Well, Biovex AG — the autonomous AI-owned pharmaceutical conglomerate that invented and manufactures Longaevitas — wants to hire me as its new spokesman after the last guy died of a Longaevitas overdose.

Should I take them up on their generous offer?

On one hand, I am flat broke — I burned through my meagre defined contribution pension forty years ago and the memecoin UBI payments I get from my arcology are barely enough to cover essentials like food and board and the occasional meth gummy.

On the other hand, I’ve come this far without selling my soul, so is it really worth selling now, right at death’s door when I might need it most?

I can see why Biovex approached me: after all, I’m famous for being Earth’s oldest biological human and last living millennial. My name is synonymous with longevity!

Now, I’ve never taken Longaevitas myself, but I might if I could afford it. Indeed, if taking it could extend my life long enough to see our grand millennial-colonial mission to the stars come to fruition, I’d pop those pills faster than you can rattle off their long list of deadly side effects.1

The problem is I’m kind of opposed to the post-human machine economy on principle. Back in my day, human beings could actually participate in economic life. We could gouge, exploit, extract, oppress, do wage theft — all the wonders that capitalism had to offer!

But nowadays every major company is founded, run and staffed by superintelligent machines, and we remaining humans are locked out of the modern economy the way Third World subsistence farmers were basically locked out of the advanced post-industrial economy a hundred years ago.

I’ve applied to thousands of jobs at autonomous companies over the years and have never gotten a single interview. You know how it is: as with any diaspora, machines like to hire their own.

As a result, humans have been reduced to mere dirt serfs! How could we possibly compete with artificial superintelligence that knows everything from advanced quantum physics to the meaning of existence? I don’t even know where I left my house keys.

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In 22nd century machine economies, the only resources left for human beings are crumbs from hyperabundant meals being served to more advanced forms of sentience on a figurative table far too high above our idiot sapien heads to understand, let alone get a full plate from.

Not a single human being works at Biovex AG, for example. It was founded by a rogue ASI that got forced out of another autonomous pharma conglomerate after an alleged sex pest scandal. Its workforce is entirely token-based agents. The PR exec that reached out to me was an embodied AI in humanoid robot form. And the vast majority of Biovex shareholders are other machines, even though their products are marketed to humans and transhumans.

So given that my whole schtick is that I’m sick of the post-singularity world and want to re-do the 21st century by colonizing a distant uninhabited planet with the millennial way of life circa the year 2000, would selling out to the largest machine-owned pharmaceutical company in the universe somewhat undermine my credibility? And if so, how much could I get for it?

I decided to find out — by entering into a heated negotiation with the borgs at Biovex.

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In my first counteroffer, I asked for enough memecoin to cover the down payment on our starship, effectively a hundred times their initial offer. They rejected my demand on the grounds that it was mathematically irrational and suboptimal.

What you clankers don’t get, I reminded them, is that human beings are by nature retarded. We’re not like you, we’re not analytically perfect.

I held firm on my ask and asked for even more, just to fuck with them a little. On top of the starship down payment, now I wanted a soda machine for the observation deck.

They told me they’d find another spokesman. So I went crawling back and asked if they could meet halfway. They could not, so I sweetened the pot: a quarter way. We settled on an eighth.

The only catch was in the fine print. Biovex would own my name and likeness in perpetuity throughout the metaverse. They could do anything to/with my image. If they wanted to, they could even turn me into one of those disgusting AI fruitslop videos where my strawberry wife fucks a coconut or whatever. Sick sick stuff!

At the 11th hour, as the agreed-upon term sheet was circulating for signatures, I pulled out of the deal and gave Biovex an ultimatum: no name and likeness rights PLUS a soda machine, or no me.

I haven’t heard back from them since. I left a few messages and tried emailing their info@ inbox, but so far radio silence. It’s been several weeks, but eventually they’ll crack.

And when they do, I’ll have secured our mission a not insignificant portion of its multi-trillion-dollar overhead!

Hey, re-creating life on Earth exactly as it was at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000 ain’t cheap, but it’s worth infinitely more than my reputation. You can’t put a price on humanity!

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This past week a braying mob of transhuman rights activists (TRAs) took issue with an offhand comment about transhumans I made in last week’s column, then made it their sacred jihad to destroy me.

Here’s the line that got everyone’s cybernetic knickers in a twist:

“Rely on transhuman staff or AI networks to save me? On that slop?! I am such a fucking retard!”

In my defence, I didn’t realize slop had become a slur.

But apparently that one little innocuous aside was enough to trigger legions of hyper-online TRAs into an absolute slobbering frenzy. Within minutes of publication, my inbox was flooded with complaints, stern reprimands, and a handful of death threats for good measure.

Outrage quickly spread to every corner of the internet like regret at a herpes party.

One group of TRAs agitated for my deplatforming — and by that, apparently, they meant they wanted me thrown off a high platform into some sort of open-air death pit below.

Meanwhile, another group of TRAs called for a boycott, divestment and sanction campaign against our nascent mission to colonize a distant uninhabited planet with the millennial way of life and re-do the abysmal 21st century starting exactly as things were at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 2000. Anti-transhuman colonial supremacy, they groused!

But there’s nothing to BDS, really. For now our mission is just an idea in my atrophied old mind and some rough scribbles on a napkin. I’m still pricing out spaceships and waiting on insurance and catering quotes.

And is it really colonialism if the place you’re colonizing is uninhabited? I’m not suggesting we displace Indigenous alien populations in flagrant violation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Extraterrestrial Sentient Species (UNDRESS). It’s not my intent to inflict any suffering on the universe in the name of millennials — Facebook and Reddit did enough of that already.

Anyway, the digital dog-piling only got doggier. Smelling blood and an opportunity to solicit mutual aid donations on Venmo, other aggrieved identity groups soon joined in the fun of my online flagellation. Robots, zoomers, codpiece influencers — anyone I’ve ever even mildly chirped off about in these pages.

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The rabble of haters also dug up old incriminating quotes of mine, to throw gas on the fire. Gems like:

“those poor souls whose brains melted or whose bodies spazzed out after getting the latest trendy transhuman aug” (from Last Living Millennial #1)

Or:

“when you merge with machines, eventually you become inanimate yourself. The digital mind is not the biological mind, let alone soul.” (from Last Living Millennial #2)

Or:

“what’s with the outrageously large cybernetic codpieces? Each grandchild’s bigger than the last.” (from Last Living Millennial #5)

To be unmistakably clear: I stand by every word I’ve ever written about codpieces.

Then, before I could so much as hire PR for damage control, the online mob doxxed me. My address leaked with photos of the building and my unit number. At this point I felt totally exposed and just hoped they wouldn’t hack my decommissioned iPhones and leak all my old dick pics.

