003 From China with love

By the first decades of the 21st century, the penetration of technologies into life was the most advanced it had ever been in the Middle Empire. It became literally impossible to live there without being immersed in biohypermedia. But while the ecological debacle that threatened NeolibGov, China, in some ways remained an indecipherable disciplinary continent. For those at the bottom, it seemed that the country was doing its own thing and wasn't fully integrated into the rest of the world, especially financially, even though this would ultimately prove to be an illusory prospect: that region's techno-tycoons, among the richest in the world, were finding it difficult to emancipate themselves from the Party-run PoSt/ates. Party leaders, they said, were far more concerned with the welfare of workers, the organization of production and consumption, and the country's emergence as the greatest technological power than with saving themselves in space or on Mars.

The technological flagship was Great Leap, the world's most powerful quantum computer. But like all powerful battleships, Great Leap would also meet its own torpedo. When it was hacked, we found out that it was running a software module that, for convenience, we called Time Machine.

Although the National Quantum Computing Laboratory in Hefei, which had designed it, boasted billions of times more computing power for Great Leap than conventional supercomputers, in reality this boon remained theoretical and not fully utilized. Despite the technological prowess of its architecture and its 127K qubits, the Chinese had resigned themselves to using the Free Quantum OS, the last major project of the Free Software Foundation commune, although they certainly disliked its transparency and FOSS rules.

All of this was public knowledge; but no one knew that software had been developed in a start-up company in Beijing's Innoway – China's Silicon Valley – that could change the perception of time by giving it a different spin. This stream was transmitted to a user via an app and a mobile device called Time Glasses, a special version of "smart" glasses.  However, the system required a great deal of computing power for each individual user, and only a quantum megacomputer could handle a multitude of simultaneous users. Sensing the biopolitical prospects of Time Glasses, the Chinese administration took control of the start-up and launched project "Long Spring". The official goal was to improve the quality of life of the workforce and, the unofficial goal, to increase productivity.

Wearing the connected time glasses, each laborer could work at least ten or twelve hours a day, having the impression that only seven or eight hours had passed, even though his or her body remained anchored to UTC.

"Volunteers" were chosen for the experimental phase in Rabbitconn's large factories in Shenzhen; these were mostly young women working on smartphone assembly lines who were promised, in exchange, an extra day off.

During the testing period, the length of the work day was limited, and it was a success. Participants were more relaxed and in good spirits at the end of their shifts, even if later, for better or worse, physical fatigue resurfaced.

When word spread at Rabbitconn about this extraordinary app, volunteers multiplied, so much so that it was difficult to accommodate everyone right away. Rare were those who hesitated because, despite official statements, they sensed the project was really aimed at making workdays endless and never paying overtime.

That's exactly what happened: the government launched the "Long Spring" project in grand fashion, supplementing it with the Social Credits (SCS) program. Each worker who adhered would receive 50 points on the red list of merits, while overtime payment was suspended. As expected, managers lengthened work days and sey the time machine to the maximum when there were peak production periods at the factory. There, timid protests were quickly silenced by government unions so that the system could be expanded to other sectors.

The government's real target, in fact, was not just workers in large factories already being robotized, but all workers of all conditions, not just wage earners. In the crosshairs were cognitive activities, including remote workers. Precarious laborers and freelancers could "take advantage of it," and in Innoway, all startuppers then followed the 996 rule: work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week. The system worked wonders.

The government was counting this device to consolidate the emerging Chinese hegemony, taking advantage of the fact that the US was in a chronic civil war that was crippling its society. In fact, there were several problems of the same kind in China as well, among others caused by major works including the immense Three Strokes Dam. However, the Chinese government and its giant SecurServ detachment –tightly controlled by the Party and loosely integrated with the Ecofin HighSphere and the High Frontier project (or perhaps linked by quantum entanglement) – were doing their best to keep the situation under control and hide the problems as much as possible. What the Chinese leaders were interested in was the expected great leap forward in production.  Then, by exporting the system to the rest of the globe through agreements with the techno-tycoons, worldwide control of the new modes of what would remain of production would be assured. After a period of almost geometric expansion of Time Glasses in every production sector, the first rumblings about social imbalance emerged. Young female workers with families complained, for example, that by staying for overtime, they no longer realized when it was time to go shopping and that they often arrived home too late to make dinner. And girlfriends could not explain to their partners how they had stoop up their dates. Instead, "mattress culture" was expanding in Innoway's startuppers, with workers putting yoga matts under their desks where they would collapse and maintain the well-established tradition of "no sleep, no sex, no life." A curse that pursued them as doggedly as they chased the mirage of Jack But, the mythical founder of Aladdin, the most famous of Chinese techbros.

