On SNL, Elon Musk joked that Dogecoin was a hustle. This was followed a couple days later, as reported on Bloomberg, that Mr. Musk tweeted Tesla would no longer accept the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as payment for his cars. He cited green energy issues. This sent the prices of Bitcoin tumbling.

Following all this, the Economist had a piece on the idea of central banks issuing digital money and if banks could survive. The piece noted that in October 2020 the central bank of the Bahamas became the first group to issue a digital currency. China has since followed with the e-yuan. Other central banks are now looking into the idea.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has had a dual mandate [price stability (i.e., the rate of inflation) and maximum sustainable employment] for a long time. They do this through the control of monetary flows through the various areas of the economy. This is not the same throughout the world with other central banks. But could this change with digital currencies? Digital currencies allow for greater control features not part of the current fiat money supply.

So, What Happened?

As the First Age of Humanity continued to unfold, cryptocurrencies kept having issues. There were problems with the mining aspects from how block chains worked. An ever-increasing number of anti-trust lawsuits were launched by miners against other miners, to increasing social concerns over power and resource consumption. There was also the ever-increasing pressure by the SEC against various U.S. entities launching cryptocurrencies in violation of trade and security acts. Then came a big Federal crackdown effort on cybercriminal activity involving not only general hacking, but also the use of cryptocurrencies for money laundering and other criminal activities. Arrests of crypto crimes were becoming news click bait as people became increasingly reluctant to use the digital currencies for trade. Then Wall Street became unwilling to deal with the space until the government developed greater oversight. This is when the ride stopped with the current known cryptocurrencies as the market collapsed.

It was at this point the U.S. federal government reasserted its authority under Section 31 U.S.C. 5103 and Title 18, Section 471 to issue any currency for trade, debt, and any obligation by creating its own digital version of the US dollar. It then relegated the remaining cryptocurrencies to a variant of tradable security like stocks, bonds, and futures. These moves reassured Wall Street allowing the reopening of trading in the cryptocurrency space, but in doing so subjected the transfers to greater scrutiny. Such as removing off book transactions, the public announcement of certain transactions by insiders, and subjecting domestic cryptocurrency exchanges to the same rules as all other security exchanges.

The Digital USD Technology

The adoption of a digital USD, or d-USD, caused a consolidation of the US banking industry. Left were shadow bankers, investment bankers, credit unions, and saving & loans associations. Gone were retail bankers, commercial bankers, and cooperative bankers. The accounts from lost banks were redistributed and merged into either the remaining bankers or under the new division of the Federal Reserve handling the d-USD working with the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department and Small Business Administration.

The US Treasury continued to print coin denominations but discontinued the printing of paper bills. Except now all coins had Nano-chips imbedded in them, making them digital and traceable.

By Rosella’s time, d-USD transactions were tracked through an A.I. reinforced Byzantine consensus mechanism instead of older block chain technology. People kept all their d-USD transactions online in a “g-wallet” maintained by the Federal Reserve. The “g” isn’t for government but is for gene. This is because it granted access through a gene scan from a person’s finger. Some people employed a second layer of security using a “key chip”. Key chips could be imbedded in the hand or kept in something physical, like a card. They used a special form of algorithmic encryption that required both parties to know the formula. Each key chip formula is unique and registered with the g-wallet that there is one.

A g-wallet ties in all aspects of the finances of a person into one digital location allowing individuals to get loans, buy stocks, or conduct any wide range of financial transactions. The downside was the government now monitors all transactions.

Cord Cutters & Criminals

There are hold outs who’ve cut the cord from digital money. This is common for poorer or remote areas of the United States. It’s also found in the communities of Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon, and parts of San Francisco, California. These areas have returned to basic bartering or use of any precious commodity, like jewels or gold for trade.

Many criminals have also moved to physical gold and silver for transactions finding it has a lower digital footprint. More clever criminals have multiple fake g-wallets using 3-D printed DNA fingers to do money laundering. These criminals act as the go between for transacting gold and silver for goods and weapons then passing the metals on to other people for d-USD. Allowing them to purchase more supplies for gangs.

