In the organizers’ command center, a trailer discreetly situated behind the stage, Tom Levine hovered behind Liza Yudong, watching her manipulate an AR screen. Only the night before, Levine had told his fiancée where he was going and what was happening, knowing that it could mean the end of their engagement. He was in D.C. by dawn the next day with nothing but a toothbrush and a change of clothes in a backpack.
“How are you doing all this?” Tom now asked Liza. She removed a pair of harlequin-style ARs, rubbed her eyes after a long day of watching the chaos organize in three-dimensional graphics around her face, and looked at her old coworker like he was boring her.
“You know in the movie when the screenplay says ‘Computer stuff, computer stuff, computer stuff’? The AI does all that, and I just sit here.”
“And here I was afraid you’d lose your sense of humor without me, Liz.”
Liza went on to explain, in the most dumbed-down, patronizing way she could manage, how not only was her algorithm pushing tactical intelligence to individuals as open-source resistance but also how it created a unity of command. Identity prediction analysis gave her algorithm a solid notion of who could be called upon to do what, and each instruction arrived on the device of a person deemed likely to carry it out.
“So you’ve spied on people to determine if they’d be willing participants,” said Tom.
“ ‘Spied’ is a big word. We use the same data as Pepsi or the Democratic Party. I call it my Occupy AI. We determined we needed a base of five thousand good little unthinking, unquestioning revolutionaries, so that if the AI asked them to act like chickens, there’ll be five thousand smelly hippies on the Mall clucking in unison.”
It was a bit more complex than that. The predictive tech, along with the gigabytes of data gathered, bought, and sold by advertisers on behavioral futures markets, was coveted by all kinds of actors. The New York Times had reported on how Vic Love had utilized a powerful new tool from CLK Metrics to devastate his electoral opponents going as far back as his Senate bid in Montana, with his campaign uniquely targeting voters’ psychology in groundbreaking ways. Liza used the same tools to recruit their true believers, an eighteen-month process in which their group made contact with nearly twenty-five thousand potential occupiers, sifting through the best and brightest of the past twenty years of social movements, veterans of BLM, Idle No More, Sunrise, Extinction Rebellion, Occupy, and Standing Rock, as well as young people just stepping into the activist space. These microtargeted individuals were not let in on the details of the plan until they’d undergone a background check and training in nonviolent direct action and the hard skills of organization and encampment, everything from first aid to latrine construction. No one on the executive committee ever had personal contact with any of their cadre leaders. It was all done through anonymizing software and aliases. The climate concert itself went unmentioned. All these folks knew was that they were going to be called to do something bold and radical. From the perspective of law enforcement, Kate Morris, Liza Yudong, Seth Young, Anthony Pietrus, and Matt Stanton had only been planning a concert. Yudong delivered insight into the protocols that governed D.C.’s sprawling security apparatus in a post–9/11, post–1/6 environment, and she used this to develop machine learning to rapidly deploy participants in a mass-protest event. Her program could recruit, train, and direct new members without anyone so much as tapping a key, generating seemingly leaderless action, while organizing its tactics around Homeland Security, D.C. Metro Police, and Capitol Police preparations for civil unrest. When all those people ran to Fourteenth Street to lock their arms in a sleeping dragon, no person told them to do that. It was the AI processing multiple data streams at once to decide how to create the most effective disruption to gain control of Fourteenth from Madison to Jefferson.
The recruits now did their jobs with dedication and efficiency. For nine hours following Morris’s speech, under a pale ghost sky, they worked tirelessly to build a garrison in the heart of the US capital. The concertgoers made their decisions after the last acts departed, some electing to stay, picking up tents and gear, but most filtering back out to the streets and the Metro, spooked by the overturned buses, still not sure if this was for real. On that first night their makeshift city glowed with digital screens, headlamps, and campfires, and the chatter of voices and song carried across the city. Volunteers came by to feed those still chained in sleeping dragons and give them sips of water. Oblate disc of moon peeking through clouds. Errant drops of rain hissing in the campfires. She wouldn’t sleep that night, but Kate Morris did pause from her work to look out over the sea of flapping plastic pulled over tents to fight the dampness, the smattered-star glitter of people checking their phones in the hastily built commune, the buzz and energy of last call at the bar now indefinitely suspended.
And yet by morning, it seemed like the whole thing was over. If seven thousand people remained on the damp lawn of the National Mall, they would’ve been lucky. Liza climbed out of her tent and saw their disappointing numbers. Given that almost all five thousand of their Blue Bands had stayed, their larger retention rate was under 2 percent. The scene looked like a poorly attended convention for suburban camping enthusiasts. The stage remained. The backstage trailers remained, all rock and pop occupants having made themselves scarce. The north and south streets were piled with debris. Semi-amused, semi-exasperated cops were still trying to get arc welders to the sleeping dragons, a few progressive press outlets hovered around the Media Relations tent, and the kitchens fed veggie burritos to anyone who showed up, but all told, it looked like it was about to be a lot of egg on someone’s face. A revolution that’s about as much of a fart in a bag as climate change itself, tweeted one commentator.
Kate Morris made the rounds, thanking people for staying, urging them to reach out to their networks to bring in more bodies. Most people listened to her from inside their tents because the rain had picked up.
The status quo, for its part, was laughing at her. The president was in Japan for a meeting of the G20, so Vice President McGuirk and the head of Homeland Security got on a holo-chat with the mayor of D.C. With the threat of Dallas-level riots appearing to be a mirage, all agreed it was best to encircle the Mall for now, keep a phalanx of menacing crowd-control cops between these granola-eaters and the Capitol, and let the whole thing fizzle in a few days from crummy weather. Once it was down to the hundreds, they’d start making arrests.