2027
From: Ian Macleod
To: 2022
Crap! I’m on insect bread and home orders again. It must have been that long drive to the underground screening of Rambo: First Blood on Sunday. I have been pushing the limits of my kilowatt allowance recently. The 1982 Stallone classic is also blacklisted now. Watching it is an EquityCrime. 2026 UtopiLaws demand that for every bullet a cis male fires in on screen, two be fired by each of the 17 official genders.
Jacinda Ardern also banned performances of most Shakespeare plays in 2024. Something about celebrating the work of a European man who exploits the tyranny of the assumption of two genders to racially stereotype, while failing to represent overweight women with blue hair. It’s not articulated in an actual law. As Gauleiter of Feelings and Facts, Mistress Jacinda, just sort of says it and the trolls carry it out like drone bees.
Fortunately, my ban is only three days this time. In January I had two weeks. That time we got raided. In hindsight, we just weren’t careful enough. The coded lingo in our text exchanges to plan the meet-up hadn’t been tightly worded enough. Clifford had also strayed from v9 of the BoriSpeak. Hell, we were still discussing Winston’s first trip to the Prole trinket shop when they busted down the door.
Two bloody weeks without pizza or travel privileges. But… wait. This will be confusing to you in 2022. The Great Reset was just gathering pace back then. Let me catch you up.
In short, “two weeks to flatten the curve” transmogrified into a cowardly new world. During the course of that initial two years of lockdowns, vaccine mandates and masking orders, the infrastructure of totalitarianism was planted.
Today, elected national governments are more like bureaucratic clearing houses. They were all so indebted to supranational bodies and Bill Gates that they ceded sovereignty. The World Economic Forum (WEF) metasticised. They changed their name in 2024: Sublime Utopian Blessors of Unitarian Equity, SUBDUE
Supreme Herr Beloved Chancellor Schwab is Big Daddio. That’s not me being funny. He chose that name. Much like Popes chose theirs (yes, “chose”, Big Daddio has subsumed the role of Pope). I believe he has concubines killed if they call him anything else. Hey, people get their kicks in all sorts of ways.
Daddio is officially a ceremonial figure. He addresses us in his BDSM suit now and then. Often stroking a large rat of purest white fur and eyes of piercing red. But we know he lacks the impartiality Her Majesty the Queen of England had. Her Maj is still alive, but is no more than a head bobbing in a gelatinous life-supporting goo. They wheel her out for only the biggest jamborees.
Daddio is known to call in presidents for a little chat in his Sky Dungeon. They all comply. Certainly since Bolsonaro was vaporised in an unfortunate but unpreventable swimming incident involving sharks with freakin’ laser beams attached to their heads. I mean… he died of natural causes.
And if you think tech is everywhere and powerful back in 2022, you are in for a steep disabuse of that quaint thought. All the carbon-burning cars were crushed and recycled in the space of 4 months in 2025. Now the fortunate few have electric cars. I bought a Soviet era Trabant that a buddy of mine got running on solar and environmentally friendly squirrel breath. It’s major babe-repellent, but at least I can more around – sometimes!
These electric things are connected to the Vista. That’s kind of what the internet, cloud computing and connected devices turned into. Gates is Most Humble Nurturing God King of the Vista. Now the local authorities can switch you off or limit you with the push of a button. I’ve never been switched off. That kills your car for the length of whatever sentence they hand down. I know a guy who couldn’t start his NovaBile for a month. But he was caught using cash. That is a Level 8 GovCrime. I’ve only had my range limited to 5km. At least I could get to the shops.
Luxury Lockdowns are probably worse. In 2025 the new DigiMoney was launched worldwide. Poof! Physical fiat currency was banned. Like the old gas guzzlers, coins and banknotes were rounded up and destroyed. Now we pay for everything with DigiMoney. It’s convenient, I’ll give it that. The SchwabChip planted in the jugular does all the paying. You simply walk out past the scanners. Unless, that is, your CommScore is too low.
The Great Reset put community at the centre. We gain points for sticking to GovSpeak in all our communications, reading KlausComms and taking our kids to CommYouthCamps. It’s a punitive system, as well. Missing your requirements on any of these – and much more – can rapidly ruin your CommScore. I had half a month’s pay CommNated once. They move DigiMoney from your DigiWallet into an approved charity. Trudeau administers this through the TruTrustForGoodAndCommunityForAll.