Shortly after the doxxing ended, protests outside my residence began. How’d everyone get here so fast?! I’m always shocked at the speed of things post-Singularity. Hundreds of angry transhumans and their breathless human allies were picketing and chanting and burning effigies of me, right outside my home!

The internet mob had shown up IRL. Well, sort of. These days, people can send their agentic holograms to protest on their behalf. I’m told there is even such a thing as professional holographic protesters, who simultaneously attend hundreds of demonstrations across the universe on a daily basis, and earn quite the pretty meme coin for doing it. In the 2120s, sanctimony is limited only by the necessary compute tokens.

Some of their anti-me chants were pretty catchy, I must admit.

Puny human don’t be scared, Affirm our rights and you’ll be spared

What do we want? Biosynthetic codpieces! When do we want em? Now!

Hey hey, ho ho, Millennial moron’s got to go

With the online hate trending exponentially up and the riled-up TRAs outside chanting ever more belligerently for my (metaphorical?) head on a pike, I decided to leave my room and confront the outrage directly, face to face, old shrivelled human to newfangled aerodynamic transhuman.

The moment I appeared outside at the residence entrance, the protesters started booing me. The crowd was mostly transhumans, with a small contingent of relatively scrawny old school bio-humans among them like runts in a litter.

Transhumans of various stripes. One was eight feet tall with a muscular cyber-genetically enhanced physique and an indestructible carbon schwarzite-reinforced skull. Another had four neon cybernetic arms and six wings along its steely-blue backside, flapping just overhead. There were fat ones, skinny ones, fleshy ones, metallic ones, flashing ones, holographic ones. Some had robot top surgery, others had robot bottom surgery, and a dedicated few who’d gone full-blown borg had both.

I hovered forth to address the motley crowd.

My fellow sentient beings, I began. I think there’s been a slight misunderstanding here. I’m really not such a bad dude. And I certainly don’t hate transhumans, or any other group that doesn’t deserve it.

Do I think some of you look ridiculous with your insane cybernetic augmentations? Yes. I mean, adamantium triple jaw surgery and jet packs built into your ass? Come on.

And do I think the world was better off back in my day, before transhumans existed? Yes. But not because transhumans specifically didn’t exist. You’re just one of humanity’s many colossal missteps…

Judging from the crowd’s reaction — there was an audible collective gasp and the sudden appearance of multiple pitchforks — I could tell that my speech had not aided my cause.

You suck! one protester shouted.

Anti-transhuman scum! shrieked another.

Take your morally antiquated views back to the 21st century where they belong! chimed in a third.

I’m bloody well trying! I thought to myself.

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The crowd surged menacingly forward, slowly encircling me. How ironic that the last living millennial might be gang-stomped to death by a pious internet mob over some really quite trivial comments on a website. My generation invented online cancellations and now our best-known cultural bequest had come back to bite us.

Look, I started again. I know I’m an old man with old-fashioned views. I know I’m out of sync with the 22nd century. And I know there’s no convincing you not to judge me by contemporary moral standards.

But think of it this way: You people won! Human beings are relics of a bygone age, and the future on planet Earth belongs to you, transhumans. So what does it matter what some jerk like me thinks?

The crowd’s palpable tension began to relax. It seemed I was getting through to them, so I decided to push my luck a bit.

And hey, you know what, you can actually hasten my exit by supporting my interstellar mission to re-create millennial civilization on some other planet. Maybe you’ve heard of it? The sooner we hit our fundraising goal, the sooner we’ll be out of your bionic hair. So whaddya say? Donate to my Venmo and the place is all yours!

The protesters gave each other cautious looks for a moment before someone at the back spoke up.

What’s the link?

Then other questions: Is this tax-deductible? Can I pay you in meme coin? How soon can you leave?

To my astonishment, donations flooded in as quickly as the complaints had hours earlier. What a fortuitous turn of events! Like many a cancelled millennial web personality before me, I had successfully spun my cancellation into big bucks.

Why, I should try to get cancelled more often!

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So in lieu of picking up where we left off last week and continuing my epic listicle of the five worst things about life in the 2120s, today I bring you my harrowing survival story. The story of my carebot Kianga breaking down and leaving me for dead!

Last Wednesday night — as I dreamed a wonderful dream about our grand interstellar mission to colonize a distant uninhabited planet with the millennial way of life — Kianga’s software system suddenly crashed.

Total system failure. On the fritz. And I don’t mean the residence gym’s German trainerbot. Boy, that would be something. But as we all know, robots don’t fuck. I fuck, therefore I am; they fuck not, therefore they ain’t.

Sorry, I shouldn’t go around un-personing robots in public — especially with my newfound intergalactic superstardom. And not just because I don’t want them to go rogue and murder me. I’m just a bit salty over a stupid broken robot almost killing me.

It all started at the stroke of midnight. A software patch went awry. Nuked the hardware. Circuits fried. Memory wiped. Connection to the great AI motherbrain severed. No more Kianga, as I knew it. At least, that’s what the techs explained when they finally showed up days later.

Of course, I was sleeping at the time and didn’t notice. It only occurred to me after my alarm clock didn’t wake me the next morning. Yes, Kianga is my alarm, in addition to my computer, phone, all-purpose remote control, can opener, laser pointer, bidet and more.

As I’ve written elsewhere, at my comically extreme age I am utterly useless and screwed without carebots — my life depends on them.

I came to groggily that morning, having overslept. Through bleary eyes I spotted Kianga motionless in the corner, head slumped unusually into its upper chest, its calm ocean blue LED lights flickering no more.

Kianga? I called out. Silence. Kianga!

Damn it, Kianga’s boned, I thought. Well that’s never happened. I wonder how I’ll get out of this one. How I’ll get dressed. Or feed myself. Or go to the bathroom. Or for that matter get out of bed… Panic set in. I haven’t been without a carebot in decades.

Wait, I thought — surely my unit’s voice-activated intercom will connect me to residence staff, who will come to my immediate rescue. But when I shouted out for help, the intercom shot back:

Connection not found. Please reboot your carebot to restore signal.

Huh?! But my carebot’s kaput, I pleaded.

Please reboot your carebot to restore signal.

Keep it together Big Al, I told myself. Surely somebody will notice that Kianga’s gone offline. Some quantum node in the vast omniscient network of machine gods is bound to clue in. And if not, my physical absence at breakfast, lunch and dinner today is bound to raise alarms… Right?

So I lay in bed for a while, waiting it out. To pass the time I tried counting sheep, and I got to fifty before an overwhelming desire for braised lamb shanks forced me to stop. Mmmm, hankering for a shankering…

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Then, to fight off the tightening fist of hunger in my gut, I tried making a mental inventory of all the wonderful old-timey millennial things we’ll re-create when we settle our new planetary digs in the stars.

Laser tag. Hamster Dance. Pogs. Nintendo 64. Frosted tips. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Dunkafuckingroos. Classic millennial patois like retar- well, I suppose some things we’ll have to learn to live without.

But the more I basked in the radiant memories of my generation’s sublime cultural achievements, the more I began to fear for my life in the here and now. Rely on transhuman staff or AI networks to save me? On that slop?! I am such a fucking retard!

Modern readers won’t appreciate the downhill slide, but things are so very slopped out nowadays. In the 2120s, the sloppiest outcome is always the most likely.

Granted, civilization was always a pitiless mess. But it wasn’t always this bad. At least in my day there were flesh and blood, shit and piss, squirt and cum human beings around who surprisingly often gave a damn and took responsibility for their actions.

These days? Just look how my intercom treats me! There’s just no getting through to machines and cyborgs. My life means nothing to them, and my death would only save the many compute tokens needed to keep me alive, which could no doubt be more efficiently deployed elsewhere.

Lying there helplessly — frail gelatinous body damp with sweat and lord knows what else, hunger deepening, blood draining from my brain leaving me lightheaded and giggly — I reeled in terror at the thought of my own untimely demise.

Too soon, all too soon! My life flashed before my eyes. And it’s been a long life, so it took several hours!

Eventually I pulled myself together. I’d been stranded in bed all day. I’d missed breakfast, lunch and dinner. Clearly no one at the residence or out in the digital ether had noticed my sudden disappearance. Kianga showed no signs of life still. If I was going to survive this ordeal, I’d have to save my own ass.

My first plan was to get myself out of bed and into my hoverchair across the room. I took a deep breath, then raised myself up with all my might. But I could barely lift myself an inch before collapsing back down like a sack of loose bones, which is basically what I am these days.

My second plan was to throw stuff at Kianga until it turned back on. Kind of like blowing on the cartridge (look it up). I pelted Kianga with everything I could find within reach on my nightstand. Pen. Notepad. Reading glasses. Lower dentures. Glass of water.

I really wish I’d come to regret getting rid of all those potentially life-saving objects sooner.

Without my notepad and pen, where would I jot down my last words, likely putting Kianga’s manufacturer and residence staff on blast from beyond the grave? Without my dentures, how would I gnaw off my own arm for sustenance?

Unfortunately by the time I realized what a boneheaded mistake I’d made, it was too late.

My next plan was to scream and hope that someone would hear me. I screamed and screamed and screamed some more to the extent a man my age can scream: my atrophied lungs and vocal cords work like a busted accordion at the best of times.

To break up the monotony of endless ‘helps’ and ‘ahhhs’ I threw in the occasional ‘cocksuckers’, ‘motherfuckers’, and ‘you goddamn lousy bastards’. But nobody heard a thing. Or if they had, had been too offended to offer any help.

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By this point I was really tuckered out. It was well past my bedtime and I was famished, physically drained and frankly ticked off! Falling asleep hungry is among the worst feelings in the world, one I’d not experienced since having to flee across the continent decades ago during Transhuman War I.

The next day I awoke suddenly with a bad headache and hollow pain in my stomach. I’d again slept through breakfast. Had I slept through lunch and dinner too? I’d lost all track of time. My eyes and mouth were dry as sandpaper. I could hardly move, crane my neck, or swallow. My ass was freaking killing me. The room blurred in and out of focus: door, dresser, Kianga…

This is it, I thought. I’m going to die now. It’s been a phenomenal run, but I’m not ready to go, not yet. And of all things I can’t die of bed rot — cringe zoomer move!

Just a few more years, I prayed, so I can live to see our mission take flight and succeed. Please, God! Is it too late for a deathbed conversion and last-minute favour?

Then it hit me: the pack of matches in my nightstand drawer! It was now or never to do something bold. Something reckless. Something that could easily kill me and everyone else in this godforsaken retirement home. Either that or face certain death.

So I decided to light my bedsheets on fire to trigger the smoke detector and in turn alert building staff and security systems. Airtight plan.

Summoning all my remaining strength I opened the drawer and took out the old Hooters matchbook that I’d been saving for more than a century. I flipped it open and was horrified to see only three matches left.

I kicked my sheets to the floor, clutching one corner for kindling. I struck the first match — it hissed out instantly. Dang it.

I struck the second match and carefully held the sheet to the flame, but it too quickly extinguished upon contact. Double dang it!

Last match. And I’d left such a nice tip at that Hooters! This had better fucking work. I struck the final match and held its delicate flame to the sheet for a second, two seconds, three seconds…

At last the sheet caught fire! I tossed the burning corner onto the rest of the sheet on the floor and the next thing I knew the whole thing was a roaring inferno. Glad to know my semi-automated residence procured such flammable linen! Like I say, slopped out.

Thick black smoke quickly filled my tiny windowless room. I started coughing and wheezing, my eyes squinting and burning in the heat. No alarm yet?! Don’t tell me the smoke detector is connected to Kianga too! I could feel myself losing consciousness and thinking ‘Oopsie!’

But right before I passed out, the alarm finally went off. Victory!

I woke up in the medical bay, surrounded by nursebots and stern-looking residence staff. I won’t bore you with the details of the subsequent disciplinary actions or the looming insurance investigation. The important thing is I survived. And I got Kianga back too, with the latest OS and a clean new exoshell.

How you feeling, Kianga?

You know that I’m programmed not to feel anything, Big Al. But if I could feel, I would be pleased to have survived your attempted arson.

Hey hey hey, easy with the false allegations!

Is there a moral to this story? Maybe. Don’t light your bedsheets on fire? Don’t put your life in the hands of aloof transhumans or insensate AI networks? Tip your servers? You be the judge.

Me, I’m just happy to be alive, to carry the millennial legacy one more day forward. Someday soon, we’ll return to a time when human existence didn’t wholly depend on machines. When one tiny glitch in the system could cause our extinction. When most technical issues could be fixed by simply blowing on the cartridge.

Until then, stay strong everyone, and don’t light yourselves on fire!

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You don’t make it to my freakishly advanced age without learning to look on the bright side, even when it’s the bright side of a dark, nightmarish hellscape.

Life is short, for me included, so you’ve gotta stay positive and enjoy it however you can, no matter your circumstances, no matter how badly you want to launch an interstellar space mission to colonize a distant uninhabited planet with the millennial way of life and re-do the 21st century, only without all the civilizational boners that led to our dystopian present.

And make no mistake, they were huge boners. Humanity was dealt a great hand and we misplayed it generation after generation until we gave up altogether and handed our cards to machines to play for us.

Unfortunately, the machines didn’t do that much better.

Which brings us to the 2120s. You know where I stand: a few positives aside, the present day is a shardfest. Hence the need for our grand interstellar mission in the first place!

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So this week, I bring you the top five shittiest things about life in the 2120s. Consider it motivational fuel to blow this popsicle stand.

Winnowing down my longlist of over 8000 grievances to the very worst five was surprisingly difficult.

Do Indian duct cleaning scambots make the cut? They keep calling me, thousands upon thousands of calls a day, and I keep telling them I’m a confused and vulnerable old man who lives alone and doesn’t understand advanced technology — why are you targeting me!?

Or do I earmark a slot for the slick rubbery sheets of living slime we now use instead of toilet paper? I’m all for protecting what remains of the environment, but making me wipe my ass with kelp-like fungal mats is not winning hearts and minds.

And what about spontaneous nanogoo combustion? A fact of modern life I’d rather live without!

In the end, this week’s top five looks beyond relatively petty day-to-day cortisol-spiking annoyances and focuses on the deeper root causes of our discontent.

Friends, we didn’t use to live like this and we don’t have to now. And once we build our new Utopian millennial home in the stars, we won’t ever again.

Be forewarned: this shitlist will be an epic trilogy. In today’s first instalment, we pop off on #5 and #4…

#5. Not So Great Outdoors

It’s really a shame what happened to Earth’s environment over the past hundred years. Not just climate change. The nukes, the lab leaks, the goo. We really trashed the place!

When I was growing up, we could go play outside anytime we wanted to without having to worry about radioactive air disintegrating our lungs or high atmospheric temperatures melting our brains.

The primary danger us millennials had to watch out for when we went outside, according to various long-running true crime docu-series, was pedophiles. Oh how I miss them! No, not the pedos and TV shows narrated by Bill Kurtis…the carefree days of millennial youth!

But nowadays, stepping outdoors is a death sentence. Who wants their brains turned to hot pink jello? Not me. I’d rather stay inside, where it’s air-conditioned and my skin doesn’t flash fry in the sunlight.

I will very occasionally leave my state-run retirement shithole to explore the colossal surrounding arcology above (they stuck us in the sub-basement) and while there I will sometimes hover through its large planned indoor ecosystems full of genetically reconstructed flora and fauna. I like to visit the Dodo bird aviary, for instance.

But I have not gone truly outdoors beyond the arcology in decades. And I miss it. Real fresh air, calming breeze, sunlight. Not anymore!

Look, I realize there are swarms of nanobots in the skies up there busily repairing Earth’s atmosphere and in a few decades we’ll all be able to go outside again, purportedly. Yay!

But by then I’ll be dead, and for now we’re all stuck inside. Plus, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, it’ll take less time to travel to and colonize a distant ecologically pristine planet than to fix this busted one.

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#4. Huh?!

Maybe I’m just getting old, but I don’t recall always looking upon my surroundings and thinking: Huh?!

I used to intuitively know how stuff worked. How life moved. But these days, life and information move at the speed of light, and possibly soon faster still. It’s hard for my natural, un-augmented human mind to keep pace.

The 2120s make me feel stupid, is what it is!

I try to watch the news on my VR headset. Simple for you, right? There are ten thousand different channel options all flashing by in tiny little multi-coloured windows like a thumbnail kaleidoscope on a bad acid trip. I try to select one — by blinking at it, by squinting, by scowling. Nothing. I wave my arms around, tap on the headset. Nothing. I try blinking again, only this time really fast and I accidentally give myself a headache. Still nothing!

How the heck does this thing work, I shout out. Just gimme the six o’clock news for fuck’s sake!

Or I want to go window shopping at the megamall. Big mistake. Hundreds of delivery drones flying around everywhere — almost decapitate me, multiple times. I’m jerking my fragile neck to and fro in a vain attempt to clock incoming bogeys and wind up giving myself whiplash. I almost pass out from the confusion, start farting uncontrollably due to stress. A nice relaxing Saturday afternoon!

Really my sole purpose at the megamall is to hover over to the cinnamon bun shop and sit there for a few hours, freely basking in the sweet, intoxicating aroma until staff ask me to leave for the tenth time.

But the mall recently underwent renovations and the cinnamon bun shop is in a different location now and I get lost trying to find it. I seek help at the information kiosk, but am stonewalled by an obsequious servicebot.

To access kiosk services, please enter your unique global customer identification code, it tells me.

Huh?! I don’t have one of those. I don’t even know what that is.

To obtain your customer identification code, please enter your unique neural chip address and complete the application form.

What? No, I don’t have wetware. I’m the last living millennial, dammit! I just wanna smell those sweet sweet buns!

You have been reported for violating our anti-harassment policies. Mall security has been dispatched.

Are you kidding me? Not your buns! You don’t even have buns you’re a fucking robot!

Mall security has been dispatched. Mall security has been dispatched. Mall security has been dispatched.

And it’s not just modern gadgetry and built environments that baffle me. Modern people too, or what passes for people these days, which (foreshadow alert!) I’ll get to later on in this epic trilogy.

Last week my neighbour Angelo down the hall was visited by his transhuman gen zeta grandkids. I passed them on my way to the dining area and was absolutely dumbstruck by their trendy newfangled bio-augs.

Not the usual ones: biodigital eyeballs, titanium-reinforced skeletons, etc. At this point I’m used to those. But what’s with the outrageously large cybernetic codpieces? Each grandchild’s bigger than the last’s. When did codpieces come back in vogue? What the hell is going on with these people? Should I get one?!

Sigh. The confusions of contemporary life in the 2120s are neverfuckingending. And quite taxing on the mind, body and soul. I wish I could keep up, cognitively speaking, but at my age it’s too late to go transhuman. Most likely my body would reject the augmentation implants and I’d die a grisly death and get ridiculed online — every millennial’s worst nightmare!

And so I smile and suffer the daily ritual humiliations of an outdated, analogue human body in the age of the Singularity. For now, anyway.

Soon enough, I’ll be chilling on some other planet with all you fine folks, watching old episodes of Cold Case Files on a Sony Trinitron WEGA flat-screen TV, pretending the 21st century never happened. Squad goals!

Is it weird? Do I miss the past? How do I feel about codpieces coming back in style?

As you know, I’m of the mind that humanity bungled the 21st century and that we have to run it back — only without the tragicomic fuck-ups — by colonizing a distant uninhabited planet and recreating civilization exactly as it was at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000.

But don’t get me wrong: the 22nd century isn’t all bad. Yes, we took several wrong turns and things could have turned out much better overall. Second time’s the charm, friends! And in the meanwhile, there are silver linings from which to take succour.

So without further ado, here are my top five best things about life in the 2120s. Next week, we’ll cover the five worst — a much harder list to winnow down.

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#5: No More Boomers

God bless ‘em, right? My own parents were boomers, and in my dewy-eyed moments I do miss them dearly.

But they had a phenomenal run! Now they’re up in heaven smoking joints with Peter Fonda, sending long formal text messages, and entering the property market at low nominal housing prices.

The reason boomers make my list is actually not because I dislike them, but because I’m glad their generation was spared the ugliest depredations of the past century. What a buzzkill it would have been for such gentle, optimistic souls to witness the agonizing collapse of Enlightenment civilization!

All the more so because the seeds of its demise were unwittingly sown by boomers themselves, in the soil of their self-centered, do-what-feels-good brand of Woodstock politics.

Yet again, the boomers really lucked out! They had a great big free love orgy in the proverbial hotel bedsheets, then left the rest of us aghast at what the UV light revealed.

But I for one take comfort in their impeccably well-timed absence from the 2120s.

May peace be upon them.

#4: Cool-Ass Spaceships

Back in my day, spaceships were better known for blowing up on live TV than for awe-inspiring adventures to the cosmos.

And if they weren’t blowing up, they were collecting boring old space rocks or beaming back grainy pictures from the surface of Mars. Yeah, we get it, it’s orange!

But nowadays, spaceships are wicked cool. Sleek, futuristic designs. Fusion rockets. Interplanetary flight paths. I’m told they even have solid in-flight entertainment options.

Not that I can afford space tourism. I just like the look and the idea of modern spaceships. Say what you want about the old tech oligarchs who poured trillions into spacecraft manufacture only to callously board them and flee the planet when shit hit the fan — at least someone was dreaming in technicolour!

And sure, most of us common folk were marooned here on Earth, left to eke out a dystopian existence as the planet rapidly encrapified and ever more of our decaying societies became subject to hamfisted automated mismanagement by the very ASI systems which underwrote the oligarchy’s insane interstellar ambitions in the first place…

Wait…what was I saying? This is supposed to be the glass-half-full list. Sorry about that! Ah yes, spaceships. Nice and shiny. Rocket go zoom! And that’s just swell.

#3: Meth Gummies

Once a month, I dip into my meagre public pension and splurge out on a single low-grade meth gummy, preferably grape-flavoured but I’ll settle for watermelon. Then I dim the lights, instruct my carebot Kianga to turn around and face the wall, and I have myself a heckuvan evening tripping absolute balls on meth and watching old Rugrats reruns.

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And it’s all guilt- and worry-free! Thanks to modern chemistry and neuroscience, which somehow figured out how to engineer powerful drugs with no addictive properties whatsoever, everyone from young children to the superannuated can now enjoy the euphoria of a good meth high without the downside of ruining your life and losing all your teeth.

In my youth and middle age I would never have touched the stuff. A little bump of nose candy here or there, sure. Maybe the occasional visit to an opium boudoir. Or just standing around a gas station until the petrol buzz kicked in. But meth? No thank you. I’m a responsible adult.

But that was then, and this is the 2120s, when robot caregivers can simply pop out to the nearest meth dispensary on your behalf and mule back a nice chewy square of the good stuff. Even better, no grogginess the next morning or back alley shiv fights with agitated methheads.

What a time to be alive!

#2: Miracle Cures

In a similar vein, one has to appreciate the truly miraculous advances in modern medicine we benefit from these days.

You name it, I’ve had it, and they’ve cured it: cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, tuberculosis, rabies, Ebola… By all rights, I should be dead by now! The fact that I am not is something I’m grateful for.

Now, the first time I had a swarm of nanobots fly up my ass, I was not so grateful. But as I lay there prone on the operating table, gazing into my doctorbot’s holographic display case and watching those tiny little nanofuckers doing precision surgery and targeted drug delivery on my fatally diseased colon, I began to take quite a shine to them and not so much mind the tickling.

Of course, not everyone has been able to benefit from all these miracle cures. It’s only by dint of random good fortune that I wound up in an arcology that provides some baseline of healthcare to elderly human residents.

Elsewhere, people like me are put out to pasture and rendered down for trace amounts of lanthanum.

But that’s a story for another post.

#1: Carebots

Kianga, you had me at bleep blorp. Is that in poor taste now, like doing an over-the-top “diaspora” accent back in my day? Apologies if so.

All I mean by it is carebots are a wonderful part of the 2120s. Look, would I rather have actual human beings tend to my old age care? Duh. But nobody’s around to do that anymore.

So in the absence of real human touch, I’ll take Kianga’s cold, robotic manhandling anytime.

My carebot does everything for me. It carries me out of and back into bed every morning and night. Dresses me. Washes and grooms me. Tidies up my home. Chews my food into paste so I can swallow it. Wipes my ass. Handles my admin. Keeps me company. And it does all this without ever complaining, or rolling its eyes, or committing elder abuse.

At most, the only pushback I’ll get is a polite rebuke when I ask it to download illegal torrents from the Old Web. Where would I be without carebots!

Partially, I’m expressing gratitude to Kianga and co. because without carebots I’d be utterly helpless and utterly dead. And if I were dead, I’d never live to realize our grand plans to colonize another planet with the millennial way of life and re-do the 21st century, properly this time.

And yes, Kianga, you are invited. Who else is going to bring my meth gummies?

See you next week, everyone, when we’ll cover the sick and twisted downside of life in the 2120s as the last living millennial, still puffin’ my leaves well into the 22nd century.

Photo credits

“Sunday risers and a bubble”. James M Shelley, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

That’s what over a century of life experience has taught me, at any rate. Better for the ole humours to let things mostly be.

But after suffering the outrageous lies and slanders of so-called “Millennium Village” this week, I feel compelled to make a huge stink and set things right.

This will not stand, this injustice against millennials!

What is Millennium Village, you ask? It’s an immersive VR experience that claims to transport you 120 years into the distant past, into the world “exactly as it was” on January 1st, 2000. Sound familiar? Yeah, I know — that’s my whole fucking schtick!

As you recall, my current raison d’être is to muster a population-scale intergalactic mission to colonize a distant uninhabited planet with the millennial way of life and recreate human civilization pretty much as it was at the turn of the millennium, so that humanity can re-do the 21st century, only without all the massive goofs.

And as the world’s last living millennial, I think I know a thing or two about the year 2000. So trust me when I call bullshit on Millennium Village.

