The Last Chog
Someday when I have time, I plan to dramatically shorten this post, or split it into two parts.
Like a giant inflatable blivet, they pumped fifty billion tons a year into it for decades. Eventually, it started pressing down on our oceans, causing mountains of water to surge onto the land; coastlines moved miles inward, lowlands flooded, weather patterns flipped, oceans acidified, fresh water became scarce, and entire species relocated or died off. The blivet was full.
Humanity ultimately adapted. However, the years preceding the Great Adaptation were horrifying: food supplies collapsed, billions of refugees clogged the borders of upland countries, and all life everywhere changed forever. That is, except for The Last Chog.
For over one hundred years, billions of Chogs, who made up more than twenty percent of the human population, lived as though there was an endless bounty. Like swarms of robotic wasps, Chogs scraped, mined, refined, shipped, formed, bought, and sold every resource on earth. Nothing was out of reach; anything could be built; and all could be obtained with a click. If it could be imagined - for maximum profit and minimal consequence - the Chogs ripped, clawed, sawed, melted, twisted, formed, and willed it into existence.
Year after year, more and more humans joined the Chogs. And why not? Mega Chogs, which included brand marketers, CEOs, government officials, oligarchs, and influencers everywhere, all prayed at the altars of consumption and consumerism. The message was clear: conspicuous consumption inspired envy, attracted mates, unlocked immeasurable powers, and evidenced happiness, safety, and security. If they all became world-class consumers, how could anything go wrong?
Until the Chogs arrived, humans lived in harmony with the planet for over two hundred thousand years; yet it only took them one hundred years to fill the blivet and disrupt life for everyone else. They did it using a combination of dirty [industrial] technology and misguided faith. If it was dirty technology that filled the blivet, it was misguided faith in climate tech that led them to believe they could return the blivet to its pre-industrial form. It did not.
As the Chog population grew, many predicted the consequence of filling the blivet, but very few had the courage or the willpower to pin the problem on consumption. The Chogs wouldn’t accept recurring declines in output, growth, revenue, market share, harvests, yields, or any other Chog chart trend that pointed down. Instead, top Chogs continued to fly private jets, sail motorized yachts, build mega mansions, and gorge themselves on luxury items and exotic foods. Chogs everywhere chased baubles, trinkets, fast fashion, big trucks, bloated boats, useless gadgets, supersized meals, and the instant gratification that came from point-and-no-think buying. Even worse, to become good little consumers, Chog children were given devices that taught FOMO [fear of missing out], materialism, status seeking, and impulse purchasing. By sixteen, every one of them could be tracked, targeted, and seduced to believe that happiness came from an endless stream of stuff.
To drain the blivet, the Chogs spent trillions. Nevertheless, they couldn’t keep pace with the rapidly growing population of Chogs and their insane, “consequenceless consumption”.
Over many decades, the Chogs had self-organized into huge tribes led by Mega Chogs. The Mega Chogs used their power and sway to mislead followers about what amounted to fights over the realignment of consumption patterns. “It’s ridiculous to dramatically cut...We just need to redistribute...” [consumption] so they said...
So, the race to rip, claw, saw, melt, twist, form, and sell continued. Fighting and competing took its toll on the Chogs - and on the world. Billions of tons of garbage and waste clogged oceans, filled valleys, and dotted the landscape like inverted trashbergs. In the pursuit of stature and stuff, they spent years commuting to soulless jobs; they overmedicated, abandoned their families, shortened their lifespans, and created historic economic and social inequities.
As the blivet swelled, a rapidly increasing number of hungry, scared, and desperate refugees flooded the borders of safer lands. Migrations of billions, that should have taken several hundred years, happened in decades. In the animal kingdom, food webs rapidly reordered as many animals and plants were stranded in lowland areas. Meanwhile, insects, birds, and other mobile species rapidly moved upland. Fragile ecosystems, that were already stressed from years of unpredictable weather patterns, were overwhelmed by these new adversarial and invasive arrivals. The oceans fared no better: already overfished, acidification was now destroying marine life everywhere.
Many, many Chogs doubled down on consequenceless consumption; they built modern castles and gated communities, shopped frivolously, cornered the market for fish and other rare proteins, burned fossil fuels, shunned that notion of “we instead of me”, and prepped for armed conflict. They didn’t know it yet, but these people were about to become the last Chogs on earth.