However, the disruption of basic biological rhythms produced by the daily distortion of time was producing another type of disturbance that was even more disturbing.

After brief moments of catatonia, subjects got incoherent inklings that, at first glance, seemed delusional. Obviously, this was just a form of lucid reaction to working 14 hours every day. Disorganized, underground forces were erupting irrepressibly in reaction to a system that "in the process of production generated a strong schizophrenic charge against which the system itself would then unleash the full weight of its repression."

These crises were an attempt to get out of an unbearable temporal disorientation, voluntarily accepted to adhere to the "collective dream" to which they had been urged in the last speeches of Comrade Guo, secretary of the political bureau of the Party Central Committee. But now, the dream had turned into a nightmare.

Government specialists had likened the phenomenon to a new form of burn-out that was already widespread in China at that time. They recommended reducing excessive and sudden surges in changes in time perception to try to maintain the essentials of productivity gains.

But once again the experts were wrong. It was not burn-out, but "a schizo process that only revolutionary activity prevents from turning into the actual production of schizophrenia."

And this was the button that triggered the sudden switch between the two poles, order and chaos, which are part of a historical alternation for the Chinese.

And when "great was the confusion under heaven: the situation became excellent."

At first, rather than a rebellion, a total and biological rejection resulted both in a staggering increase in suicides but, above all, in a wave of schizophrenia as a reaction to the modification of the perception of time for the purpose of increased productivity. The Chinese Ministry of Health's first diagnosis of was that it was a form of schizo, but they were powerless to contain it or to treat it. Schizo-tempestuous could not be treated like "normal" lunatics, that is, by locking them up in psychiatric hospitals, like the CCP did with certain political opponents. There were just far too many of them.

The "schizo-tempestuous" were agitated and rambling. They heard voices suggesting that they wanted everything and now. Especially "now", because after the treatment they received, time no longer meant the same thing it had before. Time is a fundamental dimension. Imagine if you were forced to live, or even simply work with one less dimension, as if you were flattened into a comic book or onto a screen. That'd fuck anyone up...

Anyway, institutions officially considered them as seriously ill, but the same was not true in their interactions with the rest of the population. Despite the marginalization to which they were subjected, in reality their hallucinations were moving deep within, and muddying the social waters. And the first signs of exasperation began to appear.

Neither the Chinese government nor the rest of world governance (many countries in order not to lose ground to China had joined the Long Spring franchise) wanted to give up the benefits that time distortion brought them in very concrete terms of profit, despite realizing the impasse. For them, the Project would disprove Marx: profit would never fall!

They could not – or would not – see that schizo-tempestuous, although lacking the faculties to organize the masses with their desiring hallucinations, had unconsciously succeeded in compacting divided social classes that were now rebelling just about everywhere. A kind of schizophrenic and chaotic vanguard emerged. Meanwhile, great masses supported the delirious vanguard in an unexpected way: the Tang Ping movement, inspired by the rejection of labor claimed by the European Autonomists and the direct heir of the Japanese Hikikomori and participants in the Great Resignation, magically went into non-action.  Everything came to a sudden halt and nobody worked anymore. The schizo-tempestuous fight broke out. Delirious and confusing, it was also lightning-fast and wild. The schizo-tempestuous, who had thrown themselves headlonginto rebellion, seemed so numb to the pain and amputations that repression inflicted on them that both the Chinese government and world finance had to give in before chaos overwhelmed them.

Everyone was freed from that intangible yoke of time manipulation. Schizo-temporal illness ceased as if by magic, and so did some of the autoimmune diseases that depended on it.