I was born in an insignificant town hidden within the rot of the Midwest. My grandpa, who lived with my mother since before I was born, always told me about his work at the aluminum factory within walking distance of our house. The factory was demolished in the 2000s to be replaced with a mall which itself closed in the 2030s, becoming a haunting grounds for the homeless and young alike.
After school one day, I asked my father why his father had always been living with us. He said that it wasn’t a big deal, it was just that Social Security had been reduced, and he had health problems, and he was too old to work, and on and on and on until I regret asking. But at the end of it, I begged to get a job, because even if I couldn’t earn enough money to help grandpa live on his own, maybe I could make enough money to expand our cramped house. My father laughed until he had tears in his eyes, and said that there was no work for me to do, and to just accept the small house as it were.
An avid reader, this didn’t make sense to me. I remembered reading about mill girls in Massachusetts who worked in factories from the age of ten. Sure, that was child labor, but what about a century later? Boys biked around neighborhoods throwing newspapers and ran storefronts. Yet another century later, the newspapers are all digital; homogenous stores manned with digital men. But there is always work to be done, a few streets away, heroin needles and trash covered the ground in a blanket of despair and nihilism. Yet no one was willing to pay for the cleanup - evidently, that concern ran behind the priorities of accumulating capital and profit.
Perhaps those writings sound like one of a lazy communist who wishes to return to the 19th century. But that view would be wrong, for I was not only not a communist, but feverishly devoted to working, even without any pay. After school every day, I brought a few garbage bags and picked up every broken needle and pill bottle within walking distance of the landfill. For weeks, I worked tirelessly, right up until the moment my mother found out that her garbage bags were being used to pick up someone else’s trash, ending the whole endeavor. I complained to her, for I had no job, what else could be a better use of my time? She told me that schoolchildren working was an artifact of the past, that none of her friends had children who worked, and to improve my grades instead.
Though the scolding left me annoyed, I kept a cool face the whole time, remembering that few of my other friends were lucky enough to have two parents living under the same roof. I gave up on my community service to improve my grades, hoping that an advanced education could give me the perspective to see the world as it is and the capital to change it. By my senior year, my grades had improved to the point of getting me into the best public university in the state, which I was told was also the cheapest option, the tuition being paid for by a percentage of income rather than the old system of a flat amount.
Without a head for the physical sciences, I turned my focus to the comforting abstracts in computing and anthropology, graduating with a bachelors in the former in both. For years, I spent my time plodding along, bouncing from company to company, working in cybersecurity and automated systems. I returned home for my grandpa’s funeral, which a few old friends of mine attended. Afterwards, we drank in a bar until the sky turned light again, and I asked them, only one of whom had completed college, how things were.
Our little cohort at that moment boasted an electrician, a chef, a teacher, and a landscaper. Of the group, only I made more money than the mean salary at the time. I was astounded, as all of them struck me as hardworking and dedicated adults, much more than I ever thought I was. All of them had been unemployed for months at a time.
The teacher turned to me and said that the town was in the final stages of decomposition.
I said that made no sense. On my ride home, I saw restaurants and storefronts and superchains that weren't there just a few years earlier. We even got an ExtraMart, the symbol of development and modernity.
The chef pointed out that new restaurants only required an overseeing manager for the Autochefs they purchased from Click Sprint. The teacher mentioned that much of learning in lower education nowadays was done by artificial intelligences engineered to appeal to kids. The landscaper said that there had been a decline in demand for his services as people took to Minibots to trim their lawns and pull up weeds, contracting larger, cheaper-than-human-labor robots to pour gravel. The electrician groaned at the mention of Minibots and said that he contemplated moving to Mexico where his services would no doubt be in higher demand.
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None of them were as financially stable as they wanted to be, and all of them were ashamed at having to be assisted by the government.
