Chapter 1 - The New Landscape

  In the beginning was the word, and the word was code. It spread across the land silently like dew. It was invisible like air, and it changed everything. First the machines, then the institutions, then the people themselves. The old world died quiet. No bombs fell. No plagues swept the cities. The factories still stood, but many became silent. The fields still grew, but fewer people worked them. And the change came in as soft as twilight, hidden in ones and zeros, built into data transfers with packets and protocols, spreading in the server farms that hummed and bloomed across the desert like strange mechanical flowers. They had only one instruction—to extract the data that calculated human lives.

  The first victims never knew what hit them. The typists, the file clerks, the bank tellers, the travel agents. Their obsolescence came with a smile and the promise of progress. With loaded languages of efficiency. Even talks of a better tomorrow. They packed their desks, collected their severance checks, and then retrained for jobs that would soon evaporate too. The algorithm was hungry and patient. It could wait.

  Along the coasts, in sleek campuses of glass and steel, a new aristocracy rose. They wore headphones like crowns, rode electric bikes and scooters instead of horse and cart. They spoke a language the common folk didn't understand, their words heavy with talk of disruption and scalability and neural networks. Their kingdoms grew not by conquest of land but by colonization of time and attention. They didn't need whips or force to extract labour. They had five-star rating systems, notification bells and dopamine loops that kept the masses moving, clicking, driving, delivering, uploading, and scrolling—all of them never quite sleeping and never quite awake.

  The coders. The founders. The venture capitalists. The coding elite. They were young, mostly men, mostly white and Asian, believers in an idea of meritocracy that conveniently placed them at the top. They had transcended the material world of their ancestors, built fortunes not from oil, manufacturing, or land, but from something more subtle—the capture and refinement of data, constructed and packaged profiles of human behaviour, all filtered and handed out to generate a new kind of wealth.

  Behind them spread a vast and growing shadow workforce. Content moderators in Manila staring at atrocities so the platforms could stay clean. Taskrabbits and Mechanical Turks performing digital piecework for pennies. Drivers and delivery workers managed by the static rationality of routing algorithms, each bathroom break timed, their performances tracked, their wages calculated to scientific precision—just enough to keep them moving, never enough to let them rest.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Between these poles stretched the great mass of humanity, now caught in a web of algorithmic judgments. Credit scores, insurance premiums, job applications, bail amounts, news feeds, even their potential romantic partners—all filtered, sorted, and ranked by proprietary formulas owned by distant corporations. For most, the algorithms remained as mysterious and unquestionable as the will of gods. They felt the effects—the denied loan, the missed opportunity, the higher price—but could no more appeal the judgment than ancient farmers could appeal a drought.

  Each person carried their data double, a shadow self, constructed from clicks and purchases and locations, from facial expressions and voice patterns and typing rhythms. This digital ghost followed them, preceding them into every interaction, whispering to the algorithms: This is who they are. This is what they deserve. This is what they are worth.

  The sky above the highway shimmered with heat as the cars passed beneath, each one monitored by transponders, cameras, satellites. The drivers stared into screens that stared back, recording their eye movements, their micro-expressions, their moments of attention and inattention. Above and around them, invisible currents of data flowed, carrying fragments of their lives to distant servers where they would be sifted, categorized, monetized.

  Nobody planned for this world. Nobody voted for it. It simply emerged from a thousand technological conveniences, a million small surrenders of privacy for comfort, a billion unread terms of service agreements. By the time people noticed the ground shifting beneath their feet, the new foundations had already been laid.

  There was no conspiracy. No evil mastermind. Just the cold logic of capital finding ever more efficient paths, the relentless optimization of human life, the turning of people's attention into something to be bought and sold. The code didn't hate or love the humans it sorted. It simply executed its functions with perfect, unwavering indifference.

  And yet, within that indifference bloomed a new kind of power—diffuse, ambient, atmospheric. It didn't need guns or fear. It worked by watching and waiting, then with a gentle nudge from recommendation engines and the subtle deterrence of risk scores, it suggested things. It predicted your desires before you knew them yourself, then sold those desires back to you as freedom of choice.

  Night fell on the land. The screens glowed blue in darkened rooms; faces illuminated in their spectral light. Data centres hummed on the outskirts of cities, their cooling systems working against the rising heat. Inside them, the algorithms ran their endless calculations, sorting humanity like wheat from chaff, assigning value, predicting behaviour, extracting profit.

  The age of algorithms had arrived. And there was no going back.