Mad Max – Scenario

Background:

The year is 2030 and we get to follow an afternoon in Fredrik’s life.

Fredrik works at FMG in central Stockholm, Sweden. He has worked here since the early 2020’s; he commenced his career in sales but has since then worked his way up to become an AI-recreator.

Everything is media and nobody trusts anybody

“Damn, what a day”. The last meeting of the day is running over time and Fredrik checks the news while waiting for the meeting to end so that he can go home. A notification pops up in his ear-pod, apparently there’s a shooting in Rio. This interests Fredrik and he blinks two times to find out more about it through his eye-sensor. An AR-version of the news anchor shows up in the chair across from Fredrik and quickly briefs him on what has happened. She asks if Fredrik would like to know more or has any questions, but Fredrik has already missed too much of the meeting so he decides to blink the news away.

The clock strikes five and the meeting is finished. On the way out Fredrik blinks up the news again. The AR-anchor stands next to Fredrik in the elevator and answers all of Fredriks questions about the shooting. Fredrik thinks about how it was back in the early 2020’s “How boring it used to be when the news were one-dimensional and you had to search for more information yourself. And time consuming!”

He walks out from the office building and a projected ad for a car shows up in front of him, followed by a pair of pink heels. Fredrik sighs “None of this is the slightest bit relevant to me”. Sometimes he looks back at the time before “the big reveal”, when ads were still targeted towards specific people. There were some benefits to that time, but he has no trouble standing a few irrelevant ads in exchange for being completely anonymous and sure that no foreign powers have access to his personal data. After his last raise he was able to upgrade his “personal space” subscription, so the number of ads he’s exposed to every day has decreased significantly. ¨

As he walks down towards the subway he gets a notification saying that his personal ID number has been found in a database in Hong Kong. Unbelievable. Despite paying to get completely deleted of the internet ten years ago, like almost everybody did after “the big reveal”, his ID safety tracking gets a few hits every year. Luckily his friend Olle is one of Stockholms best personal safety-hackers and will be able to help him delete the information, the personal safety-hackers are so expensive otherwise.

When he arrives at the house he is met by his partner. They have planned a movie night and his partner wants to see some new action movie while Fredrik prefers rom-coms. They sit down in the sofa and Fredrik streams the old classic Love Actually in his eye-sensor. They have just downloaded a few old movies in VR-format and Fredrik loves to re-watch them. His partner watches some tired action movie. “It’s so convenient that we can watch together, but experience different things” Fredrik thinks while grabbing his partner’s hand. At the same time his ear-pod tells him that Olle has located and deleted his data once again. ”Puh” he sighs, that could have gone badly.

Summary:

1.     All personal data is deleted from the internet and targeted ads no longer exist

2.     AR, in-ear devices and eye-sensors have become part of our everyday life