They turned to me and asked me what I had been doing, so I answered honestly. I said that I worked with the United States Postal Service to link distribution networks, cutting down lots of human labor involved. At a dying social media company, I blew the whistle on their obscene privacy and security practices and was fired as a result. In Silicon Valley, I worked at a firm which specialized in crushing bureaucracy in foreign governments. And on and on and on.
Afterwards, no one said anything, but the tone was clear: they all thought I was helping to end the old world we grew up in with a new one which was strangling us.
We departed and I went home to sleep as the morning birds chirped. I woke up just before sunset and drank enough water to offset the dehydration which had occurred the night before, heading out for a walk to see the streets I had once tried to clean years ago. The houses had emptied, windows cracked and doors missing. The streets held more trash than asphalt. A slow moving wave of impoverished hell looked to have been sweeping the town for years, even as minutes away, brand new buildings gleamed.
In my work as cybersecurity, I noticed that many places often broke company policy and legislative law when it came to securing systems. The majority of the firms I advised took my comments to heart and changed their practices. However, outliers in the automotive industry resisted my advice on redesigning their accessing systems. Distraught over the glaring security issues, I began to search for possible incidents of individuals exploiting the system, posting proof that the Minneapolis woman who hacked her car to run over her boyfriend likely used a trivial exploit to do so. Without any possible way to advance my concerns in the company, I ran to local and national media outlets, only two of which ran a tiny story on. My promises of anonymity by the media were broken, and I was publicly and humiliatingly fired.
The firing followed me for the rest of my career in technology, stifling any opportunity I had, leaving me on the diluted unemployment system for months. I moved back in with my parents only to see that the house had fallen apart since I last visited, so I used virtually all of my savings to fix it up, though my father said to not bother. My mother, who last held a job when she was driving for the Postal Service, cried at the injustice of my career’s termination when I told her. The cushy life I had lived was essentially over by that point. We lived poorly for years, as I was unable to advance professionally due to the bad blood spilt by me.
This is why I hacked the cars. This is why I sent them towards the very services destroying the fabric of our society, rendering perfectly educated and hardworking people of all backgrounds nearly unemployable and poor. I should be lauded by the few fatalities that occurred; in the wrong hands, the number could be many millions.
I have already been called a terrorist by the news media, a term I completely disagree with. Though civilian institutions were targeted, civilians themselves were not. After I had confirmed that over six thousand cars had been compromised, all of them were paused for three minutes while warnings played in nine different languages telling passengers to exit the car immediately. Those that were detected to be occupied after the time passed were released from control. All deaths occured due to faulty sensors; the tragedy of which is not lost upon me. I have released statements apologizing to the families in addition to my apologies in court; some of whom have protested my impending death.
The section at the beginning is going to be portrayed as a sympathetic grab. Here is something to think about: why does learning about the life and motivation of someone make you more sympathetic? Is it because you’ve been brainwashed, or because the more you learn about a person, the more you’re willing to lend them credibility and view them as equal human beings? Giving context behind actions is not by any means a desperate bid for sympathy. People across the nation have held peaceful demonstrations demanding that my appeal for a life sentence be accepted, a proposition which was unfairly denied. The doctor assigned to lethally inject me has resigned in protest after working with the Florida State Prison for fifteen years. Though I won’t live to see it, the tide is slowly turning in this country, one that will morph into a tsunami by the end of the decade.
Tomorrow, the State will inject potassium chloride into my arm to trigger a cardiac arrest, killing me. But today, I write confidently, defiantly, and without regret.
Sincerely, Pete
*** From Freaky Floridians: Programmer Peyton Special ***
Peyton Jones was a former software engineer controversially convicted of using weapons of mass destruction after hacking into autonomous car systems and directing them to crash into cloud computing sites, resulting in three deaths and over a hundred injuries. In the five minutes before control of cars was recovered, nearly twenty billion dollars in damages had been caused, with untold billions from lost productivity afterwards. His final writing from death row, known as the Jonifesto to his supporters, was read by approximately forty million people before being scrubbed from the surface web in the newest drive against extremist content. Jones was executed on May 16th, 2056.