'"Never. We ain't never bringing them back. That's it, man. New system, no need for these old machines. They redundant."

"But I just brought these all the way over from Brooklyn ... How am I going to get my money for them? I need some cash! There's like two hundred bucks here!"

"No cash," the guy says, as he jumps up onto the truck's front platform, where its cab should be. "No cash for recycling, just credit. You gotta get the app now."

[...] "This is a MESH network, it's completely decentralised. Instead of connecting to a router or a central server to access it, you connect directly to other Flex users over Bluetooth, and through them to everybody else on the network. It's very localised - in order to connect you have to be within fifty or so meters or someone else that's connected. But if you are then you can potentially reach everyone else in the network. So even though it's hyperlocal there's no limit to how many people can join, or how big the network can grow - this is networking on a community scale."

[...] "There are no servers here, no data centres or cloud storage. The file-sharing system is pretty sophisticated but very easy to use - you can share pretty much anything, from web pages to streaming video and full VR environments, but it has to be stored locally on your spex or another device running Flex. We've just set this up and let users do what they want with it. We've spontaneously ended up with dozens of photo-sharing groups, radio stations, and mixed reality gaming campaigns. And it's all come from within the community."

[...] Half the crowd here are finance bros of every gender, the other half their partners, all with the kinds of jobs you can do in NYC these days only if your other half is a millionaire hedge fund manager. Meatpacking District gallery curators. Life coaches. Personal stylists. Social-media brand managers. Artisan cupcake distributors. Food bloggers. Lots of food bloggers.

At Rush's insistence both he and Scott have got their scarves and hoods up to try to mask their faces from the police drones that float constantly above their heads. Most of the rest of the marchers have done the same: if not hoodies or scarves then actual masks - 3D-printed re-creations of too many other black men and women slain by the police, to keep their memories alive as much as to hide identities, as if vengeful ghosts have been summoned to march with them.

"[...] I've been on Pride, and I went on the Women's March ... but this ... They were different, right? Like it felt like people were there to have fun. Like the signs all had jokes on them, people were partying, taking selfies. This, this feels like it's about something. Like I said, focused. Urgent. Angry. But with good reason. You know what I mean?"

[...]

"Plus, on those marches, there was never this many cops."

Then that footage had leaked, the clearing of the homeless camp near Google's HQ in California. Next thing, their campus in Mountain View was swamped by thousands of protestors. The leaked video had brought them down, but it felt like most of them had some other reason to be there: that unshakable feeling that they'd been fucked over, that they'd been denied something, that they'd had too much control taken away from them and put into the hands of unseen algorithms. They cut some data lines, blocked the driverless staff buses from getting in. Called it a "real-life DDOS." It was peaceful enough, looked almost fun at first, like some kind of music festival. Until someone started messing around with homemade EMP grenades. and Google's security team of PTSD-shaken ex-vets got trigger happy. For twelve hours it was nothing but screaming and chaos, footer of hipster kids bleeding out into the streets while Google hemorrhaged money on the markets, until the police finally rolled in with armored cars and drones and shut it all down. Thirty-six dead, 68 percent burned off Google's share value.

But Mary thinks she knows now why Melody did it. She had got what she said she had wanted, the celebrity, the fame, and had stepped from one prison to another. She can only guess how hollow that left her.

[...] this was different. There wasn't even any pretense of making money here, no attempt to inform or give warning to users. This just broke stuff. It just stopped shit working. At the very least, after it had spread itself to anything else it could find, it disconnected what it infected from the network. Then it started to shut it down. To erase and corrupt data, wipe storage. To turn devices, whatever they were, into useless bricks of silicon and plastic.

So a weapon, ostensibly designed to destroy everything, and clearly meant to flourish in cities, crammed to their gills with millions upon millions of Internet-connected devices, from toys and cell phones and spex and earbuds to streetlights and CCTV cameras and traffic sensors and driverless cars. It was a weapon designed to take advantage of cities' overhyped, unthinking, unquestioning desire to be "smart," to be "always on," to be "connected." It was designed to be the consequence of untamed, badly planned, free-market-fueled, oversaturated urban networking, and to rip through it like a dirty bomb. [....]

[...] We're so young we don't remember a time where there was no Internet, but we're still old enough to remember being excited that we could use it to start a revolution.

But we were so wrong about that, our friends. So very wrong.

There was no revolution to be had on the Internet. None at all. The idea that there ever was is false. A big fat lie.

[...] We watched huge battles rage. And we thought they were exciting and important.

But we were wrong, we slowly realized. We realized those battles were just a spectacle, a distraction from what was really going on. Because those battles were taking place on a battlefield that didn't matter. On a battlefield that had no way of making a difference. Because that's a battlefield we don't own, and never could. New battlefields built just to keep us occupied.

[...] We watched our political activists and community leaders become celebrity brands, our tech-utopian visionaries bow to capital and shareholders.

The algorithms control everything now. And it goes up much further than just ads in your timeline. The algorithms control all the networks - both the physical and the digital ones, if there's any real use in pretending there's a difference anymore. From plastic-spewing gulags in China to the automated trading floors, from the bridges of container ships to the warehouses of Amazon, the algorithms decide everything.

Our politicians and corporations and leaders and economists and bankers - they all do nothing now. They do nothing more than the algorithms. [...]

We were all busy on the Internet when this happened. Some of us might have been reading stories or watching movies or playing video games about THE ROBOT UPRISING when it happened, which is kind of funny, isn't it, friends? Entertaining ourselves by worrying about a massive inhuman artificial intelligence rising up and enslaving us, when in fact a massive inhuman artificial intelligence WAS rising up and enslaving us. Haha, isn't that funny, friends? It's ironic. What's different is that the massive inhuman artificial intelligence wasn't enslaving us with nuclear bombs or turning us into batteries (how WOULD that work?) or crushing our feeble human skulls with its metal feet, but by finding the best ways to sell us stuff. SkyNet is real, and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves.