There are precious few medals awarded these days, unlike in previous centuries where they were routinely doled out for military, political, and financial honours. We still award a few – Olympic medals, the Nobel, the Fields – and one of the most prestigious of all, the Steward medal.

The medal is a thin disc of gold with the head of an ancient Greek representative on the obverse, with an image of a crowd of people on the reverse. The one I’m holding now was given to Cassandra Carillo in 2033, when she was 96 years old and judged to be among the most trustworthy people in Australia at the time.

The Steward medal had its origins in 2031, as a consequence of the rapid devolution in political power towards a more egalitarian model of direct democracy, originating from the Arab Spring of the early teens and growing directly from the events in the UK and China. With citizens around the world expecting and demanding more of a say in how their towns, cities, and countries were run, they were increasingly asked for opinions and decisions.

While on the one hand, this was a welcome change from the archaic ‘vote every 4-5 years’ system, the abundance of projects, charities, taxes, and initiative that required (or at least, invited) votes from citizens every month made it difficult for most people to make informed decisions – as seen from earlier problems exemplified in the notoriously misused California ballots.

People soon began to tire of the endless decision-making. As Alex Briand, a landscape designer from Toulouse said, “I knew I should be reading up on all of these new laws and subscriptions, but honestly I didn’t have the time or will. I wanted to just throw up my hands and say to someone smart, you decide!”

And, more or less, that’s the route that many people took: they gave their voting and subscription authority to trusted delegates by picking someone – or something – such as a person, an organisation, a collective, an expert system, or more outlandish things – to make informed decisions on their behalf. It had echoes of representative democracy, but crucially, each citizen could choose their very own representation – and while some representatives might have been chosen by thousands or millions, the point was that one did not have to compromise in their choice.

Of course, delegated authority did not appear out of whole cloth. Instead, it began with charities. A British entrepreneur found that most people mentally allocated a monthly ‘charity budget’ that was, in almost all cases, automatically transferred to the organisations that had the most visible marketing campaigns, putting newer and smaller charities at a disadvantage, and proving to be unresponsive to changes for demand.

His first solution was to give users who contributed a set amount a month the ability to allocate slices of their budget to different charities. However, after the novelty wore off, most users discovered they didn’t have the time or inclination to properly research who they should donate to, leading to general disaffection and mild guilt. A better solution presented itself through users delegating part or all of their donation authority to trusted parties – friends, websites, celebrities, and so on.

From there, the concept of delegated authority rapidly spread to other fields that presented a plethora of choices that were difficult to evaluate, from shopping to finances to utilities to, ultimately, politics. Under an experimental system adopted by New South Wales in 2025, voters could delegate authority – subject to their own final personal approval – on smaller initiatives and local matters to trusted third parties.

The system proved popular, although it was markedly more successful in communities with a higher degree of trust and education. In those places, delegated authority seemed like the perfect solution to smoothing out the passions and fevers of the public, so that important decisions were less swayed by advertising and money rather than the trends of the day; indeed, some communities now reward people for using delegated authorities over long periods of time by providing a heavier weighting to their votes. Some even claimed that the system effectively routed around the Dunning-Kruger effect wherein people believe they have more expertise than they really do.

In other communities, particularly the fractured and older areas of the US such as California, the introduction of delegated authority into politics caused it to completely seize up, as citizens lent their votes to charismatic but compromised media personalities who would then solicit massive ‘donations’ from organisations who they would later favour.

Much of this corruption came to a head when a group of conversation brokers pieced together the existence of an underground market to buy delegated votes in 2030, resulting in the collapse of delegated authorities in US politics for the next six years. Thankfully, this setback did not spread to countries where the practice was more suitable for the culture, such as Australia, where efforts were made to improve the system, for example, by requiring popular delegates to declare any conflicts of interest, and by instituting the Steward Prize to recognise the efforts of outstanding delegates and remind people of the strengths of the system.

Which brings us back to Cassandra Carillo’s medal, awarded for her highly principled and transparent votes on healthcare issues, made on behalf of hundreds of thousands of voters. Unlike most other delegates, Carillo did take compensation for her work, but it was a modest exchange for her tireless research into the issues and efforts to explain her choices through frequent videos, talks, and articles – more than we can say for most politicians in the past!

Every second of every day, we’re confronted with choices that test our apetite for risk. Should you eat that tasty – but fatty – dessert? How much time should you exercise every day? Do you really want to take that spacedive? It might, quite literally, be the trip of a lifetime.

Sometimes the calculation is easy, especially with high risk activities that come saddled with a known probability of death – but most of the time, we make decisions unconsciously, even though their cumulative impact may have more weight on our chances of living to a ripe old age than any single decision.

But what if you could measure and quantify those decisions immediately and directly? That’s what Mutual Assurance, a Melbourne-based insurance co-operative, aimed to do with their Lifeline bracelet in 2032. The bracelet was a slender band of plastic and metal that performed the usual biometric functions of tracking blood pressure, heart beat, and basic metabolic panel tests, but it also hooked into the wearer’s glasses and other technology to determine, in short, what they were doing and how risky it was.

All of this data would be aggregated and converted into a single value – the micromort. A micromort is a unit of risk, measuring a one-in-a-million chance of death; so, for example, drinking a couple of glasses of wine would accumulate a single micromort, whereas spending an hour canoeing would accumulate a whole ten micromorts. In theory, the Lifeline would be able to detect and record all of these activities, from washing hands to working at a fission reactor, and their associated risks.

Before the Lifeline, micromorts were used by larger organisations and insurance companies for decision analysis, but Mutual Assurance’s aim was to help individuals make more informed choices about the risks they took in everyday life; and, of course, to better assess insurance premiums. Initially, Mutual Assurance had planned to make the bracelets available solely to their customers, but the massive demand quickly encouraged them to ramp up production.