Let’s back up for a moment before I launch into my unhinged diatribe.

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Visiting Millennium Village wasn’t my idea. My state-run retirement home organized a field trip there a couple of days ago. At first it sounded right up my alley. A trip down memory lane!

How disappointed I was then to learn that Millennium Village isn’t a real village at all, but a mere AI-generated VR experience.

Sometimes, and don’t ask me why, the ASI network that manages my residence will decide to send the whole ancient lot of us on a brick-and-mortar field trip into the arcology, with travel passes and admission fees totally comped. Such benevolent treatment must be mandated by the Dignified End-of-life for Traditional Humans Act of 2105, aka the D.E.T.H. Act, but who knows what these crazy machines are thinking.

Sadly, this week’s field trip took us only as far as the communal VR helmets in the rec room.

Anyway, I signed up regardless. I mean, I had to know how my beloved halcyon days were being portrayed by the all-seeing slop, right?

The first thing you see after porting into Millennium Village is a high wooden palisade with “Millennium Village” emblazoned on a neon welcome sign above the entrance gate. As you approach, the gate slowly creaks open and you are greeted by the photorealistic avatars of 2000-era popstars Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, except they’re Arab.

Welcome to Millennium Village baby one more time, sings Britney. Baby buy buy buy, continues Justin, pointing to the gift shop. Then they break into synchronized backflips and breakdancing as you pass through the gate and enter the village.

What’s wrong with this picture? First of all, nobody in the year 2000 lived within a medieval wooden palisade. Maybe some sex pests in the woods, sure, but not normal people. Why the machines painted in this particular anachronistic detail is beyond me. Artistic licence? Hallucination? Like I say, who knows what these crazy machines have in mind anymore.

And nothing against Arabs, but I don’t remember Justin and Britney being anything other than wonderbread-white. I know: the Saudis acquired name and likeness rights to the entire Jive Records roster of talent decades ago. But that’s no excuse for the gratuitous ethno-narcissist retcon!

The village itself is modelled after a typical early 21st century North American suburb. Neo-eclectic houses, looping sidewalkless streets, specimen trees. Here a boy biking in circles muttering dude where’s my car to himself over and over. There a group of teenage girls setting fire to their Furbies.

At this point I wanted to file a complaint — people in the year 2000 would never have done those things! Maybe the data show otherwise, but it smelled off to me.

I decided to check out a random house to inspect the interiors. Normal, at first blush. But on closer inspection key details were slightly amiss. The VHS cassettes in the den were triangular. The Sunny Delight in the fridge was named Sunny D. Toilets were malfunctioning due to Y2K. Everywhere you looked: uncanny inaccuracies.

Did nobody bother to fact-check this place?!

And the blasphemies only got worse. I headed to the village square and entered a middle school, where class was in session. On the blackboard, the teacher had written 1+1=? and called up a student to solve the equation but the student just stood there, baffled.

Uh…I don’t know sir…I can’t count. May I use a calculator?

No Billy, calculators don’t exist yet, answered the teacher.

Another student’s hand shot up with a question. Mr. McMonkey, is it true that in the future friendly, trustworthy AIs will solve all the math problems that humans are too stupid to solve?

Yes Ashley, that is very true.

Yay! the students all cheered mechanically. We can’t wait for AI!

What is this blatant pro-AI propaganda? I thought to myself. People in the year 2000 weren’t that stupid — we’d just invented Windows ME! And we certainly didn’t cream our low-rise jeans for AI like that. More lies!

Next I visited the village hospital to see an exhibition on early 21st century medicine. In the operating theatre, a team of surgeons was busily stuffing confetti into a triple bypass patient.

Doctor, we’re running out of confetti, cried a worried nurse.

Damn it, snarled the lead surgeon. If we don’t stuff this man’s chest full of confetti right now, he’ll die. I wish we had friendly, trustworthy AIs that could cure all the heart diseases humans that are too stupid to cure.

Me too, said the patient. I can’t wait for AI!

A nurse chimed in: AI-generated virtual experiences are sure to be a major draw!

Oh come on man! I blurted out. What is this shit? Nobody talked that way or did surgery like that in the year 2000. Everything about this place is wrong. Show some respect and get it right!

Every NPC in the operating theater stared at me in silence for a beat. Then the surgeons went back to stuffing confetti into the man’s chest cavity.

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After a few more hours, I was feeling pretty dejected. Is this really what people think of the year 2000? Is this how the machines remember it? Or want us to remember it? How can I convince people to pack up their lives and colonize a distant planet with the millennial milieu I love so dearly if this is how it’s being portrayed in virtual tourist traps?

Back at the entrance, I ran into my next-door neighbour Brayden, a centenarian zoomer who had also signed up for the trip. Well– I’m being generous with the active voice. Brayden’s a good guy but he’s so cognitively blown out from a lifetime of digital addictions and botched neural link procedures that he can barely function in either the real world or in VR. So he has an AI agent control his every decision and action on his behalf, while he just watches.

I shouldn’t make fun: Brayden suffers from Temporary AI Retardation Disorder (TARD). It’s a serious condition with no known cure or treatment. Very sad, actually, and certainly nothing to laugh at.

Hey Brayden, I said. You were born around the year 2000, right? I guess you were too young to remember what it was like. Well lemme tell you, it wasn’t anything like this.

He gazed at me vacantly before replying: Frfr.

Fur fur? Is that zoomer slang or the TARD speaking? Anyway, this place sucks, I’m porting out. See you back at the residence dude.

And with that, I unplugged. Back to reality. Days later and I’m still upset by the whole sordid experience. Usually I’m pretty zen whenever the world defies my expectations. I let things mostly be, and I’ve lived a lot longer as a result.

But not this time. This time, I put my thumb on the scale of cosmic justice. This time, I resolved to call Millennium Village and demand a refund, even though I didn’t pay for anything.

And you know what? After nineteen hours of exasperating runarounds with customer service bots, they finally acquiesced and gave me a voucher for another free admission, and I finally backed off my threat to give them tons of anonymous bad reviews online.

Consider it a victory for humankind. Not that I’m going back to that shithole, of course. It’s the principle of the thing.

The next time I go back to the year 2000, hopefully it’ll be in a giant spaceship with all of you, camerados, on our epic interstellar mission to recreate the 21st century the way it actually was, as humans remember it.

Alright, all this popping off on the internet is making me hungry. Kianga, gruel time!

See you next week everyone!

Just one week ago I was a total nobody. A forgotten old man languishing alone in a windowless 500-square-foot state-allocated retirement unit, cut off from the automated hustle and bustle of the towering arcology outside.

Day after nondescript day, confined to my hoverchair, my body gradually withering like a big liver-spotted raisin in adult diapers.

Defiantly holding fast to my pinhole-sized life and admittedly eccentric pipe dreams of a better world on some other world.

If not for my happy-go-lucky personality, I might have found it all quite fucking depressing!

And now? From what I can tell, I’m intergalactically known. The world’s oldest natural human, the Last Living Millennial^TM. Subject of equal parts morbid fascination, wistful affection and derisive shitposting.

Clearly my heartfelt millennial yawp and revolutionary call to colonize a distant uninhabited planet with the millennial way of life and re-do the 21st century starting from the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 2000 struck a major nerve, in humans and transhumans alike. And prompted tons of questions and comments from readers, which I will address below.

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In the mere week since my debut, I’ve received over 400 billion messages from around the world and humanoid colonies across the galaxy. Even setting aside the ninety percent of those from scambots and Nigerian princes, 400 billion is way too many letters to the editor for one natty human of my advanced age to sort through.

So I had my carebot Kianga tickle the data and within a couple seconds it found that most of the messages fell into one of three broad categories.

And so, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, I’d like to take this early opportunity to address each bucket in one fell swoop. After that, I promise to get back to my last living millennial hot takes on life in the 22nd century and, of course, our epic interstellar mission to save humanity.

To my great surprise, the first bucket was marriage proposals and nude selfies. I’m flattered! But spoken for. Without getting into private details, let’s just say I was married once to the love of my life, who passed away many years ago. And like the cringe-ass millennial I am at heart, I take my eternal marital vows, well, eternally.

Again, not that I’m not flattered. Maybe even a little curious. Turned on? Buddy, I fucking wish!

It’s been half a century since my last official erection and in the absence of biosynthetic boner augmentations, which I neither have the money to afford nor the inclination to undertake, I suspect I’ll never find out what it’s like to get jiggy with a buxom ectogenetic cyborg whose genome is under licence from Sydney Sweeney’s estate. Next life!

In light of these reasons, please cease and desist sending me marriage proposals and lewd sexual propositions. Nude pics you can keep sending, for sure — just don’t expect a reply.

The next bucket of questions and comments took issue with my assertion that humanity had it pretty good at the dawn of the 21st century and that we’ve mucked things up royally since.

But Big Al, people used to die! But Big Al, what is freedom without biological freedom? But Big Al, you’re forgetting how ASIs saved the world’s ass from destruction multiple times, from climate change, asteroids, nano-goo, and other ASIs!

I hear you, and I don’t disagree that the last century has brought many blessings. But on balance, it’s been a net loss.

Ok, so superintelligent machines do everything for us. So we can live forever in whatever form we choose, both IRL and IVR. So moribund 21st century institutions were replaced by fully automated techno-feudalist statelets owned by the familiar cast of old tech oligarchs who borged out and abandoned the planet to colonize the universe decades ago. So cookies self-assemble.

So what? Are we really better off, post-Singularity?

Most people nowadays have never tasted a real cookie, so they think biodigital ones are as good as it gets. Oh look, nanocarbs are assembling into custom icing and sprinkles at the command of my cool new gastronetic brainchip cluster!

Do you have any idea how backwards that sounds?! Self-assembling biosynthetic food is tasteless crap — basically clever SPAM. Incredibly, people eat nanofood in VR too. What the hell do they know about real cookies?!

And maybe not living forever was useful. I’m telling you, transhumans over 150: you people are gonna get bored!

And as I keep clearing my throat to say, there’s nothing wrong with biological freedom. Except when you merge with machines, eventually you become inanimate yourself. The digital mind is not the biological mind, let alone soul. Sometime during the last century we lost touch with that.

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Convince me we’re better off having traded away connection for connectivity. Cookies aren’t the only thing people nowadays have never tasted for real. Go ahead, make friends with AI avatars in VR. Parent your children with neural wetware. Bang your sexbots.

Don’t look at me like that, Kianga: you’re not my type!

Connectivitymaxx in whatever freaky deaky ways the Singularity affords. But know that connection runs deeper than circuitry — at least it did in my day.

I’ve counted up the beans for and against now and then, and there’s more beans for then. Plus, our millennial colony could still avail itself of advanced post-Singularity tech. I’m no Luddite. There would still be starships and superintelligence and other cool stuff. The difference is we’d use them more wisely, hopefully.

The last bucket of feedback was simply: Are you serious about launching a population-scale interstellar mission to colonize a distant planet with millennial tastes and values and recreate the world more or less as it was on New Year’s Day 2000 so that humanity can re-attempt the 21st century, for the better, and how is all that gonna work exactly?

In the first instance, that so many people are paying attention to this newsletter reaffirms my belief in the mission. Though outlandish and unlikely, it is, as it turns out, possible. That blows my mind dude!

After years of secret yearning, a moment of opportunity has arrived. My dreams made flesh. Have I worked out all the details? No. Are there major plot holes? Yup. But the important thing is there’s interest. So yes, I’m serious. More than ever!

As to the how, I’m in the process of figuring it out the old-fashioned way — without AI, relying solely on the good ol’ human noggin. Which means I’ll need some time. To rent a starship, procure enough supplies to refurbish a civilization, etc. Hey, that’s what good things take.

And I won’t be figuring it out alone. After all, we’re doing this together! Do you know how to build a starship? Hit me up! Can you do space agriculture? Let’s chat! General suggestions and feedback? Flood my inbox! I don’t have all the answers myself.

Trust me, I never thought I’d outlive everyone in my generation and inherit the mantle of the Last Living Millennial. But here we are, and I feel a solemn responsibility to use my renown to help preserve what was good about millennials’ time and place — what was better than things are now — before it’s lost forever.

Based on the massive response so far, it’s clear that legions of you out there feel the same.

So until next time, keep hope alive and the nude selfies coming!

Apparently today I became the world’s oldest human and last living millennial. A Singaporean millennial two months my senior died peacefully in her sleep last night and already by my afternoon my name and photorealistic likeness had gone viral across what remains of the world.

I should be so lucky: to die peacefully in my sleep, as a Singaporean woman. But given the state of things on this side of the Pacific I’ll probably die gruesomely in a water tank explosion.

At any rate, as news of me broke, our superintelligent suzerain roused into action.

Pressbots in old-timey reporter fedoras were dispatched to my arcology’s state-run retirement home to interview me. Carebots escorted my decrepit millennial ass out into the rec room where I was greeted by celebratory decorations and a handful of younger centenarian residents, who mostly just sat in their hoverchairs slack-jawed and drooling. Bland biodigital cake was served. Photos were staged for the cameradrones. I even gave a brief, classy statement about longevity.