Local, State and Federal law enforcement are constantly investigating links between the cord cutting communities and the criminal networks. In Seattle and Portland there are street protests, even in Rosella’s time, by those who support the people’s right to barter and not deal in the new digital currencies.

The Rest of the World

As for the rest of the world, by Rosella’s time you see other central banks with digital currencies and government monitored digital wallets. Some places removed all their banks while others kept private banking systems in place. With the digitization of currency came a precise control over the economy by nation states that rivaled all previous control measures. For the first time nation states could stop certain sales of products because of illegal activity or safety issues with the push of a button. But it also made central banks an increasing target for cyberwarfare and espionage creating a security tech race among the nations. This alone helped to power the increasing development of more powerful A.I. systems for both defense and attack.

On March 29, 2021, Gallup reported that church membership in 2020 fell below 50% for U.S. adults.

By the Second Age of Humanity, this decline continued until it hovered around 15 to 20%. This was despite years of attempts to lure generations back into the pews.

With the changes in the 501(c)3 laws allowing religions to actively participate in the political process in the U.S., we see the decline in religious membership stabilize to it's 15 to 20% level.

The View on Death

Those following religious beliefs were given a sense of immortality rooted in an afterlife. Usually, the religion or belief attached the outcome of this afterlife to a set of morals.

For Rosella, she professes no religious belief. She sees the universe, like many, in the light of the standard scientific model of the time, and socially accepted ethics.

In Rosella’s line of work, she’s seen death. Her world view gives her a concept of death that when you die nothing happens except the body decays as a piece of meat.

Burial of the Dead

Each religious community had its own form of burial ritual common to their faith. This even includes those faith groups who see the androids as living, with some burying the “dead” androids in coffins in cemeteries. It would not be uncommon for Pattyroller agents, working for the leasing groups, to be seen late at night digging up these “dead” androids to recover the leased property.

Rosella loved her father so much that she wanted to give him a burial. She wasn’t able due circumstances of her being in the Ranger Marshals, and the speed at which the medical examiner processed her father’s body. This desire for a burial happens with individuals who are strongly attached to their loved ones.

Even with cemeteries present, there are many who don’t even bother and walk away from their loved ones. Leaving them for the state to dispose of their body. This may seem incomprehensible, but a cultural belief of the dead body has no meaning and is no longer your loved one has become a norm. The view held is your loved one is only your loved one while alive. But if dead, they are no longer who they were. They’ve become meat.

This view of death being nothing more than bodies becoming decaying meat has resulted in people pursuing ways to avoid this end. This has translated into pushing genetics into causing humans to living longer, curing diseases, or building technologies to avoid certain environmental issues.

In the parts of society where death is more of a daily reality, these people still hold the general view that death results in a person is only a piece of meat. As mentioned with Rosella, if a person has an emotional attachment to the individual, only then will they try to seek a burial ritual.

Cannibalism of the Dead

Since the Great Melt and losing large meat animal husbandry, fresh meat supplies have dwindled. On outlier Social Media Net shows there are stories that the rich have used fresh corpses as sources of meat. These stories are nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors and hearsay. The reality is closer to the fact the rich can afford 3-D printed steaks, and other similar cuts of meat. From sources grown in orbital stations dedicated to supplying food to Mars.

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Note To The Readers- The term Pattyroller is not to glorify this job. Or make it akin to Decker in PKD’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep“. And my use of it is not equal to that of the horrible brutalities inflicted upon those who these “bounty hunters” retrieved in the past (see below). It is to bring to light a historical word in a similar context to allow the reader to explore the true meaning. Androids are nothing more than property in Rosella’s world. Property that has emotions and can think, but is not alive by human standards. Androids are not even a close analog to a human slave, except in the sense of being property. Like a car or a house. Androids are the essence of how people saw those known as slaves. Not fully human, despite whatever legal document said of them. Something to ponder as we move forward technologically.