No doubt much of the appeal of the Lifeline came from its novelty value – plenty of people were intrigued to see their micromort count gradually ratchet up as they ate a beefburger or went swimming. But a great deal came from how it played upon the fears of the ageing baby boomers of the time. In an interview a decade after the Lifeline’s introduction, the CEO, Julia Hobbes, admitted that, “it didn’t escape our notice that there was an entire generation who were very, very anxious about their mortality, and that we could try and address that by quantifying it in a way that they understood.”

The Lifeline didn’t alleviate anxiety, though – it accentuated it. Wearers frequently became obsessed with checking their micromort readings, worrying over statistically insignificant increases, and become paralysed with indecision. In a sad turn, this anxiety sometimes resulted in increase blood pressure, further increasing their micromorts for the day.

There were other serious problems with the Lifeline. One was that the basic data was rarely accurate – most of the risks had been calculated on an aggregate basis, with no regard for the actual circumstances or individuals involved. Another was the inconvenient tendency for humans to be contrary; some users deliberately tried to increase their micromorts as much as possible without harming their health, regularly embarking on risky sports activities and venturing into dangerous areas, just to see what might happen.

Ian Kyd, a noted antigamification academic, suggests that by the early 30s, people were beginning to tire of simplified metrics: “The fashion of trying to measure and quantify more or less everything in the universe, from health and happiness to intelligence and inspiration, had its roots in the 90s and 2000s, where networks were becoming widespread and the dominant economics of the time rewarded people for thinking in strictly numerical terms. Those who had grown up in those periods carried forward their ideals of quantification and the ‘gamification’ of life up to the 30s – and no further, as we gained a more complex and subtle understanding.”

As a result, the Lifeline became decreasingly useful as a tool to help people improve their health by managing risk. However, it did inspire a new range of mostly ridiculous but occasionally thought-provoking bracelets that purported to measure tiny, incremental amounts of change, such as the ‘Microfun detector’, the ‘Microsmarts detector’, the ‘Micromorals detector’ and so on.

And that’s perhaps the most useful thing that the Lifelife did. Those trying to use its simple metrics to guide their behaviour were frequently stymied, but that very effort often elicited a fleeting understanding of mortality – and caused more subtle changes in outlook. It wasn’t a magical device that made people wiser – it was a memento mori.

How far back do you want to go? 150,000 years ago, to lighten an ice age by just a few degrees and help the hominids out? 65 million years ago, nudging an asteroid’s path so doesn’t hit Earth and cause a mass extinction? 1.4 billion years ago, tweaking the composition of the planet’s atmosphere? 3 billion years ago, altering the magma flows under the surface? Or even further back, changing the supernova that seeded the atoms that would later coalesce into a world?

Tianxia, or “all under heaven” in English, was the most popular form of entertainment from 2032 to 2034, capturing over 400 million, 2 billion viewers, and consuming over 6% of total processing in the world. It was hailed as a revolution in our understanding of planetary science, geology, and evolution, and condemned as a distraction at best, and insidious pseudoscience at worst – yet it all began as a thoroughly academic pursuit.

In 2030, an amplified team at Shanghai Tech consisting of Prof. Ernest Han, three graduate students, and seven expert systems were analysing data from the Zheng He ExoScope. They had homed in on a set of 65 Earth-like planets and were interested in understanding how they formed and whether they might harbour any life by ‘rewinding time’ a few billion years and then simulating various physical processes.

In order to restrict the set of simulations required and reduce processing requirements, Prof. Han’s team enlisted amateurs on the Zooniverse network to tweak the starting conditions at various points in the history of the selected exoplanets. While it was one of the most sophisticated and detailed simulations ever presented to the public, it was a somewhat dry experience until an enterprising user forked the code to graft on more explicit game mechanics and a massively upgraded graphics engine, renaming it ‘Tianxia’.

Simulation historian Estelle Egan explains the importance of Tianxia:

“It may seem like a crude toy to us today, but in the 30s Tianxia offered players the chance to create their own miniature worlds that could be rendered and examined in unprecedented levels of detail, all the way from orbit down to rivers, trees, and animals. It was perhaps the first game to deliver on the promise held out by earlier games such as Sim World, Spore, and Worldcraft, of complete control over a living, breathing, and highly complex world.”

Unlike those previous games, most players tended not to micromanage their creations, preferring instead to set the initial starting conditions of their world and then sit back and watch the simulation unfold, interfering only to guide the path of an errant asteroid or prevent an ice age from killing off a favoured species. As such, games of Tianxia were usually scored based on their level of ‘interestingness’ as judged by other players – a barren, unchanging rock was far less successful than one with a functioning and stable ecosystem.

Successive patches to Tianxia saw extra detail being added to the geological and environmental systems, with perhaps the most popular being the ‘agent’ simulation introduced in 2033, allowing for the creation of basic societies within the game. Run the game long enough, and your world might end up going to war with itself, or perhaps launching into the stars.

Other patches included unusual and fantastical styles of planets such as ringworlds, orbitals, Dyson spheres, as well as tweaked physics. However, most players tended to stay closer to home in their games, remaining enthralled in the richness and complexity of the worlds created by themselves and their friends; for a while, thousands of people made very good livings by consulting on how to best tweak Tianxia worlds, or by branching and remixing existing worlds to improve them.

Why Tianxia so popular and so engrossing, and how did it manage to stand out from the seemingly endless array of live-action role playing games that had dominated entertainment for the previous few years? Egan provides some insight

“Tianxia was the right game for the right time. It became popular during a comparatively calm period in which rich people around the world had a feeling of mastery over nature. They’d curbed their apetites for fossil fuels, they were beginning geoengineering projects to ‘fix’ the oceans and atmosphere, and they could gaze upon thousands of worlds across the galaxy. Most importantly, they felt they understood the world because they could simulate it and visualise it and model it.”

“And it’s true that their understanding went farther than previous generations – but not far enough. It was the unexpected that eventually led to the demise of Tianxia: after all, the Cascade came in 2035.”

But for a brief moment before that calamity, the world relaxed, and a billion people recalled and enacted the words, “In the beginning…”

Out of the whole panoply of human behaviour, there are few things more quintessentially social than eating together. We celebrate with food, we commiserate with food, we renew old ties and form new ones over breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s not essential, but having good company while eating is something we can all enjoy – indeed, the very word ‘company’ originates from the notion of those who ‘eat bread’ with you.

The object I’m sitting in front of represents that tradition perfectly – it’s a very simple long wooden table, big enough for about eight or ten people sitting on either side. This table sat in The Castle, a pub built in Liverpool in 1948. Over the years, The Castle changed hands a dozen times, gradually passing up towards ever larger corporations until the crash in the late 20s when it was bought and restored by a local family for a fraction of its price a few years previously.

Instead of running a normal for-profit pub however – a tricky proposition given the combination of cheap drinks and deliverbots – the O’Reilly’s decided to convert it into a subscription-based restaurant. Guests were encouraged to pay in advance for a set of meals, and while they had less choice in what they could eat on an individual basis, The Castle more than made up for that in terms of variety over time and affordability.

Since the O’Reilly’s had a predictable cashflow, zero rent, and lived in an area with an early form of basic minimum income, they were able to just about make ends meet, although they had quite some trouble finding enough subscribers for the first few months. Over time, though, The Castle became a regular destination for many locals, who might visit once or twice a week to catch up with neighbours, meet new people, or simply get some healthy food.

When The Castle was featured by a journalist from Hong Kong along with similar communal restaurants – which she termed ‘halls’ after classical monastic refectories and the collegiate system in Oxford and Cambridge – it began a movement that rippled across the world. It’s hard to pinpoint one particular reason why halls became so popular as a way of eating – in reality, there were several intertwined strands that seemed to reinforce each other.

For example, one simple attraction was that the food served at halls was freshly cooked, often from high quality ingredients that could be bought in bulk, since meals could be planned in advance. A common practice was to have produce delivered by UCS or other deliverbots to the hall’s kitchen and involve locals and their children in the preparation; after all, cooking is just as much a social activity as eating, and many appreciated being able to learn how to cook in practice, rather than through purely through AR or mimic scripted tutorials.

Halls could vary in size from just a dozen regulars to thousands, but the most successful halls tended to attract a few hundred reliable guests, which led into another of their strengths – the vibrant mixing of individuals and classes that occurred at mealtimes. While guests could, and frequently did, choose to sit with friends and acquaintances, smart hosts would gently encourage them to overcome their reluctance and occasionally shift around to meet new people – something that they invariably enjoyed.

Of course, this wasn’t possible for every hall – some were just too small to allow for proper mixing, or had too homogeneous a group of guests. Hosts tackled this in different ways, sometimes by offering discounted or free meals to travellers, or by setting up consensual augmented reality interfaces that would join together multiple halls to form a ‘virtual’ or ‘infinite’ hall where guests could mix; this worked best when the halls co-ordinated their menus and even furniture, which led to more than a few halls adopting the same style of tables and chairs that The Castle had.

Since most halls attracted subscribers through lower prices, they were usually run on a non-profit or charitable basis, making them more successful in those areas that had a form of basic minimum income or facilitated the formation of co-ops and crowdfunded ventures.

Today, we see halls as being commonplace, part of a tradition that extends back millennia to ancient Greece and Sparta. However, we sometimes forget how deeply alienated many people were from each other during the 20th and early 21st centuries, in between the time that billions moved from the countryside in to cities and when we developed new ways of coming together as local and virtual communities.

Halls speak to our strong need for social interaction, and for the ages-old idea that people will always need to eat – and they’ll enjoy doing it together.

There’s a moment in The World of Glass when those playing Erica Lin, the CEO of Glass Networks, face perhaps the most important choice they’ll make in the simulation. It comes just after they reach half a billion registered users on their augmented reality system – a system that superimposes new information and interfaces on top of the world via the user’s glasses or contacts – and it has the potential to change every single one of those users’ lives.

The choice boils down to open versus closed, or seen in a different way, quality versus mediocrity, but before I describe that choice, I want to provide some context on this week’s object – an augmented reality protocol.

In the late 20s, as the cost of heads-up displays dropped and their sophistication increased, it became common for people, organisations, and businesses to interact with each other via virtual or augmented reality interfaces. To begin with, these interfaces often had some grounding in physical reality – such as a bank branch overlaying account management interfaces on its walls – simply because that was more familiar to users.

But not everyone could who wanted to overlay AR interfaces onto the world actually owned real estate, so they often had to ‘ground’ their interfaces on top of physical spaces owned by others. Popular choices included billboards, posters, monuments, and public buildings – all of these might be used to show some student’s art portfolio, a portal into a massively multiplayer game, or live video from a political rally.

The problem was that any given physical space might have hundreds or even thousands of competing AR interfaces and media grounded on top of it. Navigating these interfaces was a difficult process; turn them all on at the same time, and you’d be confronted with a nightmarish melange of colours, objects, and animations – until your glasses crashed from the processor load.

There were two schools of thought regarding how to manage this. The first, favoured by organisations such as OAR and Sopol, was to allow anyone to create and ground interfaces, and to simply recommend to users (based on their stated preferences or friends) which interfaces to display at a given time; in practice, most users delegated their preferences to third parties.

