A prediction for the year 2194
Ferran Sáez Mateu He doesn't waste time on social media. He devotes himself to reading and writing, playing and listening to music, and walking. He lives a classic, old-fashioned, in-person life. He sleeps little and daydreams. Now he's written a disturbing novel with the title of an essay: The other hypothesis (Electa). A nightmare. The narrator is an old man, 141 years old, who doesn't have much time left before facing the state of LVF (Physical Vital Limit), set at 150 years old, and then becoming an EPV, that is, a person framed in the Permanent Virtual State, with a digitalized brain, without a biological body. At the end of the 22nd century, death is dead: it is an obsolete category.
In this situation, in the sad solitude of a nursing home—"my children haven't called me for years"—the protagonist begins to write a diary in which he reviews his life, especially the episode in his youth in which he participated and which marked him as much as humanity. This event took place in 2075 and involved moving the Great Wall of China (6,260 km long) 400 meters south, stone by stone. This initiative mobilized millions of volunteers from around the world. The memory of those memorable days, which marked a turning point in history, comes back to him again and again.
He was 22 years old at the time and arrived at Jaiyu Pass, on the westernmost part of the Great Wall. He went as a volunteer, convinced that a collective gesture of this kind "would contribute to improving the world" and to showing that China, already then the world's leading power far ahead of the others, "was not an empire based on coercion or threats, but the country that, without renouncing its past, wanted to offer the world a law. He was one of many young European idealists seduced by the challenge of regenerating a planet devastated by the Great Pandemic of 2051, which had decimated the planet's population by almost half.
In the world of 2194, universities, a remnant of an old destructive elitism, have been closed (research is done by large companies); series are free for everyone; public opinion is shaped influencers with billions of followers; the doctrine of evolution of "some Marwin or Darbin, or something like that" has been banned and included in the Index of Monitored Subjects; the people have self-determined through The Single Network, leaving behind "the ridiculous illusion of democracy that so seduced our parents and grandparents," who were hooked on what "they still cynically called media"; and the NIA (New Artificial Intelligence) rules everything.
Our man, Josep Duran, follows theinfluencer HH00, according to whom "consistency is only a prejudice, and inconsistency will make you grow as a resilient person": "Prove to yourself that you can prove things to yourself, but without having to do it if you don't feel like it. Don't live according to what you think." But the question that worries Josep is not how to live, but how to die, now that his brother Luciano, somewhat older, does not see clearly entering the stage of EPV: "Perhaps the way people died before was better."
Ferran Sáez's dystopia is written in 2025 in which Western liberal democracies seem to have taken the path of self-destruction, in which China is only gaining ground and influence, in which the university and academic world is in deep crisis, in which people pay more attention to the last influencer youthful than any veteran expert journalist and in which artificial intelligence has burst onto the scene with unusual force. The other hypothesis, well, it seems quite plausible. The path is clear. Today, many thinkers warn us of a return to fascism. Sáez points us toward an even more disturbing time.