State of Dystopia: 2020

You are reading a State of Dystopia post. These entries deal with current events that put us on the cyberpunk dystopia timeline. Read them now to see the future we’re going towards. Or read them in the future to figure out where things went wrong.

This is admittedly a bit late; Jan 1st would have been better. We’re not even 3 weeks into 2021, and our collective attention has a new crisis to focus on. But that just makes it a better moment for pause: Before we panic about how bad the next 11 months might be, it might help to consider where 2020 left us.

Yes, we all know it was a bad year. Duh. Covid-19, economic fallout…we all know about that. And not just us cynical nerds: if there was ever a year when dystopia awareness hit a new height among ordinary people, it was 2020.

But 2020 didn’t push us forward on the dystopian timeline just because of the pandemic, or the economic crisis. It was the acceleration of a bunch of bad trends, prompted by those things.

Normally, I do monthly state of dystopia posts. For consistency’s sake, the first section of this post will be a brief recap of December 2020 specifically.

Then, a recap of events that happened in 2020 that contributed to our dystopian timeline. This will be organized thematically, rather than chronologically, along the traditional cyberpunk axes. Note that I have a longer list with similar organization covering the last 3 years; it’s aptly titled “the Big List.”

This is a U.S.-centric list, and it should go without saying that not every single thing bad thing that happened in 2020 is captured. It should get the big things, however, and if you think something important is missing, feel free to let me know.

Otherwise…

Dystopia in December:

• Water futures can now be traded like other commodities. Highlighting concerns about scarcity, you can now hedge bets on water availability in California, the same way you can with oil or diamonds.
• France approves the use of enhanced soldiers. Nothing to worry about! The French military ethics committee that gave the OK has prohibited modifications that affect soldiers’ free will.
• Japan invests in AI matchmaking to combat loneliness. It makes a lot of sense: the country has a loneliness crisis, and falling birthrates. One solution? Have the federal government provide funding for the regional governments to better-run dating services. Half those regional governments already run dating services anyway.
  • You could argue this isn’t necessarily dystopian. I disagree: the issue isn’t the AI matchmaking itself, but that it’s necessary to fill the gap in the first place.
• UN warns 207 million people could slip into extreme poverty. According to the UN’s report, an additional 207 million people slipping into extreme poverty from the pandemic would bring the total number of people living in extreme poverty to 1 billion by 2030.
  • That’s the extreme scenario posited. It’s not inevitable, if governments act.

Okay, let’s move on to a larger view of the year as a whole. As stated, this is organized thematically.

An increasingly feudalistic economy

• As of December, U.S. billionaires had increased their collective net worth by $1 trillion.
  • As Inequality.org points out, that $1 trillion gain is more than it would cost to send a $3,000 check to every single American.
  • The bottom half of the population holds $2.1 trillion together. U.S. billionaires alone, the tiniest slice of the top 1%, hold $4 trillion.
• Job losses and long-term unemployment are concentrated among lower-income workers. Lower-income workers were hardest hit by lay-offs, and have seen the least of our limited economic recovery.
  • This has happened while app-based delivery companies and Amazon began enormous hiring sprees for precarious gig work.
• Blackstone prepares to capitalize on another housing crisis. Blackstone was one of the biggest winners of the 2008 financial crisis, using it to expand its properties and become the biggest commercial landlord in the world. As a good analysis by Naked Capitalism points out, they are poised to do the same again now: buying up properties for dirt-cheap, and squeezing tenants with higher rents on properties that they’ll keep in substandard conditions.
• Big Tech cements gig work into Californian law. Proposition 22, a state ballot initiative, was pushed by rideshare and app delivery services to make them exempt from Californian legislation regulating gig work.
  • Rideshare and delivery app companies spent over $200 million supporting the proposition, the most spent on a CA prop by a significant margin, and compared to $20 million spent by the opposition.
  • They also used their apps to send notifications to drivers and riders, urging them to support the Prop.
    • ordinarily companies can’t tell their workers how to vote, but because these are gig workers, it’s legal for Uber to tell them to vote for what the company wants, via the app they rely on.
  • It prohibits unionizing, does not guarantee a minimum wage, and will require an enormous 7/8ths majority in the legislature to even be amended.
  • Human Rights Watch called it “a devastating blow to the rights of app-based workers.”
• The seeds of the ghost kitchen model. Ghost kitchens are basically restaurants designed solely for food delivery. The model is being pushed by app-based delivery companies: such restaurants would operate at a fraction of the cost as traditional restaurants, and given who is trying to start them, they would likely be controlled by tech companies and staffed by gig workers.
  • Uber founder Travis Kalanick has been working on a startup called CloudKitchens, and in late 2019, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested $400 million into it.
  • In October of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that entities linked to CloudKitchens had spent $130 million buying dozens of properties over the last two years.
  • DoorDash has DoorDash Kitchens.
  • Uber Eats uses app data to determine what’s in demand in a given area, and asks (now-struggling) restaurants if they would like to launch virtual/delivery-only restaurants.