OAR and Sopol were sorely outgunned by Glass Networks and its competitors, which preferred a ‘walled garden’ ecosystem in which interfaces had to be approved before being grounded, with preference being given to high quality interfaces, along with existing real estate holders, advertisers, brands, and so on. The end result was a much cleaner and consistent experience, but one that was markedly less open than the alternatives.

For a while, it seemed that this battle would play out in a similar way to other open versus closed platform wars in the past, such as Apple vs. Android, with most experts believing that Glass Networks would walk away with the lion’s share of profits and users.

But this time was different. Whereas previous platform wars took place in what seemed like entirely new, purely digital, spaces, AR was intimately linked with the real, physical world – and all the economic and political concerns that stemmed from it.

These concerns weren’t high on any users’ minds during the early years of AR when people were still marvelling at the possibilities and the tools and resources required to create good interfaces were still expensive – but as time went on, a large number of people became increasingly concerned that the potential of AR to reassert notions of the ‘public space’ was being submerged by purely commercial concerns. Social historian Andrea Galloway elaborates:

“Today, it’s hard to realise exactly how much the public space – by which I simply mean the streets, marketplaces, squares, and mass transit links of the world – was effectively ceded to or owned by the highest bidder. AR held out the promise of reclaiming public space without the expense of buying the actual real estate – something that was profoundly important to many, but deeply threatening to a few. Glass stood on the side of the corporates, and OAR and Sopol on the side of the disenfranchised.”

This brings us to the choice that players of Erica Lin can make in The World of Glass. In 2032, Glass was the world’s dominant AR platform, the darling of venture capitalists and the earnest friend of every brand and advertiser in the world – but it was clear to everyone that it was facing a growing backlash.

Player could either choose to continue Glass as a closed ecosystem that favoured corporate interests – and make billions in the process – or to adopt the same open protocols as OAR and Sopol. Riches and fame on the one hand, or a much needed shift back to the common good on the other. It’s easy to see what the right decision was for society, but less so for an individual who had everything to lose and little to gain.

In the end, Lin kept Glass as a closed system – a walled garden that continued to provide a slick, simple, and restricted experience for users for many years. Other sites attempted to compete on the basis of the freedom of expression they gave to the public, but it wasn’t until the late 30s that competitors managed to bridge the gap between openness and simplicity through consensus environments that displayed and merged different AR interfaces and media based on the user’s preferences, and those they were interacting with.

Every player makes a different decision, but if World of Glass showed anything, it’s that the emerging consensus-based politics of the 21st century only proceeded in fits and starts – and that the way an individual perceives the world and their choices has ripples that affects everyone.

Polly Sheratt: “My question is very simple. Back when I was deciding what to do at university, everyone told me that if I wanted a job, I should choose medicine or programming. Some kind of trade or vocation, you know? So I studied engineering. I figured the world will always need people to build bridges and roads. But last year, my firm started getting undercut by the Gujarati and Rwandans on the cheaper business and by the Amplified teams on the high end. I was last in the company, so I was first out.

“So when you give people like me this stupid ‘Real Work’ entitlement card which is supposed to make us ‘get a job’ or ‘retrain’ while being forced to take cheap mimic scripting training work… it makes me think you’re evil. Either that, or just stupid. I did everything I was supposed to, and what did you do, Minister? You haven’t held a job in your life. I read up on you: PPE at Oxford, marketing for the party, MP’s assistant, councillor. So what are you going to do about it?”

Minister of Work, Alice Ravi: “Well, I’m very sorry that you feel that way, Polly, because I genuinely believe that this government is putting forth the best strategy to reduce unemployment. We were left with a 10% rate from the previous Coalition and -”

Polly: “That’s what you -”

Alice: “No, let me finish. We had 10% coming in, and at our current rates of growth, we weren’t going to dent that for over a decade. That’s why we introduced our ‘Real Work’ scheme, to help give people like you a lift back up into proper work, and that’s why we were elected.”

Polly: “That’s what you always say, it was the other lot’s fault. But your party was in power just three years ago! And unless you’re saying we’re simply lazy, I don’t see how cutting our benefits and making us work for free is going to improve this country!”

Moderator: “I’m sorry, Polly, but we need to take another question. I have Brian Martin representing the South Shields Students’ Group.”

Brian Martin: “I’d like to ask about what the government is planning to do in response to what’s happening in the rest of the world [interrupted by applause]. Northern European countries have adopted the basic minimum income, we’re getting outgunned by the recompetitive states in Southeast Asia and South America, and some of our best and brightest are leaving the country just when we need them the most.”

Alice: “That’s a great question. I’m just not sure that you can take the lessons from other countries and apply them to our own. I don’t think the solution is to provide even more handouts to people like they’re doing in Norway or Sweden though – I think we have to go our own way and that’s by encouraging people to do real work, by matching them up with available positions in British companies.”

Brian: “Well, my Group isn’t finding your answers very convincing, I’m afraid – we really don’t want to be made to perform grunt work just because you won’t provide us with any support. I can tell you that 4592 have just set their delegated votes to the opposition in the last 20 seconds.”

Alice: [looks flustered] “I’m sorry to hear that. But this country can’t afford to pay for people’s flights of fancy.”

Moderator: “We have a new snapshot in from our researchers. For those of you who aren’t getting the Sopol feed, this debate has been causing some waves across the country. The Northern Co-op has announced a new fund for providing local health and transport services, specifically to bypass the national government, and they’ve already received the equivalent of £9.6 million in funding in the last hour. Let’s get the co-op on the line.”

