to the machines. JT had first-hand experience with over-reliance on technology when he was in the Army during the Iran War. He told her harrowing stories about AIs mistakenly directing platoons into ambushes and autonomous drones and tracked vehicles killing their own troops in friendly fire incidents.
Together, they surfed the dark web and discovered hundreds of like-minded anti-technology activists. The message boards were full of anti-technology rhetoric and lots of arguments about what to do. But the siblings were frustrated by the lack of any planning for concrete action. Then two months ago they had been approached in a direct message by an activist who went by the name Ellul. Over the course of a dozen conversations, he had gained their trust and recruited Pam and JT to join his group, which had almost twenty current or ex-military and intelligence members. When they spoke by holochat he looked and sounded like an overweight white man in his late fifties.
In reality, Ellul was Tuan Pham, a fit thirty-eight-year-old Vietn
amese immigrant and U.S. Navy Commander based in Norfolk, Virginia. Like JT, he had seen the rapid development of autonomous weapons on the battlefield. But while JT was angry at the abdication of human decision making to inferior machines, Tuan was terrified of the Terminator scenario. He was certain that the machines would eventually surpass their keepers and decide humans weren’t worth the trouble to keep around. After trying in vain to change things from the inside, he decided to form a group to take direct action to stop the progression to more and more capable killer robots. He had a particular hatred for RezMat, the world’s leading robotics company.
Pham had named his group the Ludd Kaczynski Collective (LKC) after two infamous anti-technology zealots. Ned Ludd was the perhaps apocryphal leader of workers who smashed automated knitting machines in 1800s England. The Luddites were the first known protesters against technology automating away jobs. They were often derided for their short-sightedness, as the industrial age economy soon generated far more jobs for people. Economists even coined the phrase “Luddite Fallacy” for the belief that automation could ever lead to mass unemployment. That was when machines could only automate certain forms of physical labor. Over the last three decades, even as AI and robotics began to replace more and more cognitive and fine-motor-skill jobs, two-thirds of economists still thought the Luddites were and always would be wrong.
Ted Kaczynski was a brilliant mathematician born in 1942 and educated at Harvard and University of Michigan. In his late 20s he became disgusted by society and moved to a remote cabin in Montana to live a more natural and self-sufficient life. When developers started destroying the wild lands around his cabin he became angry and began sabotaging their projects. Kaczynski ultimately decided only a violent revolution would stop the technological destruction of nature and humanity. Over the course of nearly twenty years he created bombs that killed three people and injured twenty-three more, earning the nickname The Unabomber. When media published his manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, his brother recognized his style and ideas and Kaczynski was arrested. He died in prison in 2027 after writing more works that formed a canon for anti-technology activists.
While Ellul was particularly concerned about a robot takeover, he recruited others with a wide diversity of anti-technology beliefs, shaped from a variety of personal experiences. One of his earliest recruits was Miles O’Connell, known by his dark web alias Thoreau. Miles grew up in a wealthy family in Seattle but from his teenage years rebelled against anything and everything establishment. He joined a local anarchist group and participated in street demonstrations. Then in high school he started hacking computers and a mentor in the Puget Sound Anarchists spotted his talent and suggested Miles take a different path. “You’ve got skills, man. You could do way more damage from the inside than out on the streets.”
The anarchists hatched a plan. Miles “reformed” and followed a straight and narrow path: college, internships, corporate jobs. Then came the reward: a position as a systems and security specialist inside the FBI. He had access to all of the intel on his anarchist friends and saved their asses several times with advance notice of raids. Like Pam, he also came to realize that technology had become the primary weapon in the establishment’s oppression of the people. He was disgusted by the way the government, aided and abetted by the world’s largest corporations, used tech to suppress dissent and manipulate and distract the masses, all for the benefit of the oligarchs in the one percent.
Another recent recruit was Peter Cook, an ex-black-ops agent who went by the alias Othello. Born in Ohio into a military family, he followed his grandfather’s and mother’s footsteps into the Army where he was recruited to the Green Berets and eventually into the super-secret Delta Force. Despite more than fifty overseas deployments over the years, he had worked hard at being a devoted husband and doting father to his shy but brilliant daughter Bethany. But tragedy struck while he was on a deep cover mission in Iran.
Bethany, a junior in high school, had become severely addicted to omnipresence. She spent every waking minute obsessing about posting and life-streaming and following her friends and random lifestreams in OP. Then someone started a cruel campaign against her for reasons that were never determined. Blocked and shunned on OP, she silently spiraled into deep despair and one night jumped in front of a self-driving bus going fifty miles per hour. Peter was devastated. He became convinced that the technology that had possessed his daughter and twisted her mind was an insidious force at risk of entirely destroying human autonomy.