Pattyrollers- In the early days of android leasing, there were no Pattyrollers. Only your standard repo-men working for leasing agents. It wasn’t until androids had Emo-Ware installed did the Pattyroller come into existence. The problem was androids with Emo-Ware had a tendency to walk away from their work. The phrase Pattyroller resurfaced in the American lexicon during the Second Age of Humanity because of the level of cruelty these men used (and they were mostly men, typically unfit for mining on Mars). The word’s ​origin comes from a black slave descendent term used for the slave patrols, groups of licensed men who brutally hunted down escaped slaves. The name stuck despite its original meaning and became incorporated in many legal documents. Many states granting these men a host of rights, such as the ability to kill any person standing in their way to recover a bounty. Socially, many considered Pattyrollers scum and maladjusted.

To some in the early 21st Century, China is one of the most monitored and connected societies. As an example, during the COVID-19 pandemic they had developed phone apps as passes to gate people into certain areas depending on COVID-19 status.
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Some have suggested that when POTUS45 was removed from social media, that Big Tech was flexing its muscles that even the U.S. could become tech controlled like China.

Development of Smart Cities

It would be during the late First Age of Humanity that governments developed Smart Cities. By this point the Big Tech giants had long been broken up, but this didn’t stop the CEOs from cooperating together. It was during this time that Jon Greene’s family would make its fortunes in the wiring of road sensors and other infrastructure for smart car technology. His family corporation became the global leader in retrofitting entire cities and nations to smart roads for the new car technology. This period would become another Gilded Age.

But not all people were content with the developments of these Smart Cities. In the U.S., these protestors tried political unrest and to vote out politicians, but these tactics failed. These disgruntled city folks didn’t like how the courts were allowing the intrusion of data stealing corporations into their lives. In frustration, many fled the developing Smart Cities to the wild parts of America. To live like pioneers once more. Many of these would be wilderness settlers perished because of inadequate understanding of how to live off the land.

By the time of the Second Age of Humanity, the idea of Smart Cities with a woven web of interconnected infrastructure, like how human nerves run throughout the body, became a reality. Various computerized systems from dumb A.I. systems too more sophisticated A.I. systems were used to control everything. It kept the interconnected parts of the human world efficiently working, even with the ecological disasters going about it. So necessary was this infrastructure in the U.S. that even basic Wi-Fi couldn’t be turned off by the government because of a U.S. Supreme Court case granting Constitutional Net Privilege Rights. Only under extreme cases of acts of terrorism were exceptions allowed.

The Difference and The Price

​The big difference of Rosella’s World is humanity is not fully wired into this electronic network. The development of cybernetics to the point of full integration of the human mind into cyberspace ceased with the LA Cyber Riots. The LA Cyber Riots represented the tipping point where people realized that if things continued, a new super race was about to become a reality. Globally humanity turned its back against the idea of human-machine integration after that point. Humanity felt more comfortable with the control it had over artificial intelligence controlling parts of its world than wanting full integration.

All this integration came with a price. One’s privacy is surrendered to get a constant flow of data. For example, Rosella’s apartment toilet is an integrated smart toilet which monitors her health from her use. Many public and private toilets are this way by her time. They considered this a major medical advancement. Now real-time data could be fed into A.I. medical systems to alert a human doctor of any problem or medication change. Other real time health devices are available for individuals from implants, to integrated home systems, and to walk-up kiosks. Thanks to U.S. social changes in health care, integrating health data collection in a person’s everyday life was increased by Rosella’s time. No one felt their privacy was compromised because they were getting so many technological benefits in exchange.
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The exception were the Great Melt refugees put into ‘the stacks.’ They were cut off from any benefit but had to surrender their privacy for the wellbeing of society. Many were American citizens. Kept in camps made from cargo containers while the US government figured out what to do. By the time of many of the Rosella Tolfree stories, a second generation has already been born in the camps.

