The Future by Naomi Alderman

Author:Naomi Alderman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

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In Ucklum, Sweden, a young man watches an American show about monster trucks. This is about the only part of his day he enjoys, the time before his parents come home. He hates living here. He wants to move to Gothenburg but he doesn’t have the money and his family can’t give it to him. He hates how the only social life is the fucking pizza place and none of the other kids in his band take it seriously. He hates how the rest of the kids at school are so happy and love the tiny town and talk all the time about winter sports. He hates the winter when the sun never rises. He hates the summer when it never sets. Through the window of the screen he reaches himself into the other world, pulls his head and shoulders through into the American world, where everything is big and angry and hot and loud. He feels the heat from the engines blasting his hair back from his face. If he had a monster truck, he’d paint it with a scene of hell and put all the kids from school in the picture.

The show is over. The invitation to leave a comment flashes up on the screen. He stabs at the keys. Yaaaaaaaa, awesome! Monster trucks forever!

Happymeal runs through each word. “Forever” is emotive, a suggestion of common cause. The algorithm does not know this, of course, not in the way humans know things—not by placing itself imaginatively in the mind of a reader. It is a bead selected from a box over a million million attempts. It has been taught to analyze the comments to see which are pro monster truck and to adjust them minutely to receive fewer hearts, fewer likes, fewer milliseconds of engagement. Happymeal runs a million different realities in one-tenth of a second. It picks the one it’s been told to favor.

When the young man in Ucklum moves on to another show, on-screen his comment becomes: Yaaaaaaaa, awesome! Monster trucks.

Selah said: “See this one? We’re predicting it’s gone from nine likes to two likes. It sounds a bit wet now. Like he couldn’t even be bothered?”

Martha looked at it: “Some kid from fuckbum Sweden just lost seven little bits of reassurance.”

Badger rolled their eyes: “Zimri Nommik does this anyway. My mom does this anyway.”

Fantail did it as a matter of course: every user defaulted to seeing comments that the Fantail algorithms had been instructed to show them first. It was, Lenk had once told Martha, a full ninety minutes of work for any user to set up their own rules about what kind of information they wanted to see and turn off all the defaults and advertising filters and data extraction options for Fantail. That’s the ones you could turn off, if you knew what you were doing. Estimates were that an average user would need six hours to adequately research how to do this. A workday, just to stop Fantail from carefully showing you whatever it had figured out would make you spend the most time on the site.

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