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.
Aside from mass shootings making a comeback, March 2021 might have seemed like a return to a calmer state of affairs. Don’t let your guard down though, because plenty of timeline-darkening events/stories happened. Shout-out to Amazon, which usually manages to nab a spot on each monthly list, but outdid itself this time.
Without further ado:
March’s dystopian developments:
- A poor infrastructure report card. Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives a report card on the nation’s infrastructure. Overall, 2021’s C- grade is a step up from 2017’s D- grade. Nice? But a more ominous part of the report card: dams and levees got a D grade, even as flooding continues to worsen.
- Ancient plants discovered a mile deep into Greenland. The latest research adds evidence to the up-and-coming theory that most of Greenland was ice-free and covered with plant life within relatively recent geological history. The troubling implication of this is that, in other warming periods, Greenland likely shed its ice completely. And if we were, hypothetically, in another significant warming period, that could hold true again, posing risks for basically all coastal cities.
- Government forecasters say half the US is in drought conditions. It’s the worst spring drought in the country since…just seven years ago. It’s expected to get worse the next three months before it gets better.
- Teen self-harm rates skyrocket. An analysis of over 32 billion private health insurance records from January to November 2020 revealed an enormous increase in teenage self-harm claims compared to the same time range in 2019.
- Claims for intentional self-harm among teens, as a percentage of all claims filed for that age group, rose 99.8%. Meaning, it doubled.
- In the US Northeast, there was a 333.9% increase in teen self-harm claims as a percent of all medical claims.
- Claims related to overdoses spiked among the age group as well—up 119% in April 2020 from April 2019.
- Navy says drones could comprise 40% of aircraft carriers’ air wings. In a twisted sense, you could argue this is a good thing: more drones, for now, means less troops, and less conflict deaths overall. But these hypothetical Navy fleets, described to Congress by an Admiral, are part of a grim future in which substantial parts of war are automated, and killing becomes little more than a video game.
- Kentucky’s senate passes bill criminalizing “insulting” police. Packed in with increased punishments for rioting is punishment for being offensive. From USA Today:
- “Though Sen. Carroll said ‘insulting an officer is not going to cause anyone to go to jail,’ his bill states a person is guilty of disorderly conduct – a Class B misdemeanor with a penalty of up to 90 days imprisonment – if he or she ‘accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.'”
- Florida cops sued for predictive policing program. To be clear, the lawsuit against Pasco County is a good thing. But the context is horrendous, if (sadly) nothing new. Predictive policing is used by many, if not most, major police departments. From the Tampa Bay Times‘ in-depth report on Pasco County’s predictive policing:
- “First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.”
- “Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.“
- “One former deputy described the directive like this: ‘Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.'”
- Facebook introduces its AR bracelet. Wear the bracelet, and you can type away on an AR (augmented reality) keyboard. No need for hardware. But how does the bracelet know what you mean to type? By reading your brain, of course.
- Facebook announces a forthcoming Instagram for kids. Nominally, Instagram doesn’t allow those under 13 to make accounts. But executives have decided that getting the kids on board is now a “priority,” and now we wait for Facebook to make a ‘kid-friendly’ version of an app that is bound to destroy developing brains.
- Microsoft wins army contract. The contract? $21.88 billion in exchange for delivering 120,000 AR headsets, to give soldiers “enhanced situational awareness.”
Spotlight: Amazon time
Months like these make me wonder if this blog could even exist without Amazon. (It could, but damn if Amazon doesn’t make these posts infinitely easier.)
- Amazon refuses to sell the ebooks it publishes to US libraries, making it the only major publisher to do so. Not content gobbling up every private-sector competitor, Amazon is apparently losing its patience with the concept of a public library.
- Amazon expands its warehouse ‘gamification’ program to 20 states. Employees that participate can get digital rewards for their level of efficiency in the warehouse. The program has been around since 2019, but until now it was on a smaller scale.
- From The Verge: “Many of the games tend to be simple virtual representations of how fast the worker is completing a task. One, called MissionRacer, moves a car around a track while a picking employee sorts products into appropriate boxes, as reported by The Washington Post at the time.“
- Yes, some Amazon workers do have to pee in bottles. After recent tweets by the company scoffed at reports of workers peeing in bottles as myth, The Intercept obtained documents proving that the practice is widespread among employees—and that management is well-aware.
- A normal ‘consent’ form for delivery drivers. AI-equipped cameras will be placed in delivery vans. They’ll be on all the time, watching for when drivers yawn or just look distracted. If drivers don’t sign the consent forms, they’re out of a job.
- In last month’s round-up, I noted that Amazon was partnering with a surveillance company to monitor its drivers. I expected to not hear about it again for months. Let this be a lesson to all of us: these things move fast.
- From Business Insider, on an employee who recently quit over this: “First there was an app tracking his route. Then the company wanted pictures of him at the beginning of each shift on another app. But the breaking point came, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, when Amazon announced it would be installing AI cameras in its fleet of vehicles.”
At the time of this writing, votes are being counted in Bessemer, Alabama. Depending on the result, nearly 6,000 employees at a major fulfillment center could become the first union of Amazon workers in the US. It would be one of the biggest labor victories in the private sector (and the South) in decades, and would likely kick-start a wave of union drives across the country. Let’s hope for the best.
The not-so-bad and the …good?
Can’t appreciate fully appreciate the bad news without hearing some good news too. And besides, it’s good for you. Eat your vegetables:
- New child tax credit kicks in. Sounds boring, but it’s probably one of the best federal actions taken of late. The latest round of stimulus expands both the amount of child tax credits and eligibility: the result is that millions of the poorest families will effectively get a form of basic income.
- The hope is that this will halve child poverty. Much as we might desire that outcome, we should be skeptical of fawning coverage like this NPR article, or this Washington Post piece.
- Biden nominates an antitrust advocate for Federal Trade Commission seat. I won’t give too much credit until I see strong action first. But for now at least, Lina Khan’s appointment is promising: she’s a prominent legal scholar who has focused primarily on the legal justification for the breakup and regulation of tech monopolies. The FTC is not all-powerful, but it’s far from powerless.
Good reads from March
- The New Republic: Why Are Troops Leading the Vaccination Effort?
- Don’t mistake the author’s point here; it’s not an argument against having troops lead the vaccination effort. The issue is that civilian government is hollowed out, and the military is the only thing that never lacks funds, resulting in the need for it to step in for basic governance.
- Naked Capitalism: Need Amid Plenty: Richest US Counties Are Overwhelmed by Surge in Child Hunger.
- As the title says.
- The New Yorker: What Happens When Investment Firms Acquire Trailer Parks.
- If you want to feel truly disgusted, read about private equity companies buying up trailer parks and jacking up rents for some of the poorest people in the country.
- Jacobin: Walmart’s Company Town of Bentonville, Arkansas.
- Subheading: “Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to Walmart’s headquarters. It’s also a town in which the Walton Family Foundation works like a parallel state, creating a kind of twenty-first-century company town.”
And that’s March. ‘Til next time.