I think that it’s fairly likely that it will not take too long of a time for the entire surface of the Earth to become covered with data centres and power stations.”
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI Co-founder and former Chief Scientist
The Arklow Crimes have submitted their Wicklow County Development Plan and our very own futurist correspondent, Hal Feckard, makes his predictions for what the town will perhaps look like by 2028:
The much-heralded panacea of the data centre is finally completed, providing a whopping total of one minimum wage security job (for insurance purposes) remotely monitored from Kenya , as it rapes the Avoca River of, as Karen Hao states in her excellent critique Empire of AI, the oceans of required “potable—water often needed to cool the servers. (The water must be clean enough to avoid clogging pipes and bacterial growth)” to capacity, leaving in its wake only some smug puppet local representatives preaching delusions of endless economic growth and fantasy job figures, a giant hole in the corporate tax take and a scene akin to the aftermath of an oil tanker disaster from the resulting man-made drought as gasping, dehydrated swans, ducks and fish quickly envy the dead. Parish-pump public sector Paul surveys the damage from the Nineteen Arches Bridge and chimes: “But sure wasn’t there a few jobs out of it. Ya can’t make an omelette without breaking a few duck eggs.”
“They’ve entered communities in secrecy under shell companies; they’ve donated to community programs to dampen resistance; they’ve made promises to cities about the sustainability of their facilities before walking them back one by one after projects have broken ground and are more difficult to reverse[…]Most data centres did not provide many jobs beyond their initial construction. They are extractivist projects that come […] to use cheap water, tax-free land, and very poorly paid jobs.”
Empire of AI, Karen Hao
Arklow Main St now resembles a scene from Blade Runner as an artificially dense and persistent rain cloud hangs over the town due to condensation from the excessive data centre cooling, as these Anthropocene artefacts teem down on the labyrinth of flashing neon signs and noodle street food vendors of Arklow/Chinatown Main St. Mandarin has now fused with Arklowese in the novel indecipherable hybrid language of trade.
Whatever energy is left over from the resource-sapping data centre is used solely to run the now 178 burgeoning and only existing businesses; nail salons, barbers, vape/thrift/phone repair shops. “FULL EMPLOYMENT!!!!! EVEN FOR THE TRAFFICKED AND EXPLOITED,” bleats Cllr. Fitzbollocks on a loop from the tannoy speakers everywhere, repeating the state mantra of the day as the ever-metastasising dole queue is concealed from view with digital signing on days.
The oblivious, ditzy hunzos care not though, as their nine-inch nails cause them to consistently drop their iPhone 37s, thus fuelling a symbiotic cycle of business between nails and phone repair. Due to the radon poisoning from data centre heat emissions, the town’s citizens now resemble the Yul Brynner school of acting, but that doesn’t seem to stop the endless expansion of the aforementioned CCCCCAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHH OOOONNNNNLLLLYYYY barbers feeding the bottomless County Council their precious commercial rates and the Revenue Commissioners with questionable tax returns. “FULL EMPLOYMENT!!!!! GDP!!!”
An Garda Síochána have now been merged with the Traffic Warden Corps, forming An Garda Bailiú, with its stated aim to stealth tax the shit out of every last breathing human/economic unit now that the very last member of the class formerly known as middle has long since perished. As parking fine revenue collected is funnelled into central Wicklow County Council coffers, the squeezed working poor of Arklow are now perversely funding the upkeep of the Greystones Trafalgar Road bowls greens as the all-too-tight Lycra-wearing, vaginal-thrushed, pensioner ladies of leisure and serial NIMBY-ists debate over liquid lunches which social housing development to object to next.
A plastic recreation of what was previously known as a public house is all that remains now of how the commoners were once encouraged to interact with each other in the pre-social media era. This includes a fully functional, digitally uploaded hologram of a typical wrinkled resident barfly complete with snuff stains, crippling religious order–induced PTSD and cigarette breath included for that authentic experience.
