What People Will Still Be Fighting For in 2096

by | Culture

Culture

The Fight for the Future

Here is the thing about a broken world: the people inside it are not broken in the same way, or to the same degree, or all at once.

The world of 2096 has been damaged by specific, traceable, human choices. The people who live inside it remain, stubbornly and sometimes magnificently, human — which is to say: capable of love, capable of fury, capable of the particular grace that arrives when a person decides that the conditions of their life are not the full measure of their life.

The cautionary tradition in speculative fiction has a failure mode that the best of it avoids and the worst of it falls into: the mistake of depicting a world so comprehensively broken that its inhabitants have been broken too. The grey, flattened, affect-less populations of the most dystopian dystopias — people who have had the fight ground out of them so completely that they exist as illustrations of a thesis rather than as human beings.

The world of Shards of a Shattered Sky refuses that failure mode. Its people fight. Here is what they fight for, and why those things are still worth fighting for, and what their fighting tells us about the relationship between the human spirit and the conditions it inhabits.

Dignity: The Irreducible Claim

The first thing people fight for in 2096 is the most ancient and the most non-negotiable: the claim that their lives matter. That the distance between their birth and their death is not merely an administrative interval in which they consumed resources and generated data, but a span of genuine meaning that deserves to be witnessed, honored, and remembered.

In a world where the life expectancy gap between the wealthy and the poor has reached thirty years, where the comprehensive surveillance of the lower economic tier has made the unobserved self a luxury item, where the literacy gap has created a population that cannot read its own contracts, the fight for dignity is not abstract. It is the specific, daily, costly insistence on being treated as a person rather than a data point. On having one’s name known and one’s story heard. On being the subject of one’s own life rather than the object of someone else’s management.

Dignity in 2096 is not a philosophical position. It is a daily practice of resistance — the insistence, repeated in the face of every system designed to reduce a person to their measurable outputs, that the life being lived is irreducibly more than what can be extracted from it.

Love: The Untaxable Currency

The second thing people fight for, and the thing that the surveillance architecture has the most difficulty monetizing and the political fracture has the most difficulty weaponizing, is love. The specific, particular, chosen attachment of one human being to another — the kind that names its object and shows up in the difficult moments and does not calculate the return on its investment.

Love in 2096 is not a retreat from the political. It is, in the world of the trilogy, one of the primary forms that political resistance takes — because the systems of control in 2096 are most powerful when they isolate, when they atomize, when they replace the dense web of human interdependence with the thinner, more surveyable, more manageable web of individual consumption. Love resists atomization. Community resists surveillance in the way that a crowd resists a count — by being, in its full humanity, larger than any data set can contain.

Love in 2096 is not apolitical. In a world designed to atomize and surveil, the dense web of chosen human attachment is among the most durable forms of resistance — too large, too specific, too particular to be fully contained in any data set.

Truth: The Dangerous Luxury

The third fight is the most costly in the world of 2096, because in a world built on the lies examined in the previous post — the lie of inevitable progress, the lie of the bargain freely made, the lie of the exceptional case, the lie of the stable future — truth is not merely an intellectual value. It is a political act with consequences.

The journalism infrastructure of 2096 exists in the condition that DataArts documented for the arts in 2025 and that journalism had been navigating since the collapse of the advertising model in the 2010s: contracted, concentrated into fewer and more precariously funded outlets, operating in an information environment where the speed and volume of produced content make the careful, verified, specifically true story a luxury product in a market that rewards the fast and the emotionally satisfying over the accurate and the complex.

The people who fight for truth in 2096 fight for it the way that DataArts documented human-made art surviving AI disruption: by becoming more deliberate, more committed, more aware of what they are doing and why it matters. The handmade truth, like the handmade painting, becomes precious precisely because it is no longer easy. Because it required someone to care enough to do the hard thing.

Truth in 2096 is a handmade object in a world flooded with generated content. Its value is precisely its cost — the specific human commitment required to produce it carefully enough that it can be trusted.

Autonomy: The Right to an Unscripted Life

The fourth fight is for the right to move through the world without the movement being predicted, managed, and redirected by systems with interests in its direction. The right to make choices that are not the product of algorithmic optimization. The right to want things that were not suggested to you. The right to be, in some meaningful sense, the author of your own life rather than a character in someone else’s model.

In a world where the behavioral data economy has seventy years of compounding sophistication, where the AI systems that optimize for engagement and purchase and political behavior have been trained on the full behavioral history of the population they are managing, the fight for autonomy is the fight for the gap between the predicted and the actual. The deviation. The choice that the model did not see coming. The life that exceeded its predicted parameters.

This is, in the world of the trilogy, one of the primary moral claims of the resistance: not the grand political claim of rights and constitutions, but the intimate, daily, almost private claim that I am more than what you have predicted me to be. That the model is not the person. That the data does not exhaust the life.

The fight for autonomy in 2096 is the fight for the gap between the predicted and the actual self — the insistence that the model is not the person, that the data does not exhaust the life, that the deviation from the expected is not an error but an identity.

Memory: The Unrelinquished Past

The fifth fight, and the one that takes the longest view, is for memory. For the preservation and transmission of the specific, documented, living record of how the world came to be what it is — so that the normalized can be denormalized, so that the “always this way” can be corrected with the “once it was different”, so that the grandmother at seventy can tell her grandchildren about the aquifer her grandfather farmed above and make the loss tangible rather than theoretical.

The fight for memory in 2096 is the fight that the trilogy itself is conducting on behalf of the present. By building a world that is the recognizable consequence of choices being made right now, the fiction is making an argument about memory: that the future has a past, that the past is us, that the choices being made at this moment are the memories that 2096 will inherit.

What people will still be fighting for in 2096 is the same thing people have always fought for when the conditions of their lives have been arranged to make fighting difficult: the claim that the life is real, the love is real, the truth is real, the self is real, and the past that produced the present is a record that can be read and learned from and, with enough stubbornness and enough love, changed.

In a broken world, fighting for those things is not naive. It is the most sophisticated response available to a creature that has, for all of recorded history, refused to be entirely what the conditions of its existence required it to become.

 

 

Sources Cited

The research and data underlying the conditions that make each of these fights necessary.

Dignity, Inequality, and the Body

Surveillance, Autonomy, and the Observed Self

Truth, Memory, and the Information Environment

Human Resistance, Love, and Community

 

Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts