Humans, you have been warned. At least warn your children. Start posting now. Here are the 7 reasons.
1. Find your other half. By 2025, you will be able to find your perfect match and more importantly avoid the perfect disaster based on years of your anonymized (chill) FB data. No more fake guys posting as reincarnations of Victorian poets in the first dates only to be proven that all they read is Domino Pizza’s menu. Divorce lawyers and multiple cats will be reserved for the off social media folks. While your wall remains empty, someone else is off to the Caribbean with the love of your life.
2. Get a job. By 2030, every company will fill jobs through smart algorithms that analyze years of your online profile. Bios claiming that you are knowledgeable, funny, loves programming(please), or an octopus fisherman (please squared) will be irrelevant. Either your social media data proves it, or you score zero. Without a social footprint, you are not in competition.
3. Be selected for college etc. By 2035 no one could apply for a position of any power, from Prime Minister, to Mayor of her little town, to President of XYZ Alumni Association to getting into the University of her choice, unless she scores high on the social media profile analysis test. And that person will have to prove it, based on years of social interaction data, not fake the last month before the application.
4. Survive annihilation. By 2040, the global council (hint: they are too lazy to meet, they’ll just run the script) will select the 1 million people to leave the planet and ensure the survival of our species. The other 10 billion will have to learn to drive their carbon emission cars underwater and grow gills out of unrecycled plastic. A tenth of the 1 million lucky ones will be unquestionably smart and talented people and another tenth will be “policy cases.” The rest will be selected based on their FB activity. Your DNA could be significantly and safely altered by then, but FB activity cannot. Sure, you will go and post then when you feel the heat. But no one will care about your posts. Only about the likes. Not even. Only about the shares. Not the number of them. The impact of them. It is complex. You cannot fake it.
5. Become immortal. By 2050, the previous plan will go south and Plan B will be in full force to achieve immortality through downloading your consciousness and memories into an always healthy, godlike looking, suitable for space travel, unlike your organic body, immortal robot. Unfortunately, the people to be immortalized will be selected based on the social richness of their data, because that will be essential to create a genuine copy of a person. Since the procedure will be very expensive in the beginning, only high probability cases will be selected.
6. Live in a democracy. Social media will not “go away” or be replaced by the old “reputable” media. The world will not become as good as it used to be. Online will grow to the point that any news source is as relevant as its social media penetration. If your kind of people, (yes, I know, serious, reputable, low-key, think that you should be doing op-eds at the top newspaper of your country, or scientific papers) don’t want to leave your mark in the social media world, well, you will not leave your mark in the whole world. You will be as good as ostracized from the Agora. All your forefathers and foremothers who fought for centuries so that you achieve democracy and rights and a voice (that you don’t want to use) will be rolling in their graves. Tweet for freedom. Or be tweeted into tyranny.
7. You don’t have to believe all of them, just one of the above…
PS: This thing I wrote (a poor attempt at sci-fi predictions) is intentionally dumbed down because it is aimed at readers who don’t believe in participating in Social Media and most of the above may be news to them. Because it has happened already.
C.A. Caskabel is the author of the Drakon fantasy series available on Amazon.