Everyone in the group believed that technology was driving vast economic inequality by rapidly substituting for human labor. Kimani Richards, an African-American woman with a masters in economics and twelve years of experience as a CIA global politics analyst was the most articulate proponent of this view. Using the name Artemis, she argued that the logic of shareholder capitalism made it inevitable that the owners of capital would automate the masses into a mindless horde of indentured servants, in a constant struggle for precarious work. The only thing that could awaken the working class, said Artemis, was a direct attack on the infrastructure and supply chains that made the automation possible.
To the members of the group, Ludd and Kaczynski perfectly represented their primary concerns about the impact of technology. Every day, with each new story of tech replacing people or being used to dehumanize and oppress them, the group became more convinced that a political solution was impossible, and that dramatic, violent action was required. And now they were a few weeks away from making their first strikes against RezMat, the company leading the way in human subjugation. And those would be just the opening salvos in a wider war against technology.
CHAPTER NINE
LOS ANGELES - SEPTEMBER 30
Jacob jumped out of the gray Waymo and strode briskly towards Harding’s tall iron gate. His teammate Lou Salerno exited a Lyft self-driving minibus with a few other workers and Jacob joined up with him. “Hey, Lou. How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain. Hey, Jacob, I heard from Cheryl last night about your dad. I’m so sorry, man.”
“Yeah, thanks. It’s been tough. It’s so fucking unfair, a guy like him, such a waste.” Lou didn’t really know what to say. The two men walked in silence for a minute.
“Say, how’s the back?” Lou finally asked.
“It’s fine. Those nanobots work like a charm. The medtech these days, just fucking amazing.”
“Tell me about it! My sister’s medplant detected early stage pancreatic cancer and one nanobot injection got rid of it. What, ten, fifteen years ago that shit was a death sentence.” They walked through the gate and Lou leaned in towards Jacob. “But did you hear about Ed?”
“Ed over in team six? I heard he got fired.”
“Damn right. He took a job working health care some nights. His medplant reported him for napping during his shift. He got one warning, then bam, second time the medplant caught him he was out on his ass.” Jacob glanced at his tattooed forearm where the small chip was embedded and wondered what else it might be reporting to his employer.
The two men reached the locker room, donned their dark blue jumpsuits and hardhats and headed to the check-in kiosk. There was a small crowd around the assignment screen and they heard voices raised in anger.
“They can’t do that!” shouted Cheryl Garner.
“What’s going on?” Jacob asked. Cheryl pointed at the display with the day’s work assignments. “Our team is gone! Done!”
“Cheryl, calm down. What are you talking about?” She jabbed her finger at the screen. “It says we’re fucking supposed to talk to an HR DeepAgent for outplacement!”
Jacob shook his head. “There’s got to be a mistake. I haven’t heard anything about this.” He gave Cheryl and the others a reassuring look, but he had a strong suspicion what was going on. He flicked through a few detail screens and they soon confirmed his worst fears. “Aw shit,” he said under his breath.
“What the fuck, Ja
cob?” said Lou, who was looking over his shoulder. “What is that thing?”
“It’s the RezWeld 5000,” Jacob said under his breath. He had known this day would come, but had no idea the tech would be ready for the difficult kind of work at Harding so soon. Lou poked at the screen and a demo video popped up. The logo for RezMat, the world’s largest robotics and internet equipment manufacturer, faded in and out and a tracked industrial robot appeared on the screen.
A cheerful male voice said, “This is the RezWeld 5000, RezMat’s fifth-generation welding robot. The RezWeld 5000 includes cameras, lidar, infrared, haptic, and X-ray sensors, and multiple welding tip kits. With its advanced sensors and specialized tractor treads, it can navigate any work area and can operate at extreme temperatures. It’s capable of laying down a bead from just a few millimeters wide up to three centimeters. It can create a razor straight line or an intricate pattern, and its articulated arms can reach just about any work surface. If your steel components have embedded chips, the RezWeld 5000 can run autonomously, following electronic work orders issued by your master AI build program. When resupplied by our automated carts, the RezWeld 5000 can create perfect welds to precise specifications, and do so three times faster than the most experienced human welders on a twenty-four seven schedule.”
Cheryl poked her finger into his chest now. “You knew about this, Jacob? You knew about this goddamn machine?” Over her shoulder, Jacob could see two techs in gray coveralls unboxing a set of 5000s.
“I’ve hit the limit on welfare, Jacob. Me and the girls, we’re going to be homeless!” The other welders crowded around him, shouting their own concerns.