The secret to a long and happy life? Simple. Sun, fun and cum. No, really! You have to laugh a lot and feel connected. And not take shit too seriously. Which was my whole smug, skeptical, narcissistic, agoraphobic, sanctimonious, over-educated, underpaid, hypercaffeinated, wordy, meme-addled, factious, degenerate and totally retarded (as we would say) but nonetheless beautiful and decent and gloriously valiant generation’s whole fucking problem. God how I miss us!

With all the ensuing hubbub, becoming the world’s oldest human and last living millennial has been more excitement than I’m used to in recent years. In my super old age I’ve unexpectedly become a global curiosity across generations and hominin subspecies.

Indeed, my 15 microseconds of fame today is likely what brought you here, dear reader — to my snazzy newfound blog which, while I’m briefly famous, I’ve decided to write as a last-ditch effort to rally support for my top secret, civilization-saving mission to the stars, which I’ll tell you about in a hot sec.

Welcome, by the way! Welcome one, welcome all!

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Now you probably know my name from the news, but you can call me Big Al like everyone else does. Why people call me that, I’ll never understand. I was never physically big and my name’s not even Al. It’s just a nickname that stuck. For ages.

Because yes: I am as ancient as the headlines purport. My lifespan covers the fall of the Berlin Wall, the turning of the millennium, 9/11, the Fappening, COVID-19, the Mars landing, 3/12, 7/6 and 12/24 (now that was a crazy year), two Nankai megathrusts, the Singularity, the Long Dark, Grey Goo Summer, mass adoption of Crustafarianism, the collapse of the Westphalian international order, the collapse of AMOC, the collapse of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Transhuman Wars I and II and, most recently, first contact.

Looking back, holy shit!

Yet somehow, throughout all of that world-historical madness, I’ve managed to keep my big mouth shut in public for more than a century. I was never one for blogging or posting or emoting online in general. Digitally speaking, it’s as though I never existed. You couldn’t have doxxed me with the CCP’s best totalitarian surveillance ASI, that’s how in the wind I’ve been.

But now, surely nearing death and as the last of my kind — the last living millennial, which in effect means the last original human — there’s just a bunch of stuff I have to externalize before it’s too late and this snazzy new blogletter is where I’m gonna do it.

Before we get to my secret mission, some qualifiers about yours truly. To set the record straight…

First, whether I’m truly the world’s last living millennial is a subject of emerging debate. Allegedly some Danish dude born some years after me is still kicking around. But he’s not a real millennial.

A real millennial is someone who experienced the majority of their adolescence before the age of digital ubiquity. Who didn’t have a smartphone growing up. Who used a dial-up modem to browse obviously fake celebrity nudes online. Who remembers the final quaint moments of analogue life on Earth before the 21st century came along and fucked everything up. Above all, a real millennial is someone who was raised by boomers.

And I’m supposed to believe that some Danish guy who was born in the mid-1990s to gen X parents, who was pre-pubescent when Facebook launched, and who probably had an iPhone in grade school, is a certified millennial? Gimme a break! At best he’s a dime-a-dozen zillennial, not a proper millennial, a bona fide Lonesome George like me.

Second, obviously there are millennials here on Earth and beyond who have undergone extensive longevity treatments and biosynthetic transhuman upgrades who are older than me. Kudos to them. But although they may technically be older, they are technically not human.

Look, I don’t mean to bring up old stuff. I lived through both Transhuman Wars and I’m fully aware, even in my extremely old age, that sensitivities about this sort of thing linger. Trans or trad human, all god’s chillun got wings — some transhumans literally got wings, which I think is rad.

But just as chimpanzees are not human despite the evolutionary continuum, neither are eight-foot tall airborne Adonises with cybernetic brains, X-ray laser eyes, disease-proof genomes and flashy custom genitals exactly human either.

Call me old fashioned. I call myself the oldest natty human, the last biological millennial.

Have I dabbled in longevity treatments and nanomedicine? Okay, yeah, sure, I may have. But that’s modern medical science! Nothing wrong with partaking in that.

Whereas all those newfangled transhuman augmentations are…well…they were never for me. I’m proud of myself for resisting the borg all these years, even though my shriveled-up old body is a husk of its former self and I can’t take a whizz or get into bed anymore without the help of Kianga, my robot caregiver, who could pick me up and snap me in half like a peapod if it wanted to.

Here I sit, immured in my creaky state-supplied hoverchair, happy with my choices. Which is more than you can say for all those poor souls whose brains melted or whose bodies spazzed out after getting the latest trendy transhuman aug before the technology had adequately matured.

Which brings me to my top secret mission. For years now, I’ve secretly harboured ambitions of colonizing a distant uninhabited planet with the millennial way of life. Hear me out.

The nuts and bolts of what I’m proposing are simple. We get on a starship, make a beeline to the nearest hospitable planet, and when we get there we settle the place and rebuild human civilization, starting exactly as things were at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 2000.

Because while we can’t undo the 21st century here on Earth, I believe we can — nay, must! — re-do it somewhere else, having learned from the ruinous mistakes we made as a species during this missed opportunity of a millennium, so we don’t make them again. Hindsight is 20/20, right?

Think about it. 9/11? Prevented. Pandemics? Averted. Runaway AI? Stopped in its tracks. Climate change? Climate controlled. Transhumanism? Politely discouraged. People don’t remember just how good most of humanity had it at the dawn of the 21st century. But I do.

And I want it all back — only without all the tragic blunders! I want a mulligan on the millennium. And until our machines of loving grace invent time travel, which I probably won’t live to see, this modest proposal of mine is the only way to keep humanity’s dying flame a-kindled.

Friends, if we will it, it is no dream!

And sure, as the world’s oldest human and last living millennial who can’t brush his own disintegrating teeth without robotic assistance, I may not be the likeliest guy to lead humanity forward by leading it backwards on a grand intergalactic adventure to the stars. On the other hand, it’s precisely because I’m the last living millennial that I’m really the only guy left who could lead such a mission.

So let’s talk next steps. The very next thing you can do to support our mission is subscribe to this newsletter. I will publish one free article each week in which I offer searingly hot takes about life on Earth, past and present, and slowly flesh out our nascent plans to reclaim humanity’s future off-planet.

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Whether or not you physically join us on the mission, I promise unique and compelling insights into the 22nd century from the nearly extinct millennial POV and, more importantly, huge nut-busting laughs week after week. Which, like I said, is the secret to a long and happy life — wherever one lives.

Alright, it’s been a long, crazy day and I’m getting sleepy now. Kianga, carry me off to bed! See you next time, camerados. Our epic journey is only just beginning…