Previously, humans had survived plagues, pandemics, world wars, and famine. This was entirely different. Consuming without consequence had pushed nature and civilization to the brink of collapse that no ‘war’ on ‘X’ was going to fix. Instead, rebalancing the ecosystem required an unprecedented adaptation: a Great Adaptation, a period when all humans had to learn to live in harmony with nature and each other...seemingly overnight.
A decade or so before the blivet exceeded capacity, more than six billion humans were already spending multiple hours per day inside Deeply Immersive Virtual Environments driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI DIVES). People used AI DIVES for everything, including: learning, working, relaxing, gaming, training, and simulating alternate realities, or “alties” for short.
The three features that made AI DIVES so compelling were limitless depth, hardened integrity, and prophetic probability predictions; all of these features took decades to deliver. Limitless depth enabled users to travel, tilt, pan, and zoom in any direction without audio or visual boundaries, constraints, or distortions. Concurrently, transparent and universal access to authenticated, peer-reviewed, and censorship-resistant data and code had generated unshakeable faith in the integrity of the most compelling AI DIVES. However, it was the prophetic probability predictions that were imbued within the simulated alternate realities (alties) that drove engagement worldwide.
After fifty years of reinforced learning, the intelligent agents that backstopped the alties were capable of generating godlike depictions of the future. Early on, the range of outcomes depicted were vast and almost inactionable; but over time, altie simulations became eerily accurate. Over the span of thirty years, probable outcome counts fell from more than twenty to several; with one outcome always more believable than the other. Doing ‘this’ rather than ‘that’ became an obvious choice.
As time went on, the Chogs used alties to experience the alternative outcomes of everything including: storytelling via synthetic media, engineering and architectural decisions, genetic alterations, military planning, crowd manipulation, gambling, medical treatments, resource planning, logistics, healthcare, epidemiology, and even sports team configurations.
However, there was one altie that changed the trajectory of humankind. The Global Eco Mind (GEM) was a universal consumption altie that enabled users to visualize and predict the often unseen impact of consumption decisions. The GEM began life as a consumption analytics overlay embedded within augmented reality [AR] lenses. As AR users skimmed over recognizable products, the GEM heatmapped everything by the degree of environmental impact. Twenty years in, the GEM morphed into a full-on altie that not only incorporated a universe of transaction, device, sensor, social, and human behavior data, the GEM also incorporated millions of validated outcomes to build predictions upon.
As the blivet pressed down on the world, GEM users could visualize every forkful of impact. Through haunting, real-life depictions, they could see the personal, local, regional, countrywide, and global impact of every consumption decision on earth. Beginning with resource mining and ending at disposal, the lifecycle of simple items like toys, clothing, packaging, and food could be visualized in aggregate. Complex products and services such as phones, electronics, vehicles or air travel could be deconstructed and viewed similarly. To GEM users, a stick of gum became ten million sticks of gum; a water bottle became a fracked field, a chemical plant, and an ocean of plastics that led to contamination of the food supply; an airline ticket became billions of blivet-inflating air travel trips. The crushing consequences of consumption upon all living things, both near and far, were finally on full display.
The GEM caused two rapid and significant shifts. First, Chogs everywhere commanded their authenticated, autonomous user agents (AAUAs) to optimize their life and consumption choices for planetary well-being. As such, billions of AAUAs ranked and selected products based upon regenerative designs and sustainable ingredients; furthermore, they cast billions of ranked choice votes based upon the likelihood of planet-positive outcomes. Second, the GEM enabled anyone to zoom into the grid to find remaining patches of Chogs that were still practicing consequenceless consumption, and needless to say, these areas flipped from bad to good almost overnight. That’s how the Great Adaptation came about, and it’s how we got to today. The blivet is mostly full and slowly deflating, but the crushing danger has passed.
So what happened to the last Chog? The last Chog lives upon a massive mountain of coal. He makes disposable things that nobody wants; tossing them into his valley of trash where they take ten thousand years to decay whilst leaching into nearby rivers and streams. The last Chog is often seen driving around his mountain in a massive white pickup truck as he sings the ‘Intoxicating Tango’ song to himself. He has no friends. He has no enemies. He’s the last sad Chog, on the last sad patch, in the sad GEM grid of consequenceless consumption.