[speculative fiction short story]
Child’s Play
It’s all fun & games ‘till someone gets rich!
Is an elite cadre of children and seniors responsible for The Great Anomaly?
Reporter: Tere Guttierez
11/20/2023 9:10 AM | Updated 11/22/2023 4:28 PM
The Great Anomaly has puzzled quants and statisticians since it was discovered last spring. By all conventional indicators the situation is catastrophic. Supercharged volatility in the stock market has sunk the value of many stocks to near zero, taking out huge financial institutions along with it and bankrupting several major corporations thought to be too big to fail.
In the past several months the top 0.1% has lost as much wealth as it had accumulated over the past quarter-century, a trend which appears to be only accelerating. At the same time the wealth of the bottom 50% has seen steady increases. A recent Brookings Institute report showed the bulk of these gains appear in the accounts of senior citizens living at or below the poverty line.
If you didn’t know better, you could be excused for thinking there to be some sort of forcible redistribution of wealth taking place in America.
Now, a pair of Bay Area researchers say they have unearthed evidence that the Great Anomaly may be just that. What’s more they say, the culprits behind this large scale pillaging of the corporate world are most likely children.
According to a paper published yesterday, The Great Anomaly is the result of massive, clandestine market manipulation with origins in ApplesauceMC — a server that hosts an instance of the popular computer game Minecraft.
“It’s a video game,” said Marcus Webster, anthropology lecturer at Laney College and one of the researchers who published the report. “Like actually a video game. Our hypothesis is these kids have built a simulation of the real economy on Minecraft. The data show a network of and it’s become so advanced that it’s somehow having real effects on global markets.”
Webster said he uncovered these findings while using his son’s phone to set up his Netflix account on a new TV. “My phone was dead so I just grabbed Daryl’s. I was trying to do the little activation thing and I see his grandma is texting him all this stuff. I started reading it and I’m like ‘What the hell is this?’ It was like a code.”
He took the phone to his neighbor, UC Berkeley computer scientist Rebecca Elkin. As a cryptography and cyber-security expert, Elkin was able to run the text exchanges through an experimental machine learning model that revealed something extraordinary. The text messages were a means of making a direct payment of over $100,000 originating from ApplesauceMC through a currency exchange and into the account of Webster’s mother-in-law Yvonne Sanders.
Shocked, Webster returned home and confronted his son Daryl, 9. “He played dumb,” Webster said. “He just kept doing that dance. You know the floss dance? Yeah. He just kept doing that until his mom came to pick him up.”
“My grandson has always been a very bright child,” said Sanders. “I think it makes Marcus a little uncomfortable.”
The exact mechanism through which ApplesauceMC has been able to effect these changes remains unclear. But based on a statistical analysis of the timestamps on the outgoing and incoming transfers to the server, Webster and Elkin show that ApplesauceMC has been profiting immensely from recent market fluctuations. “We’re talking twelve figures, easy,” said Elkin.
According to their report, the members of ApplesauceMC could be using a currency system designed in Minecraft as a store of value, akin to a crypto-currency, and transferring the money into other accounts to cash it out.
Although not included in their published report, Webster has a theory about how the server is able to translate in-game currency into real dollars. He believes ApplesauceMC is operated by kids, for kids.
“Why have the elderly seen such huge financial gains in the past six months? Which is how long this server has been around. Why are the payments coming out of this server moving disproportionately? They’re children, they can’t open accounts of their own. So they’re giving to people who they trust and who they can count on to funnel the money back to them. They’re laundering money through their grandparents.”
“I don’t know how they would do that” said Andrew McGuinness, senior research fellow at Hoover Institute. “But they’ve been right every time. Even insider trading could not yield returns like this.You would expect to see a few misses. This Minecraft server has not missed yet.”
It may seem far-fetched, but leading banks and big investment firms are desperate for answers. “It’s absolute, literal f***ing carnage on Wall Street,” said Valerie Munez, a financial analyst at Chase Manhattan. “Nobody knows when or even if it will end. I for one welcome our juvenile overlords.”
“We are witnessing a cataclysmic shift in the US economy, one which threatens to leave many members of the financial community in the dust,” NYSE president Fabian Li said in a press release Monday. This sentiment was echoed in the alarming report “Prolegomena to Any Future Markets” published yesterday by the International Monetary Fund, which warned that global financial markets may be on the brink of total collapse.
Some are already seeing the potential upshot of this situation. ”Instead of a trickle-down economy, we might see a scenario in which wealth would start to percolate up, making a full cycle before it’s recaptured at the top of the distribution curve,” said Stanford sociologist Lewis Highkiln.
This could lay the groundwork for the widespread adoption of what Highkiln calls “circular care networks.”
“On a micro level you have — look, okay, so your children are able to capture a tremendous amount of wealth more or less on their own. They pull in their grandparents because they are sort of natural allies… these are two groups that have been traditionally dependent on others for care. But now they discover they are able to actually provide for one another in very real ways. The power dynamic becomes inverted.
“Then on the macro level, as this becomes more commonplace, you’ll start to see entire markets shift to try and cater to the specific needs of children and the elderly, who will become the new dominant consumer class. What is more, the elderly vote and they will vote to mutually benefit their new circular care networks. During the pandemic a few years back, we saw global billionaires make trillions as workers lost trillions, now instead of a .00001% holding 98% of the world’s wealth we see that wealth has shifted to 20% of the population. Something that hasn’t happened in any of our lifetimes.”
Not everyone is convinced, however. “Anybody who tells you they understand what is happening in the economy right now is lying to you.” said Norman Itzkowitz, Pulitzer-winning Harvard economist and author of The Future of Futures: Speculative Finance at the Dawn of a New Economy.
“The truth is we’ve never had a situation like this before. Never. In the very near future we could see fiat currencies all around the globe start spiraling into hyper-inflation. Hedge funds, large corporations, and other major players have already seen the value of their holdings evaporate overnight. Goldman Sachs is gone. Facebook, Tesla, Walmart, poof. Bezos is worth next to nothing. And then Elon Musk’s children and their solidarity space walk — I don’t need to get into it. We all know. And yet you look out your window and everything is… fine. Better than fine, actually. Things are great. It just doesn’t make sense.”
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With Elkin’s assistance, The Chronicle has made several attempts to contact the administrators of ApplesauceMC. Click here to view an interactive map of the memes they have sent us in response.
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A previous version of this article stated that Daryl Webster was 8 years old. He just turned 9.
This is a piece of speculative fiction by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, inspired by Futurist Writers Room workshop hosted by the Guild of Future Architects.
This short story is part of the official announcement of No Funding:
Be the Crypto-Anarchist Digital Artist Colony You Want to See in the World.
No Funding — the newest project from Stupid Hackathon co-founder Amelia Winger-Bearskin — is a mutual aid network that aims to help creatives radically rethink our relationships to funding, grants, and gatekeepers. In an arts and media culture increasingly focused on securing patronage from institutions, corporations, and wealthy individuals, No Funding asks what creative life would look like if artists were fully liberated from money and the self-censorship imposed by its pursuit? Rather than experience the soul crushing lifestyle of striving, rejection, and constant jockeying for position, could we instead find new ways to support one another? What would we make?
No Funding is a public group; visit no-funding.com to get in on the fun and participate in weekly conversations where members present on topics near and dear to them. No Funding is primarily BIPOC creative technologists but it is open to anyone who has needed a day job to make something cool they believe in. Our motto is no-striving no-hustling: No-Funding.com a creative collective.
Thank you to Eamon O’Connor, who makes me the best writer I can be.