Last December TechForce located a copy of Brave New World I had hidden in my PriVista, a supposedly “private” pocket of the Vista where all of our digital activities are managed and stored. I had got a friend to build a secret safe within it. But these are illegal, and TechForcers have ways to find them. My score plummeted well into Deplorable. My SchwabChip was throttled. My DigiMoney was only valid for GovSsentials. BugBread, water, Virtue-rated literature – books, essays and pamphlets that Jacinda has deemed most CommProg, or progressive towards the greater community and enhancement of GovSoloReliableSources.
ReliableSources rules have all but destroyed independent media. Jordan Peterson was the first one to go. Jacinda chose the biggest name in BadThink to make an example of. He occasionally gets a message out on back channels. Jack Dorsey runs a crack squad of ThinkCheckers to confirm the BadThink. Then he has a team of what were the world’s most effective underground hackers hunt down the signal and kill it. These guys are some of the most worrying turncoats. They were defenders of free speech in your day. The rumour is that they’re kept compliant with the serum. We think there is a compound Fauci developed in his shed (I say shed, it’s a 4,000 square foot biomedical research lab under his garden shed). It’s based on antidepressant technology. It is calming and dulls ambition. So they say.
Oh, you may be wondering what BugBread is. Or not. I mean, the name says it. Farming livestock was outlawed in 2026. The BlueHair Council deemed it paternalistic and “sexually objectifying”, and Chancellor Gore (Al, that is) had worked out that we can farm insects with a vastly lower carbon footprint. Now we have mushed bugs in everything. Even Parktown prawns are commercially farmed. Most High Perfector of YourOwnGood Greta oversees all of that. She often refers to grasshoppers as her “children”. She has gives them names.
By virtue of a recent discovery by government scientists that insects have souls, these too will be given rights and universal basic income. We should go ZeroBug by 2028. Just as soon as plant-based protein sources can take up the slack.
I do get a hold of traditional bread now and then. A friend’s granny bakes it. She hasn’t been caught yet. But it’s a major FoodCrime. The GoreBunal deals with these sorts of things. I reckon she’d get six weeks in CorrectiCamp for this. I’ve never been. They say it’s mostly watching films of a variety of celebrities berating you with a startling degree of contempt and memorising lines from Herr Schwab’s 2021 hit, Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet.
The camps were originally just for Covid quarantine. But people went along without much protest. So Assistant to the Regional Commander Macron championed their extension. He got Most Venerable and Loved Xi to build them worldwide. Chairman Xi already had the template for the Uyghurs. That worked a charm. Fewer escapes than Alcatraz, they say. They also call it the Club Med of cultural re-programming. But people never come back with tans.
My homeland of South Africa is an unusual participant in the New World. Herr Schwab thinks we’re kind of cute. Sort of the least backward of African countries. So he gave Administrator Ramaphosa a blog. The KlausCouncil also brings him in to consult on the establishment of TaskForces. These are very high level investigatory bodies formed to keep world leadership in check. They have no fear or favour, and ensure that everyone, even Herr Schwab, is accountable to the CommuniCode. So far not a single instance of malfeasance has been uncovered. It’s good to know our overlords are upstanding and always have our interests at heart. It is servant leadership at its most glorious.
All of this is not to say fun has been extinguished. Sure, tennis was outlawed in 2024 for its overt and systematic micro-aggresses, overtones of masculinity and for “idealising individual pursuit to the detriment of communal utopianism, against a backdrop of decades of the high crime of TwoGenderism”. Monopoly is also a no-go, for obvious reasons.
Gary Linekar is Tzar of Games, Goodwill and Controlled Jollification. Football is allowed, provided it is not done competitively. There are no teams or goals. 22 licensed players may gather on a common and pass around a super cushioned NoHurt ball. Everyone has to touch it an equitable number of times. Other than that, it’s the good old footie you know and love in 2022.
Cards Against Humanity is also allowed. But the statements have been updated. They describe scenarios of selflessness, where members of the New World sacrifice themselves for higher pursuits like climate change.
Oh, climate change. It gets really bad in 2023. I mean, the data was still suggestive that we are doing environmental damage and contributing to a warming planet, and supportive of a number of modest changes to help avoid the worst of air pollution and rising temperatures. But OwnGood Greta told us we were 7 to 8 months away from being able to fry an egg on exposed rocks at the North Pole.
Now she personally approves all private jet flights, Hummer purchases and Davos. Mostly we use solar and wind power. I usually get about 3 hours of electricity a day.
Aaaanyway, at least we have our… memories. We’re promised the technology to CommRectify those will only be with us by 2030. But I think that explains 2027 to you. Of course, much like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures (1989), you do have the power to change the future. In that case, this letter will never come into existence. Just don’t wait too long. Much like Hemmingway’s explanation of bankruptcy, tyranny happens gradually, then in one violent and precipitous drop.