Technology of 2096: Progress or Control?

by | Culture

Culture

2096 Technology Access: It’s All About Class. Wasn’t It Always?

Progress and control are not opposites in the world of 2096. They are not even in tension. They are, with the patience of seven decades of compounding development, one in the same — the same system, the same infrastructure, the same interface — experienced differently depending entirely on which side of the economic divide you find yourself on when you reach out and touch it.

Technology in the world of the Shards of a Shattered Sky trilogy (that begins with One Grain of Sand) does not resemble the gleaming, chrome-and-glass dystopian tech of earlier speculative traditions. It does not announce itself as sinister. It does not require a villain to operate. It is, in its texture and its affect and its daily presence in the lives of the characters who move through it, ordinary. Unremarkable. The way electricity is ordinary. The way running water is ordinary. The way the road beneath your feet is ordinary, until you notice who built it and for whose movement it was designed.

Here is how technology became, in the world of 2096, both the century’s greatest achievement and its most durable instrument of stratified control.

The Wondrous Half: What Technology Genuinely Delivered

Let me be honest about the wonders first, because the world of 2096 is not a place where technology failed. It is a place where technology succeeded magnificently — for some people, in some domains, with benefits distributed according to the same geometry that distributes every other good in this world.

Artificial intelligence contributed an estimated 1.2 to 2 percent of additional annual GDP growth across the intervening decades, per the NBER’s analysis. The precision medicine available to the wealthy Americans of 2096 — AI-optimized nutrition, gene therapy, metabolic treatments descended from the GLP-1 revolution of the 2020s, early-detection diagnostics that identify and address disease before it becomes illness — represents the most sophisticated biological maintenance ever applied to a human body. These people live longer, healthier, more cognitively vital lives than any generation that preceded them.

AI-augmented education, for those with access to it, has elevated the ceiling of human cognitive achievement in ways that would seem fantastical by today’s standards. The personalized, adaptive, globally networked learning environment available to the children of the credentialed class in 2096 is not a marginal improvement on the education of 2026. It is a different category of thing entirely.

The wonders are real. The technology genuinely delivered. That is the first thing to understand about technology in 2096, because it is the fact that makes the second thing so much more devastating.

Technology in 2096 did not fail. It succeeded magnificently — and the success was distributed according to the same geometry that distributes every other good in this world. That is not a technology failure. That is a political one.

The Dangerous Half: What Technology Was Permitted to Become

The NBER paper that documents AI’s contribution to GDP growth also documents the mechanism of labor displacement with the same dispassionate precision: 85 million jobs displaced globally in the near term, with new job creation unevenly distributed by education, geography, and access to capital. The worker-to-retiree ratio collapsing from 3.0 to 2.0 by 2075, per Penn Wharton, rewrites every assumption about the social insurance systems that were designed for a different demographic arithmetic.

The WEF’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 confirmed the structural shape of the transformation: not replacement of work by non-work, but replacement of accessible work by work requiring credentials and capital that the displaced worker does not have and the social infrastructure did not provide. The middle of the labor market hollowed out with a precision that economists had been predicting since the 2010s and that policymakers declined to address with the seriousness the prediction warranted.

In the arts, the ACM’s 2024 analysis documented the AI disruption in specific, human terms: one in three professional illustrators had already lost work to AI displacement by 2025, at an average annual cost of $12,500 in wages. The question of whether AI is collaborator, competitor, or colonizer in the creative economy had not been answered, but the displacement was real and the policy protection was not.

The dangerous half of the technology story is not dramatic. It is the story of displacement without cushioning, of transformation without transition support, of a society that celebrated the wonders and declined to manage the costs.

The Surveillance Infrastructure: Progress and Control, Indistinguishable

The most important technology story in the world of 2096 is not AI or biotechnology or precision medicine. It is the surveillance infrastructure — the architecture of observation that grew, connection by connection and data point by data point, from the consumer internet of the early twenty-first century into the comprehensive informational transparency of the mid-twenty-second.

The FTC’s 2025 action against General Motors and OnStar — documenting the extraction and sale of geolocation data from vehicles without meaningful consent — was not unusual in kind, only in its documentation. By that point, the behavioral data economy was extracting and monetizing location, purchase history, social connection, emotional state, and sleep pattern from the overwhelming majority of Americans with commercial internet access. The Identity Theft Resource Center recorded 1,732 publicly disclosed data breaches in the first half of 2025 alone.

And then: neural data. The electrical patterns of thought itself. Colorado and California amended their consumer privacy laws in 2024 to include protections for brain-computer interface data because brain-computer interfaces were already commercially available and the question of cognitive sovereignty had already become a legislative question rather than a philosophical one. The Neurorights Foundation was lobbying state legislatures. That such lobbying was necessary describes the condition of the territory.

By 2096, the surveillance infrastructure is simply infrastructure. The wealthy navigate it through legal structures and encrypted architecture purchased with the leverage of their data’s revenue value. The poor exist inside it completely — their movements, purchases, emotional states, medical histories, and the electrical patterns of their thoughts assembled and monetized by systems they interact with unavoidably, in every transaction and every public space, because the alternative to those systems is not privacy but exclusion.

The surveillance infrastructure of 2096 is indistinguishable from convenience. It is the road you drive on, the clinic you access, the identifier you use to exist in a society that runs on verified identity. For the wealthy, it is a negotiable condition. For the poor, it is the air.

The Dual Nature and What the Story Does With It

The technology of 2096 in Shards of a Shattered Sky is deliberately, carefully dual-natured because that is what the research describes. The temptation in dystopian fiction is to make technology simply evil — to cast the algorithm or the surveillance system or the automated labor displacement as the story’s antagonist. But that misrepresents the actual dynamic, which is more disturbing and more useful for fiction than simple evil: the technology is neither good nor evil. It is a mirror.

It reflects the values of the society that built and deployed it. It amplifies the inequalities that preceded it. It extends the logic of existing power arrangements into new domains with a fidelity and a comprehensiveness that prior technologies could not achieve. The question it poses to the society that created it is not are you using me well? but rather: what does the way you are using me say about who you are?

That is the question the trilogy asks, through the medium of 2096’s technological landscape, of the world that built it. Which is to say: of us. Right now. In the choices that are being made and deferred and avoided while the technology accumulates its data and the mirror shows us, with increasing clarity, exactly what we look like.

Progress or control? The answer is yes. Both. Always both. The distinction is in who is holding the interface and what they paid for the privilege.

 

 

Sources Cited

The research and data underlying the technological landscape of 2096.

AI, Labor Displacement, and Economic Transformation

Surveillance, Privacy, and Neural Data

AI in the Arts and Creative Economy

Health Technology and Biological Stratification

Technology, Fiction, and the Dual-Nature Tradition

 

Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts