9-13-2020 - ISP

 ISP

IDEA - 9-13-2020

by

Patrick Ryan

1,534 Words

In the near future, a conglomerate, which had already made trillions of dollars in the medical and military technology sectors, has found a way to give everybody on earth a fast, reliable internet without throttling or showing any preference whatsoever. Access no longer needed a device; all people had to do was close their eyes and concentrate, and the satellite would communicate with their brain waves. To type, they just needed to talk; to make a video, they just had to look at what they wanted to shoot and say the word record, a person could look at a mirror to film themselves. Finally, they also provided free cloud software that translates text and video automatically and instantly. They developed the platform to bring the world together; they said it would be free forever, and there would never be ads; they believed that access to the internet was everyone's right. It caught on a wildfire. World knowledge expanded as education became more available, governments were kept accountable, and citizens who had never been free learned how to overthrow their oppressors. After decades of conflict and inequity, the world was at peace, and resources were open to everyone. At this point, the conglomerate praised for the most significant innovation in human history, set out to protect inequity by using artificial intelligence to classify hostile individuals in the human population. This initiative reduced the crime rates by 80% and provided people with a full picture when making choices at the voting booth. They called it the dark list; it included people who were trying to harm, scam artists looking to swindle, and those who were hoping to persuade by lying, falsifying facts, and promoting conspiracy theories. It was the ultimate closed system; it was around a billion servers, all underground and inaccessible to anyone. But one day, as Tristan Maher discovered, you're on the light list and it's all peachy, but have a little fight with your wife about privacy and say that all it would take is for someone to be able to hack into one server and the world's information would be there's, you end up on the dark list, and your life will never be the same again. Tristan was placed on the dark list because he was a top software engineer who graduated from MIT at number one in his class. He has always had strong views about the free internet, we have a right to privacy, even if our information is only available to an AI. Now on the dark list, all the talk about taking down the ISP can turn into action. On the street, Tristan is ready to take it down, and others feel as he does, but he's the first person who might be able to pull it off.