With the price of a pint now €53, only the landlord class can afford to imbibe this precious elixir of the Gods and so, to prevent an even costlier peasant revolt, state-sponsored diluted cocaine, confiscated from the finest families of Arklow, is redistributed to what is left of the human capital/workforce. But there is no such thing as a free lunch/line in this ‘Republic of Opportunity,’ as whilst at least ostensibly mollifying the great unwashed, the state expects a return from their ‘investment,’ as the discounted drug crucially allows the slaves to function hangover-less at their artificial bullshit Monday morning job and, crucially, endlessly consume and argue online with their fellow disenfranchised, zombied, Netflix, Amazon-Primed, arsehole digital avatars.
Following the Vatican mandate to liquidate all non-performing assets, St. Mary’s & Peter’s Catholic Church has now been converted to a six-storey brothel, surpassing even Dublin’s famous old ‘Monto.’ Cllr. Fitzbollocks’ son wins the operating licence under disputed circumstances, but as westerners no longer risk sex any more due to reproduction meaning immediate economic suicide, a permanent immigrant slave underclass are instead imported to copulate and procreate within the brothel with their fellow countrywomen.
“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialised human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future…Directors of Hatcheries.”
A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Like a nuclear-addled cockroach, the clergy still comfortably survive off the millions donated by deceased establishment party voters and ‘THE GREAT REPLACEMENT BOOOIIIIIII!!!!!’ by African evangelicals embracing the Christian religion of the ‘White Devil.’
“When the white man came, we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
Jomo Kenyatta
Father File’s successor, Father Eunuch, gleefully dusts off the Roman Catholic Church human trafficking manual, ruthlessly ensuring that any resulting pregnancies, or ‘Brothel Babies’ as the tabloids have so cruelly dubbed these unfortunates, are swiftly weaned from their mothers to serve as expendable slave labour in what is left of the local factory jobs. Each economic unit is still half a credit a week cheaper than the machines!
Under the Utilitarian Act 2028, all second- and third-level education has been officially abolished as the state (who not so long ago told everyone to learn how to code and before that get any college degree at all) now mandates that everyone trains to become a plumber. The Plumbing Cert emerges solely to train workers to construct the cooling pipes of the endless data centres housing AI that exist, as Yanis Varoufakis states: “to train us, to train them, to train us, to train them…” Due to public backlash from the banished intelligentsia class, a first-year philosophy module is reluctantly included for students at the last minute, entitled, “I Plumb, Therefore I Am.”
An unintended consequence of the Utilitarian Act 2028, though, is now that everyone was told to become a plumber, nobody needs to avail of their services on the open market any more and so thousands merely “Plumb for Fun,” which is spun as a government initiative to perform unnecessary plumbing to pass the time, check if your elderly neighbours are “expired” yet, or just to all too briefly converse with fellow humans about all things plumbing since nobody bothers to talk about the perennial data centre rain cloud any more. A princely 20 credits are added to their existing Universal Basic Income payment for this duty to multinational and country.
After intense negotiation, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have at least now made their incestuous union official into the one authoritarian weeping boil, Fine in Failure, with the negotiation sticking point for the greedy gombeen bolloxes being the lucrative breeding/slaving rights from the ‘Brothel Baby’ sector. As their pure dynastic bloodlines ever dwindle due to the unauthorised miscegenation resulting from their younger members’ trips to the Church Brothel, inbreeding increases rapidly amongst the ruling classes in a vain effort to keep land, titles, GAA captaincies and government jobs/contracts in the grasp of their greasy flippers.
A catastrophic side effect of over a century of this intermarrying and interbreeding peaking is that their offspring are spawned horrifically deformed and mutated to Habsburgian proportions. The one-party Fine in Failure apparatchiks still manage to bypass the mandatory abortion on non-productive economic units/citizens though, with the resulting offspring now filling the largely ceremonial and toothless local councils as every national and local decision is now overseen directly from Silicon Valley, California.
A typical Municipal District meeting now consists of the insipid mutant representatives being wheeled in inside formaldehyde jars, as the county manager informs them of the latest developments on the Wexford Road potholes and, as per usual, the cemetery dead and decaying are still devoted more minutes than the living tax-paying serfs and long-exiled emigrants.