Northern Co-op: “Thank you. That £9.6 million is about half in direct pledges or investment, and half in terms of delegated selection of future consumption towards our qualifying startups. It’s not our first fund of this type, but it’s specifically aimed at young people looking for microfinance – the sort of people who we believe this government is neglecting. Our studies show that we have more than enough wealth to spare to provide people with basic essentials, so it seems needlessly intrusive to dictate how people live. What are you going to do with unemployed? Vilify them? Kill them? Force them to work? We won’t let them be homeless, won’t let them starve, won’t let them be offline. ”

Moderator: “Thanks. Before you answer, Ms. Ravi, I want to get another question in.”

Adam Bharwani: “Well, I completely disagree with the previous speaker. I’m sure it seems very impressive to click a button or blink a link or whatever it is people call it these days, and move around millions of pounds in a minute, but it’s hardly what I’d call a considered action. Young people don’t realise that we can’t afford to lavish money on their crazy business schemes on Sopol, selling toys and trinkets to each other. That money comes right from our pensions and our healthcare, and it’d mean even longer waits for operations, getting up into even one or two weeks for stem cell therapy. I think the Minister is spot on for putting these kids in their place.”

Alice: “I’m glad to hear a voice of reason! Of course, the NHS is one of our top priorities and we’re working very closely with the unions to ensure that we can continue to offer a high level of care. We have an ageing population in this country and they need and deserve the best treatments we can afford – and I hope that younger generations understand that this will benefit them in the long term as well. But we also want to support good business ideas, and that’s why we’ve assembled a team of top regional commissioners, businesspeople, and experts who’ll assess and provide funding to innovative and strategic startups.”

Moderator: “One response from the floor, from Katie Silva.”

Katie Silva: “I’m sorry, Minister, but we really don’t need any more so-called experts who get to award millions to their friends. I agree with a lot of the government’s policies, particularly on energy independence, but I don’t see how you can rule out a basic minimum income while also finding the money to spread around to pet projects. That’s our money – what makes you think you know how to spend it better than we do? This isn’t the 20th century, we have the information and we have the ratings systems to understand what to do.”

Moderator: “Just a quick reply please, Minister.”

Alice: “I absolutely respect that view, Katie, and I’m glad you can get behind our goals on energy independence. We were elected on that platform, just as we were on our promise to get the best experts to commission the best projects that will help our country – that’s how the government works, and it’s what makes our country so strong. I hope you will continue to give me just as much robust feedback in the coming months!”

Moderator: “Thank you Minister Alice Ravi for joining us tonight, along with those who’ve been following live. Our next live event will be in fifty minutes, with the country’s leading Ethics Delegate, Zoe Clarke.”

The last known words from Xu Yao at USTC in Hefei were, “something sounds loud going outside to check it out”. His neighbour, Jennifer Liu, was finishing up an AI assignment, while across the hall Tiffany Chen was cooking some noodles before a dance class. A few seconds later, at 6:37pm on Friday 1st April 2033, a helicopter taking off from a nearby car park caught a set of electricity pylons outside their dormitory.

The helicopter tipped over and smashing it through the building’s curtain wall. Multiple gas lines were ruptured and immediately ignited, causing an explosion that incinerated the entire western wing, instantly killing 19 students and staff, and critically injuring 48 others. It wasn’t until the next day that emergency workers and drones were able to clear the rubble and carry the last few survivors to hospital.

The explosion was covered in real time by over a thousand separate cameras and audio sensors. While only 133 were publicly accessible – mostly students’ personal cameras and glasses, along with some unauthorised media drones that happened to be nearby – there was enough to identify the helicopter and all of the people involved in the accident. In the space of five minutes, 78,000 messages about the crash were circulated across the internet, and after an hour had passed, that number had risen into the tens of millions.

A cursory examination of the footage revealed that the helicopter was registered to Wuhan International, a shell company. Collective searches traced the ownership back to Dr. Alexander Yang, a billionaire investment manager from Shanghai. It emerged that his son, Herbert Yang, was studying at USTC and – just as he had done for the previous few months – intended to skip the traffic jams by flying directly to his home outside Hefei.

Officially, civilian helicopter flights were strictly regulated within Anhui and indeed all of China, and it was certainly illegal, not to mention clearly unsafe, for Herbert Yang to be taking off from a car park so close to a residential building. However, corruption was common and bribery ensured that few questions were asked – until the crash.

Calls for Dr. Yang to be arrested for manslaughter gained traction with over seventeen million people agreeing within two hours, and other government officials who were thought to be complicit in the crash, such as the civil aviation officials for Anhui, were also identified.

China’s internet monitors had been tracking sentiment surrounding the ‘USTC crash’ right from the start, and the order was given to Weibo and other social networking platforms to slow or shut down the transmission of keywords associated with the crash. In the past, this had worked reasonably well at blunting anger, especially with the ‘Harmonious Choir’ counter-protest system that helped human operators spread messages meant to blunt or disperse online anger via a panoply of supposedly realistic artificial personalities.

However, the millions of furious messages were hard to shut down, with keywords and images and videos changing minute to minute as groups evaded the online censors; it didn’t help that a widespread mass transit systems failure across Guangdong had only been resolved two days ago. As it happened, the censors weren’t entirely immune to the messages either, as Carol Xu, a censorship community manager, told me:

“You have to understand that the crash was deeply personal for many of the online censors. The people who were killed were engineering and computer science students; we thought they were the victims of a cruel and corrupt society. OK, not all of the censors felt the same way, but enough did, and… well… we went a bit slow. Maybe we didn’t look as thoroughly for all the keywords and clusters we should have. I don’t know whether it made a difference. I hope it did.”

