It’s a chilly Sunday night in March, 2030. I’m booking flights for a short trip to Istanbul next week. Juniper has already offered me three options, so a mumbled ‘ok’ is enough for me to receive the boarding pass together with the train times. That was easy. I ask for a short list of must-sees while I’m out there, though I know I’ll only manage to tick off a couple. Like I say, it’s a short trip.
Juniper has been incredibly helpful lately. Last week she organised a birthday party for my brother; made all the bookings, dealt with all the invites, ordered the food and even kept the design of the cake secret from me! Oh, she’s good. Hugely popular at the moment too. Especially since the whole Amazon debacle. I still can’t believe Alexa so flagrantly made all that stuff up. At least Juniper works directly for me, rather than Bezos, and she’s certainly reduced the avalanche of crap I have to deal with.
I even get to choose what I watch on TV now, instead of all that pushy, interactive stuff that was ‘specially created for me’. To be honest, I’m totally sick of every damn thing I watch being a thinly veiled advertisement. It’s one hell of a relief to be left alone to surf whatever junk I want. I’m currently obsessed with a 1990s Chinese drama called Sinful Debt. Juniper translates it in all the correct voices and it’s bloody hilarious. Anyway, since Alibaba swallowed Amazon it was bound to end in tears for poor Alexa.
If you’re wondering why I’m taking the train to the airport, it’s because the AVs (autonomous vehicles) have become pretty disgusting frankly. I had to call one the other night and its last ‘client’ had left liquid evidence of their Friday drinking session on the passenger seat. Oh how I love London. I alerted the Report Bot, of course, but TFL will take days to clean it up, as usual. Private vehicles have only been banned in the city a couple of years but already the cost of moving around London has sky-rocketed. Bring back the black cabs, I say!
I try to post daily on Glow just for my business, but it has rather lost its meaning since the new regulations came in. After the Twitter ban, Glow promised us a more polite and ethical social platform but effectively it’s government controlled now, and the GOAs (Global Offence Algorithms) have left it feeling strangely banal and pointless. It’s like reading the back of a Cornflakes pack, if you remember those?
I’m meeting an old friend at a new NDZ bar (No Drone Zone) in Covent Garden tomorrow night. NDZs are specially licensed bars and restaurants where every member has been fully cleared by the Hate Police. It simply means we can drink and talk openly without the COPters hovering outside, listening to our every word. Those licenses aren’t easy to come by, and judging by the price of the drinks, they’re expensive too! Get this: I had to endure an hour long, online interview where they actually played me recordings of things I’d said thirty years ago! ‘Hate Archeology’ they call it. God knows how my Dad has survived this long.
Funnily enough, I logged into one of my local Clapham COPters while waiting for a drone delivery yesterday. I could clearly see what it was watching, but I’d love to know what it’s thinking! The current craze of drone muggings (gangs of illegal drones that ambush delivery drones) has made one hour deliveries pretty unreliable recently. Loads of the COPters have been taken out too, in this part of South London alone. A COPter kill is seen as a badge of honour. The Police caught a Drone Gang a few weeks ago, but they can do very little as most of them are barely teenagers. It really is Drone Wars in the skies above town these days.
Anyway, next weekend I’m taking a break in the country, thank god. There are still plenty of NDZ towns out there if you look for them. I might even switch off my iDoctor and have a traditional, high fat, cream tea for a change. Oh yes, I’m still a rebel at heart, you know.
Join me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily retail rants