As only the generational wealthy elites own anything and their well-paid jobs/titles escape automation, Universal Basic Income credits are introduced to allow the proles barely enough (supplemented by black market drug dealing) for one human capital/economic unit to eat and lease a dwelling pod. Once the crucible of Arklow’s ‘White Only Policy,’ ironically, Fernhill has now been converted into one of the largest sprawling IPAS centres in the EU (operated by Billy Fitzbollocks’ sadistic wife.) In a cruel twist of fate for the proud housing estate’s ‘indigenous Austrian/Viking/Norman/British/Irish mongrels’ though, the centre has been constructed to house not only the ‘Brothel Babies’/‘New to the Parish,’ but also themselves!
Initially, tensions between the ‘Arklow Says No’ clans and ‘Brothel Babies’ faction result in multiple fatalities, but as the local merchant class factories’ productivity and profits plummet, a peace deal brokered by an emergency meeting of the Municipal District Jars soon quells animosities. As the Arklonians and the ‘Brothel Babies’ slowly learn they are both being fucked in equal measure by Fine in Failure, they form a common brotherhood and even a soccer team (which would eventually go on to win the 2026 FIFA World Cup.)
Fearing revolution and social harmony, the IPAS operator bans all book reading and, similar to the early 20th-century Southern West Virginia coalfields miner strikes, divides company sports teams along ethnic lines in a bid to split the workforce and pit them against each other. As engineered, the tribal warfare resumes but as the slaves are now approaching the end of their productivity life cycle, a cull is due anyway to allow for fresh replacement batches.
Due to gerontocratic voters’ stubborn refusal to die, the Fine in Failure party still hang on to influence by the finest of margins. A panicked ruling class pours vast resources into scientific advancements to ensure these doting kingmakers reach an average lifespan of at least 125 years plus now. The distilled misery and anguish of Millennials and Zoomers are now forcibly extracted and collected from their tear ducts and added to the winter flu vaccine, thus increasing the eldery’s longevity and rates of ‘voting early and often.’
As the Secret Ballot Act has long been abolished, voters must ‘vote the right way,’ and if not, a pathogen is released for any non-compliant geriatrics. To ease into this transition, moving statues are reintroduced to dazzle and distract any codgers who may begin to question what the fuck is going on.
Not content with this manufacturing of consent, and never to miss out on squeezing every last scintilla of productivity out of a young or old economic unit, the government have long since abolished all forms of childcare, with the adult-nappied now forced full time into the rearing of their nappied grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.
As the Fine in Failure slogans preach: “It takes a village to raise a consumer/future taxpayer/human capital/economic unit,” but with the modern-day commune being anything but, as parents only see their children in hologram form, as they toiling endlessly at invented, pointless jobs they hate that exist solely to keep them permanently tired, obedient, exhausted, frustrated, separated and stressed and under the boot heel of corporate-funded state power.
Work, consume, die!
The drive to short-term, precarious contracts in the gig economy, and to flexibility and mobility in modern neoliberal capitalism ignores our connection to place and home — the essential human need to belong. […] The resulting sense of emptiness and placelessness creates mental distress and alienation. People then try to fill this void with other things, like consumerism. This is the business plan of corporate capitalism.
Gaffs: Why No One Can Get a House, and What We Can Do About It, Rory Hearne
In the fertile crescent of the rolling Wicklow Hills, not much has changed in the lair of the puppetmaster, as the never-satisfied, old-moneyed landed gentry seek to expand their wealth and land further. The lords of the manor watch amusingly, “much like someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water,” from the safe distance of their ivory towers as the Arklow plebiscites bicker over whatever Budget Day scraps these maniacal absentee landlords have instructed to be left to their subjects. With titles plucked straight from Game of Thrones, ‘The House of Lancaster,’ the largest land baron in the area, laments at how much dividing and conquering has come to cost these days, but quelling the peasants by the least costly method was always a tactic their ancestors had finessed: “Can we rule this place by contract, or must we rule it by cannon?”
Voltaire
Parish pump public sector Paul will return in “A View to a Sexless Marriage”
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