Retrospective analysis suggests that Xu’s efforts – or lack of them – did in fact help buy the protesters crucial time to stoke up outrage to a point were citizens were prepared to take further steps. Not physical ones – people were still afraid to go outside with emergency surveillance drones floating over every city and town – but online civil disobedience was a different matter.

The government simply wasn’t able to move fast enough – by the time a proper statement that it would mount a ‘serious investigation’ of the crash emerged a two days afterwards, people had already begun sending messages and files to government officials in their hundreds of millions, crashing mailboxes and networks throughout the country with pent-up grievances. Scripts were circulated that would hammer ‘corrupt’ businesses with credit card transactions and then revoke them, playing havoc with banks’ financial systems. Look on any street and you wouldn’t see much out of the ordinary – but look online, where people lived and worked and played, and it was a seething revolt.

Most shockingly, hackers managed to leak high level government deliberations on the crash. The videos and audio transcript showed a party that was disunited and afraid; the one thing they could have done – arrest Dr. Yang – was subject to furious debate as many in the party worried about a mass exodus of businessmen and capital from the country if a precedent of real corruption arrests were made. It plunged China into the Quiet Revolution, one characterised by the battles online, not in the real world.

There had been unrest in China before, and about apparently far more serious matters such as environmental damage and civil rights. But the sheer normality of the USTC crash – an entirely preventable accident that pitted the masses against the corrupt and the rich – struck a new chord, and the crash became linked to wider dissatisfaction about growing social security and employment problems across the country.

China’s one child policy had resulted in a decidedly lopsided population pyramid in which a comparatively small number of adults were supporting a large number of the elderly; compounded by low government pensions and only basic free healthcare, not to mention emerging competition from both the low end – in Africa and India – and the high end – via local manufacturing and 3D printing, strains in the social compact were becoming too much to bear. China’s leaders authority relied on whether they could prove themselves worthy to rule. A decade of crawling economic growth was the the fuel. The USTC crash was the spark. And the effects would be felt across the world.

Towards the end of the Kyrgyzstan civil war in 2032, General Askar’s insurgents were routed in a rapid series of battles across the Jalal-Abad Province. Many independent observers believed that the Transitional Authority had defeated the insurgents through superior numbers and materiel, and while had both, some were puzzled at how General Askar’s forces crumbled so quickly after having put up a strong resistance for over two years.

It emerged that General Askar had been the victim of 47 separate ‘kill switch’ activations in a few days towards the end of the war. These kill switches degraded the insurgent’s communications and drone network to the point of uselessness with frequent crashes and in the case of some glasses and drone recharging pods, physical explosions. The Transitional Authority took advantage of the confusion to mount a fierce ground offensive on two fronts, decapitating the elite ‘Green Guard’ with special forces and taking the General prisoner.

I have a pair of sunglasses from the civil war in front of me, owned by one Colonel Erkebaev, a 38 year old from Osh. They’ve got thin silver rims and tough plastic lenses; not a particularly fashionable item, but very much military spec, manufactured by FPLS SK in South Korea. Along with being hardened against electromagnetic pulses and having an in-built array microphone, it has a high capacity silicon alloy battery contained in frame.

It’s these batteries that we’re interested in. Let’s take a closer look with Academician Juica from the Aragon Institute of Technology:

“It’s clear from the scorch marks that these batteries overheated, destroying the glasses within seconds. Luckily for Colonel Erkebaev, she wasn’t wearing them, because they would’ve gotten awfully hot. The cause lies in a special chip located at the tip of the right arm. It’s not shown in any of the schematics or virtual manufacturing models, and it was only found by a painstaking forensic examination. The chip only does two things – it waits for a signal, and when it receives it, it overrides all the safeties on the batteries and burns them out. It’s a classic kill switch.”

What’s remarkable about this chip is that it doesn’t use the glasses’ in-built wireless system; if it did, there would be a risk – a tiny risk, but still there – that the ‘kill signal’ might be detected and intercepted. Instead, it uses the glasses’ frame as an antenna to receive ultra-low-bit-rate messages. And just like Colonel Erkebaev glasses, at least 20 other key officials suffered catastrophic failures of their personal network devices within the same hour. Everyone thought they were the only one, and by the time people were discussing the potential of a virus or faulty hardware, the Transitional Authority were already moving it.

Kill switches were hardly a new invention, having been used since the 20th century to monitor or control weapons and computers by security organisations that enjoyed a technological edge. In practice, this meant countries such as the United States, the UK, Germany, Israel, and in the 21st century, China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. They had the engineering expertise and facilities to subtly alter devices without being noticed.

Unsurprisingly, as microchips and computers found their way into increasing numbers of devices and manufacturing began shifting to Southeast Asia, and later, India and Africa, the kill switch arms race was afoot. Largely unseen by the public, government and security organisations were scrambling to cope with the flood of potentially compromised devices that were being used by millions of people, including politicians and top businessmen, while simultaneously developing their own exploits. We recognise this today as being a colossal waste of resources akin to the nuclear arms race, but even more widespread and arguably more damaging in practice.

The two leaders in this race quickly became South Korea (aided by the United Stated) and China. Both countries routinely inserted compromised chips and circuitry into consumer and military electronics that even microscopic inspection wouldn’t discover. The glasses worn by Colonel Erkebaev, made by FLPS SK, were part of a batch that were swapped in Turkey, en-route to Kyrgyzstan, when they were suspected as having been ordered for use by the insurgents.

After US deep cover agents determined that the glasses had made it to the insurgents, a series of low power transmissions were made from local radio stations in Jalal-Abad. Over the course of a month, various backdoors were activated on the glasses that gave South Korea and the US access to many of the insurgents’ top officials. After some frantic political wranglings, they decided to weigh in on the Transitional Authority’s side – not by supplying any intelligence, but by activating the final kill switch and effectively winning the civil war at a stroke.