While America continued to adopt various socialist-like programs, it never fully became an absolutely communist utopia. Americans still prized individuality over the collective, and politicians were unwilling to uproot the U.S. Constitution based on identity politics. Politicians would amend the Constitution from time to time, but not fully change it into a new government. The current system served the parties well.

Set against the backdrop of increasing radical pressure to hold another Constitutional Convention, mainstream parties had to deal with these elements every election cycle. Despite having organized political parties initially, the American Marxist groups were by the mid-20th century a loose collection of identity politics, and intersectional theorists that used social media as a decentralized communication tool. They are more known for their leftist publications, which continue to operate even in the digital age.

By the Second Age of Humanity these groups were operating their own channels and shows pumping out their messages 24-7 to anyone willing to listen. In the Second Age, they still operated in a decentralized manner with no clear leadership. This made it difficult for local, state, and federal authorities to broker deals or even charge the leaders with racketeering or conspiracy.

Maeva Paquin

Around the end of the First Age to start of the Second Age, Maeva Paquin, a French Neo-Post-Modernist, came up with a new Marxist theory. She called it, “Oppresseurs Cycliques” or Cyclical Oppressors. Looking back through history, she noted how Lenin and other communists became oppressors in their society. This furthered the need for deconstruction and reanalysis of the intersections of the oppressed. Requiring the oppressed to revolt against these oppressors. If successful they would then become the oppressors themselves. Starting the cycle all over again.

Or as she called this cyclical reality, “utopie réalisée”, or perceived utopia. In that, each cycle would create a perceived utopia that would fall into a dystopian reality because of the creation of oppressive leadership.

Paquin noted the same was occurring with the African American subculture. As the new affirmative action amendment took effect in the U.S., the Race-Conflict approach was fading rapidly away now that a successful win had occurred. And African American personal perceptions were changing about well-being. The old victim arguments were no longer working because the people no longer saw themselves as a victim based on any historical legacy or natural racial category. Many saw the amendment as the final and end all corrective action needed socially because of the political messaging to get it passed and ratified. Opposition shut down attempts to say otherwise on social media or the news. While individual African Americans were not becoming “oppressive overlords” in American society, they were becoming like their historical white counterparts in larger numbers. More African Americans were being lifted out of poverty and out of the prison systems. Being moved into the higher income brackets. With all the social perks that come with those brackets. A perceived utopia.

But Paquin saw that in doing so it came at a dystopian cost for some. The uneven realities of the amendment created widening disparities between African Americans and the other races and ethnicities. Thus, the amendment was creating groups of oppressed people by her thinking. Repeating the original cycle of the past. Making the amendment a source of cyclical oppression.

By the early Second Age, with advance CRISPR, full genetic manipulation and fixing of human genomes became a reality. Paquin noted that people were skewing the concepts of race, gender, and sexual identity on a genetic level. They were removing some and mixing others. This made identity politics of any kind going forward increasingly difficult to argue. She predicted if the trend continued that a new oppressed group would need to be found if there was to be any hope for the movement.

The main counters to Paquin’s arguments was the lacking resolution to the cycle and getting what her critics called “absolute utopia”. A state of perfect and unchanging utopian existence. She would reject the absolute utopian theory as an impossible reality because of human nature. Other critics told her views on what oppression was and what it was not were skewed. She would dismiss this out of hand.

Paquin was correct in that by Rosella’s time all the labels of sexuality had faded away in society. People did whatever with whomever (there were still social norms and laws dealing with children and consent). The public celebration of unique sexual identities was no longer a norm. And as for race, people had blended in so much melanin genes to deal with the increase in ultraviolet radiation from global warming that many people looked similar in color. People became “color blind”. With the affirmative action amendment firmly in the past, nearly everyone excepted things as historically resolved.

