Today is 12 March 2050. Today is my birthday. I’m now 67 years old. My alarm clock goes off at 06:30. With a groan I wake up, and reluctantly kick away the warm, heavy bed sheets. I put my feet in the cold slippers below the bed, and shuffle to the kitchen, yawning. I pour myself a cup of hot surrogate chicory coffee. The cool morning makes me shiver, it looks like winters are getting colder each year. We heat up the house as little as possible. We're too greedy to enjoy comfort.
The bitter taste of the chicory makes me grimace, as it does every morning. Sitting at the table, I enjoy the first rays of sunshine that fall on my weather-beaten face. Our house comes alive with noises: on the upper floors I hear laughter and kids running around. My two sons descend from the stairs. The oldest checks the status of our solar panels on one of our computers. My youngest son looks at another screen, to check the status of our farmbots.
Musing about how things used to be, I look at my sons. When I see them, my heart fills up with pride, but also with compassion. They’ll never know the comfortable life that I led up to my 36 years. Yes, the world is climate neutral now, but we paid a price for it.
The big change started in 2019, with two unfortunate events that happened together: the Brexit, and the impeachment of Donald Trump. But the first seeds of the destruction of our society had been sown a lot earlier, in 2009.
Brexit happened on 29 March 2019, and gave cause for great political tensions within the UK. The classical parties where torn apart or became irrelevant. After a series of chaotic elections and re-elections, the extreme right-wing party Norsefire came to power. The country went into a dark and deep recession, but this gave Norsefire only more power and control over the citizen’s daily life.
In October 2019 came the other scandal: Donald Trump, the president of the United States, had already been executing for 3 years secret orders from his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Apparently Putin had been blackmailing him with a “golden shower” movie, in which Trump played a not very presidential role. The impeachment procedure was concluded in less than 24 hours after the start of the scandal. The next day came the well-known effect: a Wall Street crash of epic proportions.
The fall of the Dow Jones also made the stock markets in Europe, London and Japan tremble and shake. In London the bank Barclays went bankrupt. Millions of UK citizens suddenly couldn’t reach the pounds on their savings accounts anymore. However complicated the explanation given by economists was, the simple fact remained: the money was gone. Of course, bloody riots ensued. Politicians were slaughtered in horrible ways. A bitter-comical news item I remember from those times, is the story of David Cameron asking political asylum in Cuba, where he was on vacation. (The demand was denied and he was deported to the UK).
In the midst of these turbulent times, a monster reared its head from the darkest depths of the internet. Bitcoin.
In their fearful search for certainty, the British converted their remaining Pounds in Bitcoin. Soon their entire society ran on a black circuit of Bitcoin. The British Pound wasn’t worth a penny anymore. The value of Bitcoin however, rose to unseen heights. And that did not pass unnoticed in the rest of the world.
To save the paralyzed economies of Europe and the United States, the policy makers only saw one cure: inject massive amounts of money in the economy. However, this only drove the value of the Dollar and Euro downwards, and the good savers finally followed the panic investors, into the ever-growing mighty tentacles of Bitcoin. The network had by then been declared illegal, but this had no effect.
Life in a society with a deflating currency is strange, if you look at it with eyes of 2019. First of all, you will try to avoid spending money as much as possible. Why buy a coffee today, if you can buy two tomorrow? This reasoning caused a global shrinkage of the economy. Investments where postponed. Vital items, such as fruit, vegetables, bread, medicines, rose in price. Superfluous items remain unsold. Factories producing those closed. Hundreds of millions of people lost their job. And for the first time in centuries, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere diminished.
A second effect of this unregulated currency is that nobody payed taxes anymore. The government became poor.
This made our society evolve to an ultra-liberal society. The right of strongest, richest or luckiest ruled. National and international laws where of no significance anymore. Citizens organized themselves via the internet, and local groups took over the tasks of the failing government. Carrying arms is now taken for granted. Justice is no longer done in a court of law, but in online forums, where the majority votes for the verdict and the punishment.
Together with the failure of the government, came the failure of the energy grid. People switched over to local production, and storage of energy. First with diesel generators, but soon with solar panels and batteries. Even though the price of oil was extremely low because of the global recession, still people preferred to buy solar panels. They pay back their value, whereas the value of a gallon of diesel – once it’s burned – is gone forever.
The discussion on nuclear power, which had been very actual only years before, became a joke. How could a failing government ever find the necessary funds to build new nuclear plants?
In the meantime I have, as most people, retrained myself to farmer. It’s not a heavy job, robots do most of the work. But it’s also no luxurious. We mainly eat bread, vegetables and fruit. We only eat meat once a year. The slaughtering of the sheep is always a festive occasion.
I have accepted this existence now, and can also see the pretty side of it. There are no more superpowers, waging war. They simply do not have the money to buy bombs. The gap between rich and poor is closing, albeit very slowly. A poor man must simply save harder and spend less than a rich man. Since the money is gaining in value, this strategy works, although it will take many generations.
My son’s generation was too young to see the decline of our society as something abnormal. They are optimistic and strong, and look for creative solutions to the problems of these times. Health care is extremely expensive. Insurances no longer exist. If you’re seriously ill, you’ve got bad luck.
It’s especially the millennials, people who are born around the year 2000, that are unhappy in today's society. They remember a youth full of opportunities and dreams, that have all vanished now. Weekend trips to Barcelona or New York are a distant dream today.
I often discuss with my wife if things could have been different. She thinks: yes, if the Brexit and Trump-scandals hadn’t happened. I see things differently. The seeds of the decline had been sown long before. The fall of our society was inevitable.
I wake up from my reveries, and join my sons. We’re going to check our farmbots. Each armed with a rifle, we get on our bikes. I put in the headphones of an mp3-player, a small luxury I permit myself. A song from a long time ago, the Rolling Stones.
“You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find… You get what you need.”
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