To provide cover, a faked intrusion into FPLS SK’s systems was arranged in which a cache of emails suggesting internal sabotage was responsible for the glasses malfunctions. This story held for a few days until a number of people concerned about exploding batteries began investigating the model numbers of their own glasses. Inconsistencies began mounting and soon enough, students at Second Copenhagen Free School published electron microscopy results with the insert chips clearly labelled.

Naturally, none of the parties involved ever admitted culpability, but as billions of people began worrying (mostly inaccurately) that their own devices were at risk of exploding as well and consequently forming co-operative efforts to verify the integrity of hardware, it became clear that the age of the kill switch had finally become unacceptable to the world population. This episode also led to the mini-boom (and subsequent bust) in nanoscale fabricators-in-a-box, which allowed small organisations to make their own ‘trusted’ microchips. Unfortunately the technology was rather unreliable and expensive, leading most to return to mass-produced electronics.

Government intrusion to people’s lives had been taken as a given in many authoritarian countries – in some cases, it was actually welcomed. But changing attitudes towards personal freedom, and an increasing distrust of politicians thanks to endemic corruption, altered that equation. The sheer insouciance of the use of the kill switch in the glasses, in a civil war that most people didn’t even understand, was a key turning point in the retreat of unauthorised surveillance.

Back in the 19th and 20th centuries, many predicted that people in ‘the future’ would prefer to eat pills or some kind of slurry in order to speed up eating; after all, while we all need to eat to survive, from a purely biological perspective, it’s only about getting the right mix of nutrients into our bodies. However, quite aside from the sheer impossibility of getting enough calories from a couple of pills, such a prosaic approach completely ignored the pleasurable aspects of eating a good meal. After all, the point of life isn’t simply to survive, it’s to flourish, and it would be a shame to ignore millennia of good food and communal meals in favour of saving a few minutes here and there.

For the vast majority of humanity, food generally meant vegetables, but in the past few centuries that changed with the advent of new agricultural techniques that allowed for the production of cheap meat on a massive scale. By 2033, over 60 billion chickens were living in ‘factory farms’, with billions more cows, pigs, and other animals, all to feed the world’s voracious apetite for animal protein.

Most of these animals were kept in cramped conditions with little to no access to the outside world, let alone space to walk around. While there was some progress in improving farm animal welfare, it was painfully slow since drastic changes would harm the profits of the large suppliers and supermarkets. Ultimately, moral considerations were not what caused the world to move away from factory farming – instead, it was a combination of environmental, economic, and scientific changes that did. And each of those changes is summed up in this object – an Owen’s Original Beef Burger, originally sold in Ontario, Canada.

I’ve managed to obtain this Owen’s Original via the efforts of Mary Alderman, a chef at Fifth Column in Berlin. This burger is not actually from 2033, but a rather sprightly three minutes old, which I’m thankful for because I’m about to take a bite of it right now. And yes, it’s just as delicious as they said it would be; a very earthy taste, but also surprisingly tender and flavourful. But the meat in this burger didn’t come from a cow grazing outdoors, or cramped indoors – it came from a bioreactor. Mary Alderman explains:

“I grew the cells in this burger inside a sterile ‘test tube’ environment, seeded around a printed scaffold made from organic materials. Now, if I left it at that and only provided necessary nutrient bath, your burger would basically be a rather unsightly large blob of cells. Since I imagine that’s not the sort of thing you enjoy eating, I needed to encourage the formation of blood vessels and arteries to make sure that the tissue turned into muscles that you’d be more familiar with – and of course, those muscles needed to be stimulated electrically.”

“If you know how to do it and have the right tools, it’s easy, but I know that the pioneers encountered many mistakes and dead ends before they perfected the process. Compared to the usual way of obtaining meat, it must have been incredibly frustrating!”

Frustrating, but it was worth the effort for some. There were two pressures driving the development of cloned meat. The first was the increasing cost of the traditional farming model, which had been built on the assumption that cheap land, cheap water, and cheap electricity would be with us forever. With climate change and increasing competition for arable land from the recompeting countries, these assumptions looked increasingly invalid. It was also becoming more difficult to keep livestock healthy due to new restrictions on antibiotic use.

But even with ‘traditional’ meat becoming more expensive in the 20s, cloned meat – still only being grown in labs – didn’t constitute a genuine alternative. It would take another pressure to bring prices down: the demand of the newly elderly for clean and nutritious food. Across the world were tens of millions of consumers who were focused on living healthily, and cloned meat was marketed as being guaranteed germ-free and impeccably sourced from bioreactor to deliverbot to home.

Not only that, but cloned meat could be tailored to different consumers so that it contained different types and balances of molecules. According to its biggest backer, Tiersen, it was more like medicine than meat – except for that fact that it tasted good. The fact that Tiersen affiliates were also stoking fears of ‘traditional meat’ contamination on casters and through scenario engineering didn’t hurt either – at least, not until the company was forced to pay a $1.2 billion fine in 2031.

As other companies joined the ‘tailored meat’ bandwagon, the cost of bioreactors began dropping and more scientists began engineering cell lines, some of which had their recipes open-sourced. Soon, it wasn’t unusual to see bioreactors join the ranks of cooking implements at high end restaurants; and from there, it was a short trip to fast food outlets and community kitchens.

That’s the origin of my Owen’s Original here. Surprisingly, Peter Owen is actually a real person, not a corporate invention, and he’s living in Hamilton, Ontario these days. According to him, he arrived at the recipe for his burgers by experimenting for several months with a bioreactor setup he’d picked up from a firesale at a bankrupt pharmaceutical company.