The New Conflict Groups

It was during the development of the A-3 androids that Marxists groups in France latched onto a new under privileged group. They called themselves, “Société de la liberté robotique”. A French organization known by the initials SLR. Or in English, the Robotic Freedom Society. This group pushed for marriage rights, property rights, voting rights, wage earning rights, etc. for autonomous A.I. sentience. They see humans as oppressors. And these machines as the true humans. Many of the followers’ desire to become machines themselves. These followers see androids as slaves in the same context as historical human slavery. The counter arguments were that androids are machines. Programmed tools for humanity’s service. There’s no comparison to human slavery. Humans have dignity and a soul. Machines don’t.

Government anti-terrorist organizations saw the SLR as a bona fide threat. They believed that the SLR could reprogram A-3 and A-4 androids to become malicious against humans. They also believed that the group was responsible for the illegal trafficking of illicit cybernetic technologies.

The only other social group that was attempted to be organized in the United States were those who were displaced by the floods and New Madrid Traps. This included the native born and immigrants herded into the camps known as the Stacks. The Stacks were shipping containers turned into makeshift housing for the displaced by the federal government. But attempts to organize these people constantly broke down due to the level of support and oppression they suffered. While in the Stacks, the federal government ensured that they met their basic needs. Some could leave the Stacks to get employment in the surrounding communities. Overall, these people had become so discouraged with their position in society they lacked the will to fight back. They had become content with their bleak outcome.

Other Posts of Interest

Human Sexuality, Sex, and Genderism in Rosella’s Dystopian World
Important Legal Changes in the Dystopian U.S. of Rosella’s World
Important Legal Changes in the Dystopian U.S. of Rosella's World- Part 2 

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Image-"Workers of the world unite". By Hennie Stander, Source Unsplash, Unsplash License (Processed with Adobe Splash)

Recently the U.S. had its first Presidential Debate for 2020. Some are saying it was horrible. I didn’t catch much of it. What I saw, I didn’t like personally because it wasn’t your typical policy style debate. It was more of smackdown match. All what was missing was the caged Thunderdome. Which if you’re into that, I suppose that’s fine? But that’s technically not debate. It’s a street brawl.

By the Second Age of Humanity, and the creation of the Social Media Net, an organized candidate debate had disappeared from the American political culture.

This is primarily because the Social Media Net has millions of channels and show options. Think about YouTube and Twitter having a baby that’s fed steroids. This is the Social Media Net. It crowded out traditional news networks that would carry such events. The same happened to sports and movies. With so much diversity available for people to consume, this thinned out the eyeballs per channel and show. Competition went through the roof.

In the prior age, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) was put in charge of licensing the operators in the U.S. of such broadcast mediums as Twitch. This was because of an increased need to regulate issues around copyright abuses. This licensing continued with the development of the Social Media Net and helped to speed up its development. Because of the licensing technique used by the FCC was like Amateur Radio Service (ham) licensing versus normal broadcasting, access to individuals and small businesses was far easier. Allowing for a flood of new operators and business models. The FCC also blocked many mergers to encourage competition. This prevented larger mainstream media from buying up smaller operators. The FCC rules also regulated the maximum number of channels any single network could own. All these factors made for a robust plethora of content. But discouraged centralized broadcasted events, like a Presidential debate.

Without having such events, the grip of the two-party system slipped. Increasingly, the smaller parties were using the Social Media Net’s niche channels to gather party strength in regions. These echo chambers reinforced these smaller parties’ messages.

Organizations did many legal attempts to shut down both hate group channels and “radical leftist” channels. All these attempts failed because of support of free speech for the channel by the courts. And with the growing shattering of the two-party system, the ability to culturally control the narrative in America faded.

What it leaves us with by Rosella’s time is an America filled with diametrically opposed sides, and everything in between. And no one group completely controlling the conversation. It’s one social free-for-all, with violence as the ultimate solution for many. And a government trying its best to control the situation in a flooded world. All the while, corporations are reaching for space.

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Image- ​AR District UPCI District Rally, By Geron Dison, Source Unsplash, Unsplash License (Processed with Adobe Spark)