Time Travel

Yes, really

I’m going to show you how you can time travel. You can learn how to do this today.

But first let’s talk about why you might want to.

When I look at the direction of the modern western world I’m conflicted. There’s so much potential to make positive changes that will improve the standard of life for the vast majority of people. I see this in our understanding of the world around us and in the innovations we make in technology and all it’s applications. What troubles me is that I have nagging feeling that those people we have in power - and I’m not sure it matters where really, with some exceptions - aren’t interested in using our current knowledge and capabilities to make the world better.

Now if I’d just read that paragraph as a reader, not the author, my response would be ‘duh, obviously. They just look after themselves’. I believe that’s true. Most politicians, elected or not, are very flawed human beings, or become that way after a period. Unfortunately I think we’re on the precipice of a leap in what’s possible in terms of how technology effects our daily lives, that will give these flawed individuals the potential for control over the populace that even the best of them won’t be able to resist.

You do not need to fashion yourself a tin foil hat for this. You can be completely practical.

Imagine you’re trying to run a country. The populous push and pull against each other, hurt one another and participate in all sorts of unhelpful activities that make their own and those around them lives worse - better sometimes too of course. So there you find yourself in this position of power, elected by them and constantly critiqued for what a terrible job you’re doing. This is a hard job.

This gaggle of inconveniently free willed individuals need money to go about their business, but they constantly use it in ways that are misguided, logically, or just in your opinion. Then a technology becomes available that allows money to programmable because it’s digital and uses a blockchain. Now I know some of you readers won’t be crypto people so I won’t take the piss here, next couple of paragraphs are just a simple explanation of what something called a Central Bank Digital Currency or CBDC is. Ring any bells? Your stoner mate has probably mentioned them.

Imagine that the banking app you very likely have on your phone is a slightly more advanced version, that not only has you bank account with its record of your purchases as it does now, but also has your health tracking data that your phone or watch currently collects. It’s connected to your phones location services so it knows when you’re using public transport or driving. It has all of your loans and credit scores via open banking. Because it uses facial recognition and other biometric style ID, you’re able to use it as a passport and of course your health records and vaccination status will be available. Now go one step further and imagine that your interactions online, social media history, searches etc are all connected too. Reading through this you’ll note that you’re already used to 90% of this stuff being recorded or available to people other than yourselves, but currently they’re separate in various apps generally controlled by businesses. Also note that this is all pretty convenient sometimes.

So now combine them into one and call it something that sounds harmless, but that you’re required to have legally to go about your daily life free of restriction.

Now fill it with a form of money that to the user will seem no different at all. After all few people still use cash, so we think of money as a number on a screen. However this money is programmable, in that it’s capable of interacting with the outside world in defined ways. So the same digital pound when I have it my wallet, will be usable in a different way to when it’s in your wallet.

So lets define the kind of prescribed parameters that we could see.

Imagine I have a weight issue that my country’s medical experts have decided is beyond national acceptable standards for health. I head to the supermarket and attempt to do my normal shopping only to find at the the checkout that when I go to buy my beloved Krispy Kremes I receive a notification that I’ve gone beyond my quota for foods with a red nutrition score and that I should make a different choice. My money will not pay for what I want to buy. I’m also embarrassed in public and don’t want to go through that again.

I go to buy petrol and receive a notification when I attempt to pay that I’m over my car travel allowance for this month and so cannot buy any more petrol. Or perhaps I am able to override this by paying an additional carbon tax to offset the damage I’m doing to the environment. The other people in the garage can see what happened and sneer at me when I pay the extra to drive more, as does the hippy looking girl behind the counter who was previously flirty, the gold digger next to her give me the eyes - I must have a good income to afford extra travel.

Maybe I check my balance and see that I have less than I thought. I scroll through the transactions and see that I’ve received deductions. One is a small fine for travelling by car too many times outside of my ‘15 minute town’ boundary and the other is for a combination of unacceptable online behaviour. Apparently my search history is suspect and I offended someone on Facebook. The money will revert to my account if I delete my posts.

The point of the above examples is to show that all of that and more is possible with programmable money in a fully connected system. The parameters can be individual as above, or national - maybe the government has decided we must all drink less alcohol, or international - maybe the WHO has decided we must all eat less meat.

You get the idea. Now perhaps this is all for the best, perhaps our elected governments and unelected international organisations are the rightful arbiters of how we live our lives. But I don’t believe so. I’m sovereign and bar encroaching on others, want to live my life as I see fit. And so I come back to my point about the general public being a nightmare to govern.

I think it would be incredibility naive to believe our governments will be able to resist the temptation to govern through nudging - hit your insect protein intake and receive 10% increase in your petrol quota, and restriction - you cannot leave the country without vaccines, than by consensus. Why would you bother to persuade people anymore? You can point to your experts, incentivise them to say what you need them to, implement your policy and ‘other’ the dissenters. At a purely practical level, this is the most efficient way to run a country. Combine government with big business and you control the customer, you no longer have to sell to people, you can just provide for the needs you tell them they have.

So, time travel.

Sorry to be a misery, but on a long enough timescale, I think the above is inevitable. Bar something epic, it will eventually come to every country in the world. It will not be a smooth process. Perhaps it will be at first, but in a change to the classic boiling frog where the frog dies, this frog will realise it’s trapped and kick off in a big way. That will be nasty and you may not want your loved ones, or you for that matter, here for it. All of the above will come to the most modern western countries first. The countries in 2023.

I find myself thinking wistfully about the world I grew up in and how even though I have many things now I didn’t then, like smartphones and the internet, I didn’t have the sense of impending dread I have now that the world is moving under my feet in a direction I don’t want and have no control over. It’s able to do that in part by the existence of infrastructure, technology and cultural norms in my modern western county.

So I look around the world and search for places that are moving in a modern direction, but are further back on the development of infrastructure and modern western cultural normalisation than mine. These countries are perfectly liveable and moving where my country is going, but are effectively in my country’s past. They are my country 10-20 years ago and may still have time to change course or optimise. They are a chance to stand freely on the sidelines a bit longer.

There are plenty to choose from, enough to tailor to your own lifestyle needs. It requires a change of mindset about your country and what it means to be a citizen there. Something those of us who have served often find very uncomfortable. Your taxes are a subscription to the services provided in that country. I am not against taxes, we must all contribute. But I am against my contributions being squandered or used to enable changes I don’t believe in. I’ll even give you a sizeable tax contribution without complaint for the country to get better, but look around you and be honest, is your country in the ascendance or the decline?

So I suggest that it’s possible for us to regain the life we want by taking responsibility -as always - and choosing to exit, to time travel back to a place further from the event horizon of this technocratic dystopia that our leaders cannot resit.

Get the map out, get the DeLorean up to 88 and I’ll see you in the past!

Gaz

-You Are Your Actions-