Megacorps consolidate their grip

• Biden’s administration gets stacked with corporate insiders. For a more comprehensive overview of the nominees and transition personnel, see this section of my election post.
  • Secretary of Defense pick: A board member of Raytheon, one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the world, and the largest producer of guided missiles.
  • Secretary of State pick: Biden’s top foreign policy aide when he pushed for the Iraq War.
  • Secretary of Treasury pick: Has earned over $7 million in speaking fees at banks and tech companies.
  • Secretary of Agriculture pick: represented a trade group of big agriculture companies overseas.
  • Senior White House adviser: founded a lobbying firm that represented health insurance and drug companies.
  • Top White House economic adviser: an executive at the world’s largest private equity company.
  • The teams overseeing the presidential transition are also chock-full of corporate affiliations.
• Former director of the NSA joins Amazon’s board of directors.
  • Arguably, this is one of the most cyberpunk things to happen this year. Ed Snowden wasn’t pleased.
• SpaceX collaborates with the Pentagon.
  • The Pentagon awarded a $149 million contract to SpaceX to have the company build satellites that can track missiles.
  • The Pentagon also wants SpaceX’s help to transport cargo via rocket. Rather than taking several hours to get to the other side of the world by plane, supplies could be sent to troops in 30 minutes by blasting off into low-earth orbit and then re-entering the desired part of the world.
• Salesforce buys Slack. Salesforce’s CEO said the merger would “transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.”
• Verizon buys Tracfone. The company running the 2nd largest wireless telecommunications service in the US buys the largest prepaid provider.
• Nvidia buys Arm Holdings. A clear affront to fair competition, this could make Nvidia one of the mega tech companies of the future, with one analyst arguing they could become a trillion dollar company.
• Uber buys Postmates. The fourth largest food delivery service merges with the second-largest.
• Just Eat Takeaway buys Grubhub. Just Eat Takeaway is a European company, so the effect here may not be immediate. But hey, consolidation is consolidation.
• Intuit buys Credit Karma. A major case of consolidation in fintech.
• Morgan Stanley buys E-Trade. Ditto^. And the biggest acquisition by a Wall St. bank since the 2007-9 financial crisis.
• T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint wraps up. From 4 big wireless telecoms to 3.
• Blackstone buys Ancestry.com. Aforementioned private equity company–again, the world’s largest landlord–buys the largest geneology tracing company.
  • Note: Technically, they just bought a big majority stake.

Paving the way for a police state

• With work from home and virtual schooling, came…more “bossware” to monitor workers and facial-recognition-based proctors to monitor students.
• Facebook pitches “content control” features for its Slack rip-off. Facebook Workplace is a chat/collaboration tool for companies. An internal meeting at the company exhibited new features.
  • The presentation specifically highlighted that employers might find it useful to blacklist the word “unionize” from discussion.
  • Facebook Workplace is used by Walmart and Starbucks, among other large companies.
• Amazon-owned Whole Foods caught using a “heat map” to identify the locations most at-risk of unionizing. Not a literal heatmap, but still, a dedicated modeling system using over two dozen metrics.
• Amazon caught using a tool to monitor its drivers’ Facebook groups. Yes, including private Facebook groups. Check out Vice’s original reporting on the matter.
• Amazon introduces Amazon One: a pay-by-palm device for cashier-less Amazon Go grocery stores. You walk in, take the groceries you want, place your palm on the scanner to pay, and then walk out. Utopian stuff.
• Amazon tries to transition from smart home to smart neighborhood. From Amazon’s blog about the release of Sidewalk, a new network protocol:
  • “In the near future, we also see the potential to help customers get more from 900 MHz connections in their neighborhoods, creating a broad network among neighbors that can be used to extend connectivity all the way to your mailbox out at the street where a smart sensor lets you know exactly when your mail has been delivered, or to a water sensor that lets you know it’s time to water the garden in the backyard.”
• The FBI investigating Antifa as a domestic terror threat. What do you get when you combine very open-ended terrorism-related legal powers, with the investigation of a group that has no formal members? Nothing bad, I’m sure.
• Julian Assange’s extradition trial. Regardless of what you think of Assange, the charges brought against him by the Trump administration are objectively a threat to press freedom: they set a precedent allowing any journalist who sees sensitive information to be at risk of prison time.
• Clearview AI becomes known to the world. The company scraped billions of pictures from social media, fed it into an algorithm, and gave the facial recognition tech to anyone who wanted it—like thousands of police departments, ICE, and Walmart.

Civilizational catastrophe stuff!

