A Message from The Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come
I am the Ghost of Christmas Future, and the future I see is filled with godforsaken people and godforsaken streets. A future where human connection is only possible dependent on the strength of your internet connection. A future where there is a pandemic, but not a virus-related pandemic, instead a pandemic in our minds. A future not too dissimilar to the one foretold by Huxley. A future where people get given all that they desire – or at least have been taught to desire.
People don’t visit their friends and family anymore as a hologram is all they need. They can project the outside world in their living room from their internet feed. Nobody gathers around the table, nobody visits their grandparents, in fact nobody even calls or Facetimes anymore. None of that is needed as everyone can just create holograms of the people they want to – or sometimes feel obliged to – see on Christmas Day. In perhaps what is the only upside, there is no Queen’s speech – not even a hologram of her – nothing.
But she has been replaced by commercials of new ways to “customise” your holographic loved ones to help them further suit your needs, and opinions. There are also ads for new virtual locations that you can “travel” to within the comfort of your own home for an ‘Awaystaycation’.
This is because in ‘Christmas Future’ people can bring the outside inside, and the holograms they speak to will echo in their chambers, leaving them feeling comforted, with their biases constantly confirmed.
In Christmas Future, as Nietzche foretold, “God is dead”. And if anyone still believed in Christ his death, and therefore birth, would be irrelevant. Because grief doesn’t mean a thing anymore as those you have “lost” can be brought back as holograms. Ironically suicide rates have gone up because people cannot bare the tensionless apathetic way of life they lead. But nobody cares – because they can be brought back as holograms remember?
Christmas Future exists in a world where the only way forward is conformity and herd immunity, also from the pandemic of independent thought that your leaders found contagious and dangerous. In Christmas Future sincere intelligence is seen as a threat to artificial intelligence. The irony is that A.I. does not need to be programmed anymore, because you are instead. The only thing worshipped in this once religious holiday is technology, as humans have gladly taken the place of lab rats.
Gift giving is non-existent because as everyone thinks the same, there cannot be any surprises. Instead everyone is surrounded by pleasures gifted to them by technology, that leaves them overstimulated and more but less connected than ever.
Look – can you see? It’s Christmas Eve, and in this AI-driven world of high tech mangers, the sheeple gather around towards midnight for the countdown to…. well nothing much at all