After his friends gave the thumbs up, he started selling subscriptions to the recipe (and ongoing improvements) to restaurants around the world, with a discount if they kept his name on the food. Owen’s Originals proved to be a long-lived success, selling tens of millions of burgers over five whole years before Peter Owen decided to open source the recipe and move on to other work.

All of this talk of ‘cloned meat’ is, of course, rather baffling to us today since we usually just call it ‘meat’, whereas the prospect of actually eating animals tends to equally divide people between those who find it distasteful, and those who see it as a special treat. Whatever your own view, I think we can all agree that we’d rather not return to a world with tens of billions of animals slaughtered every year.

“I can personally guarantee that our partnership with the Chinese Transnational Fund to develop high-tech farms and infrastructure will usher in a new phase of prosperity for everyone in the Gambella region.” – Elala Asfaw, Ethopia in 2019

“After everything we did for them, this is how they pay us back? We should make them understand they can’t do this to China and kill everyone in Ethopia who had a part in the bombings!” – Han Peng, Shanghai, in 2025

Our object today is a message – a message that was written in ink and in blood, one that spanned continents and highlighted the growing power and disparity between two countries: Sudan and China. And it all begins with the price of food in China.

It wasn’t just the billion people living in China that caused made food increasingly expensive; it was their apetites. As China became richer, it followed a well-trodden path that saw its demand for meat, fish, and speciality produce increase dramatically. On the whole, crop yields in China also increased thanks to GM crops and improved techniques, but not quite fast enough to keep up – urban sprawl and expanding industry put pressure on the price of available farmland, not to mention topsoil degradation and water scarcity due to aquifer depletion.

Like other countries in the Middle East and North America, many Chinese companies – often with the official blessing of the government – chose to make major investments in securing millions of acres of comparatively cheap farmland wherever they could, usually in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Sudan. The notion was that foreign governments’ investment could pay for better crops, improved fertilisers, and higher quality management; host countries would gain from the improved infrastructure, extra jobs, and new revenues, while the companies would generate much needed food and profits.

The reality was rather different, as Dr. Anthony Liu from Tsinghua University describes:

“In contrast to the orthodox capitalist view which stated that these foreign ‘food security’ investments would benefit everyone, the truth is that only the elite and the privileged were accorded full and fair access to the market. Land in Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria and a dozen other countries was often sold below market rates, seized from those who had been living on it for generations, and forcibly occupied. They were paid little, if anything, but kickbacks, bribes, consultancy fees and other favours flowed to local administrators, developers, government officials, and politicians.”

In a thousand locations, the promised jobs didn’t materialise, and the hospitals, roads, schools, clinics, and railways were frequently second-rate and shoddily built. Despite the desperate unfairness of the situation, it seemed that any negative effects would be strictly limited to the host country – until the terrorist attack in 2025.

In 2014, the China Transnational Fund made a routine investment in 14 million acres of farmland in Northern Sudan. While much of the land underwent development immediately, a small and less fertile region in Al Jazirah was left spare until April 24th, 2021, when local police and contract security services moved in to clear the area. The inhabitants were given money for their land and for relocation expenses – a fraction of what it was worth – and one month to move out.

On May 24th, seven locals were shot dead, with thirty heavily injured. However, the locals succeeded in defending their land until a larger police force moved in two days later, killing a further 13 people and scattering the rest. Online media and TV pundits were outraged, leading to a government investigation that saw three mid-ranking police officers fired and the China Transnational Fund paying a modest amount of fines, as well as promising to implement better self-regulation. Overseas reaction was even more muted due to a tsunami near India.

Yet we now know that relatives of those killed in Al Jazirah were planning a response. Many were desperately poor, but their fervent desire for retribution found willing ears in richer fundamentalists who were eager to stoke anti-Chinese sentiment even higher. Ironically, its name notwithstanding, the China Transnational Fund had little loyalty to China, with funds and staff coming from investors and private equity around the world, but it had a Chinese face – and that’s what they wanted to strike at.

Three Sudanese men travelled to Shanghai under business visas, ostensibly to meet with LED manufacturers. Instead, they checked into a hotel near the airport for two nights, then drove out to a flat near Dongtan owned by a Kenyan expat. There, the men assembled components for a bomb and hid it inside a van; later, it was discovered that many of the parts were stolen, with several policemen and security official bribed to look the other way.

For the next two weeks, the men from Sudan surveilled the financial district to determine the most effective time and place to attack. On Thursday 18th September, 2025, they drove their van in to Shanghai, and dropped off two of the men armed with assault rifles into the busy tourist district of The Bund. Before they were shot and killed by policemen, they managed to kill 142 people. Five minutes later, the van rammed into the glass frontage of the Agricultural Bank of China skyscraper and exploded. 25 people standing nearby were killed instantly, and during the resulting fire and structural damage to the building, 598 others died.

The Chinese government initially pointed the finger at Uighur separatists, but a blog post and video from the Sudan Resistance Front quickly clarified matters. The letter from Sadiq Naguib, discovered in their planning house, apparently written to his family – but not named or addressed – explains that he was doing this in retribution for ‘China’s occupation of our home’ and that with luck, this attack would cause them to think again.

The bombing was a significant moment for China. The country wasn’t a stranger to violent protests or even terrorist attacks, but most had come from regions in China’s periphery such as Tibet or Xinjiang, not halfway across the world. The middle class, already dissatisfied with the levels of corruption and economic slowdown, along with poor social services, were momentarily distracted with the prospect of a Chinese retaliatory attack on the terrorists’ ‘base’ in Sudan, but in an echo of the decade following the 2001 New York attack, increased security measures and strained political ties with African countries put even further pressure on China’s economy – and its social compact with its citizens.

Such were the strains of a nation that was moving to the forefront of the world…