The world you live in didn’t flip overnight into a dystopia. It slid there, one capitalist and convenient step at a time. From your perspective, this is roughly what happened over the last seven years.
It started with what everyone called the "Stack Wars". There were already giant companies like Macrosoft, Tosla and Taigazon providing almost everything: Cloud and storage, smart devices and operating systems, social platforms... Each one wanted to be the big one, the monopolist.
Then came a series of supply chain crises (fuel first, chips later), extreme weather events that wrecked ports and cities and the competition from those companies started to get like REALLY fierce... and then... they began to crave something terrifyingly simple: “One system. One standard. Just make it all work.” They basically stopped fighting with each other.
The consortium of tech giants built a unified “neutral” infrastructure backbone where basically everything of importance runned: the internet, the voting systems and every single cent... They branded it as The Signal™: the infrastructure that would protect and future-proof civilization... and they were all partners
People didn’t vote for it directly, they didn't care about politics anymore. Every person, goverment and company gradually adopted the Signal™ stack because it was cheaper, it solved endless compatibility issues and well, the marketing was great.
Your phone, your job, your local government IT... They all quietly updated to Signal™ systems.
On paper, Signal™ didn’t rule the world. It just managed identity, provided cloud services, optimized distribution, scaled AI to a consumer level... things that seemed necesary. Governments remained, flags still flew, elections happened. But more and more, those institutions ran on Signal™ software.
Then the scoring started. Signal™ introduced:
No one voted for this. It appeared in terms-of-service updates, in government procurement contracts, in HR systems. You might have skimmed an email about it once. When someone complained, the answer was always “It’s automated. It’s neutral. The IA decided.”
Once everyone relied on Signal™, the lock-in began.
A massive cyberattack took down non-Signal™ networks in several countries. Signal™’s fortified backbone held. Everyone else did not. Losing Signal™ meant losing access to payments, logistics, and identity. Opting out became, well, a suicide.
A few states tried to “restore digital sovereignty” by forking off, but their economies collapsed within months as international trade, insurance, and banking refused to work with “non-compliant infrastructures.”
A series of climate and refugee crises overwhelmed any region that tried to go it alone. Signal™ arrived each time with highly optimized relief – at a price.
By the time the dust settled, Signal™ owners (basically four trillonaries) controlled most critical infrastructure: power grids, ports, cloud, identity, communications, health records...
Governments became Partner Administrations (local managers implementing Signal™’s policies). On the news, you still hear about “Prime Minister X” or “President Y”, but their decisions are constrained by those four bastards.
Signal™ internal doctrine is: “Humanity is inefficient and biased. Systems should be optimized by tech and not by outdated politics (and our owners will get richer in the process).”
In today's world people with capital thrive. Everyone else is tolerated, managed, and nudged, or detained by the Field Agents.
These Field Agents are not always uniforms with guns (though those exist with a very "nazi styled" uniform). They are mostly private security units, auditors and enforcement squads for “risk events”. They look like normal contractors, delivery drivers, or maintenance crews… until the situation escalates.
From birth (or registration), you have a Signal™ ID. It links to your legal identity, biometric data (face, voice, gait, etc.) and your financial accounts.
The Church has access to your location history (stored and aggregated) and only people living off grid in self managed environments (mainly in rural areas) are free from this.
Housing is usually a subscription service: Pay a monthly “living service fee.” Includes maintenance, basic utilities, sometimes shared amenities. Controlled by Signal™ or its partners as “Asset Clusters.” Eviction is often automated: Miss enough payments or trigger enough risk flags makes your keycode stop working, your access token deactivates and your stuff packed.
Cheap housing tends to be densely packed and farther from high-tier zones where everything is secure and flooded with services and comfort.
Most work is now platform-managed, you don’t just have “a job”. You have a profile of tasks matched in real time by Signal™ algorithms. For most people, that looks like corporate employment with a salary and remote-work tools.
Basic care is “included” for everybody in theory. Appointment priority and treatment options are heavily filtered and the waiting times leads to death in a lot of cases.
Data from your wearables, sleep trackers, diet and exercise apps and payment history feeds into your “Health Risk Profile.”
Early education is standardized and heavily digitized, even teachers are AI based. Higher education is a subscription-based service with dynamic pricing.
Most media is produced or distributed through systems that Signal™ either owns or licenses. Movies and TV Shows are personalized by learning algorithms and AI Produced. You still see some dissenting opinions, but high-visibility dissent is labeled as “unverified” or “potentially destabilizing.” Creators critical of Signal™ are nudged into algorithmic obscurity, unless they’re useful as controlled catharsis.
Cultural life fragments into corporate-aligned mainstream (idols, influencers, sanitized art) and underground scenes using old tech, local mesh networks, print, zines, encrypted forums...