Cultural Cyanide

The year is 2050. Men and women lay on couches smoking digital cigarettes. A polluted riverbank lies by the nearby neighborhood buildings. It used to only be the poor and black households back in the day, but now the riverbank pollutes the streams for everyone. A middle-aged mother of two stares at the windowsill. She wonders what happened to the same riverbank that she once swam in as a child. She wonders whether her children will have the same joy that she had.

No one works jobs anymore. Everyone stays in houses for less than a year before eventually turning homeless. If you’re lucky, you stay at a small apartment for five years instead of one. After that, you become a vagabond, left to the streets where hope is lost, shots are fired, and morality is just a term in the air.

The common schools are dead. The teachers have been replaced with AI chatbots, and the children are excited devils whose emotions have been distorted to the bubbly servant of an oil tycoon. And as those same bubbly smiles stare over the surface, a 50 year-old man stares into the distance. He can recall the days of sincerity, impassioned debates, trial and error, and a society that messily wanted something better but couldn’t get there. Now, he sits on a bench. His face is drooping, his dog is depressed, and the preschoolers and parents laugh at his traditional foolishness. As for the bench itself, it is no decent bench, let alone an average one. The wood is poisonous and breaks down with the slightest amount of weight, there are spikes that come as soon as another homeless druggie walks by, and the back of it will fall down as soon as anyone gets too comfortable. Even the benches are AI-generated by the worst of a deformed humanity.

The corporate mongrels stare over glass offices built by digital slaves. Each transaction is a deduction off a crying and angry soul somewhere overseas, somewhere that their cruel selves see as another gateway to increase B2B sales on the latest networking platform. All products are cheap heaps of plastic that decay into the Earth faster than an 8th-century European peasant. On that note, life expectancy has declined by a decade, as people eat contaminated foods and will get shot if a few bare-bone, blues-singing, blistered bastards dare protest. If you jump out the window and manage to survive, you’ll end up on the streets of the wealthier parts of town.

The streets are quieter than ever before. They do not ring of the quiet of bliss or of a Romanticist excursion. They ring of a hollow fascism, where babies cease to cry, children die before they reach adulthood, alcoholism is common among those who avoid brainwashing, and very few people make it out just fine.

If we return to the schools and their children, the AI chatbots do not ingrain their children with ingenuity. The children become consumers of the AI’s manufacturer, and they love the ease and efficiency of it. The parents love the lack of tension when an artificial recipe comes out. Their children will never cry, laugh, or complain. They are sterile, satisfied, and in a sinister solitude that extends for myriad horrors beyond Victorian imagination.

If we return to the same adults and those parents, they cheered it on. They were tired of the effort. So they gave up, searching for an easier solution. No longer are there breakthroughs from the promising college students. Instead, they smoke marijuana and stay in dormitories that have not been renovated since the 2010s.

If we return to the past, humanity was once vibrant. People opposed artificial intelligence, considering hollow consumption and easy solutions a facade for evils dealt in backrooms by the wealthiest of men. But after a quick few police beatings, dissident killings, and fascist takeover, everything was fine. The vibrance was removed for a calm stillness.

The calm stillness remains, floating in the wind full of greenhouse gases. The greenhouses have turned to grayhouses, and the grayhouses have faded to black as the past has faded with it. The ethnicities of this world were lied to by the oligarchs, and they let down their guard in spite of every plea and warning. A poison intoxicated humanity and all of its imperfect beauty. So much so that every organ was disassembled, every person was brainwashed, and every soul was corrupted to unknown destinations of the worst events. The cultural cyanide was complete, and nothing more was said since then.