• Trump administration overhauls the National Environmental Policy Act. The act is a foundation piece of environmental legislation that preceded the EPA.
  • In the words of one expert: “This may be the single biggest giveaway to polluters in the past 40 years.”
• Russia will arm its navy with hypersonic nukes. The announcement came in July. A successful test was announced on October 7th.
• For the last couple years, the U.S. has been sending nuclear-armed vessels near Chinese and Russian bases.
• Arctic begins releasing methane. Climate scientists believe global warming will cause ice to melt in the Arctic, releasing previously-stored methane. Methane has a significantly stronger warming effect than carbon, so this would contribute to a feedback loop of warming and emissions build-up. The outcomes of such a feedback loop are incredibly difficult to predict in climate models: it’s one of the more ominous wild cards in climate change.
• Arctic loses a near-record amount of ice. Don’t worry, it’s only the second-lowest point of ice in 40 years of record keeping. And the all-time high was a long time ago! (2012).
• Study finds Greenland lost a record amount of ice last year, 15% more than its previous record in 2012.
• Study finds Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals in the last 20 years. Despite covering just 0.01% of the ocean floor, reefs host 25% of all marine fish species.
• A record-setting Atlantic storm season. Tropical Storm Eta was the 28th named storm of this year, and it tied us with 2005’s record storm season, in terms of the number of named storms. Ultimately, we broke 2005’s record with a total of 30 named storms.

Viscerally dystopian things

• Inmates in El Paso paid $2 an hour to dispose of Covid-19 fatalities.
• California sees its largest fires on record…resulting in the Bay Area aping Blade Runner.
• CDC study from August finds…
  • 1 in 4 people aged 18-24 had seriously contemplated suicide within the last 30 days of taking the survey.
  • 21.7% of essential workers had seriously contemplated suicide within the last 30 days.
  • The prevalence of anxiety order symptoms was 3x that of a similar period in 2019. For depression? 4x.
  • Suicidal ideation went from 4.3% of all adults in 2018 to 10.7% of all adults this summer.
• Residents of Rio’s slums use apps to avoid open gun battles. Although Rio has “only” had an average of 14 shootings a day in 2020, down from an average of 20 a day in 2019, stray bullets are still a common danger. The solution? Apps that tell users where gunshots were last noted, using crowdsourced information.

Good and not-so-bad news

That’s right. Can’t leave without at least some positive notes. After all, if you prioritize accuracy, recognizing the good is key to understanding the bad.

• The U.S. and Russia appear poised to renew the New START treaty. This is their last remaining nuclear arms control treaty, as the others have expired.
• Record vaccine progress. Despite being overshadowed by catastrophe, the amount of time taken to 1) make the Covid-19 vaccines, and 2) test them for mass public use, is historic.
  • Some of the vaccines are mRNA vaccines–the first to be approved for public use. These hold a lot of potential for the future of medicine, and are a silver lining of sorts.
• A wave of action against Big Tech:
  • From a House panel recommending the breakup of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook;
  • To a Senate committee subpoenaing the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google;
  • To the Department of Justice formally suing Google on antitrust grounds, which was cosigned by nearly a dozen states;
  • To the UK issuing new competition rules tailored to the major tech companies;
  • Or to the EU, the largest biggest economy in the world by some measures, overhauling its digital regulations to protect fair market competition as well as enhance customer data use…
  • Yeah, there’s a lot of room for improvement, but it’s not nothing.
• Google-owned AlphaFold breaks a barrier in biology and AI. DeepMind’s deep learning system, AlphaFold, won a long-running contest in which participants try to better-understand protein structure. AlphaFold was able to predict the structure of proteins to within the width of an atom, in a vastly shorter time span than other methods.
  • The good: As one lifelong biologist put it, this opens up a whole new area of research. It may accelerate and birth new treatments for difficult diseases.
  • The bad: DeepMind is owned by Google, and Google has been investing heavily in healthcare, specifically with health-monitoring services. It wouldn’t be surprising if this led to a world in which Google becomes an enormous player in healthcare; providing not just treatments, but the “perfect” surveillance of them within a single platform.
• A bunch of climate commitments. Let me preempt you: no, these are probably not sufficient. They’re almost certainly going to be full of loopholes, and even if completely fulfilled, aren’t scaling back enough. But lowering emissions is a bottom-line priority for anyone who cares about the future, so it’s worth appreciating steps in the right direction.
  • Denmark, the EU’s largest oil producer, announced it would end all oil extraction by 2050.
  • The UK vows to cut greenhouse gas emissions 68% by 2030, based on 1990 levels.
  • The EU promises to cut GHG emissions 55% by 2030, based on 1990 levels.
  • Japan pledges to cut net GHG emissions to 0 by 2050.
  • China, the largest GHG emitter by a significant margin, pledges to cut emissions by at least 65% by 2060.
  • There were also quite a few corporate climate pledges (for example, Exxon Mobil’s). I’m already skeptical enough of all of the governmental ones above, so I decided to spare you the corporate side.
  • These are not listed here to give you a false sense of security, or justify complacency. These are listed here because, while they won’t be enough, they’re a solid start.

And that’s all for now, folks.

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