The Hindsight Times

The carbon increase, attributed to 'datacenter growth and cryptocurrency mining,' occurred as millions of young citizens deliberately chose 'dumbphones' — devices capable only of voice communication and text messaging. Contemporary observers called this behavior 'cool' and 'mindful,' apparently unaware that their decision to reduce personal connectivity while permitting industrial carbon venting represented the era's characteristic cognitive dissonance.

'They worried about smartphone addiction while breathing corporate emissions,' notes Dr. Kai Patel-9947, whose recent biography of Elon Musk, 'The First Tweeter,' chronicles how Saint Elon's promises of sustainable transport were systematically abandoned as his empire pivoted toward Mars colonization. 'Citizens chose personal purity over systemic change — the defining pathology of the pre-Sorting era.'

The Musk Infrastructure, then still called 'Tesla,' continued producing luxury vehicles for the wealthy while ordinary citizens practiced 'digital minimalism' — a movement that historians now recognize as the early symptoms of what would become Purpose Allocation resistance. The irony was not lost on contemporary observers: as one archived tweet from @GenZGirl2025 proclaimed, 'ditched my iPhone for a Nokia brick, feeling so much more present while the world literally burns.'

Most disturbing to modern readers, these personal choices occurred alongside what were called 'trade wars' — conflicts between geographical regions over the right to extract and burn carbon compounds. The Trump Administration, in its second incarnation, threatened 'tariffs' (primitive taxation of goods based on origin rather than carbon content) while citizens debated whether TikTok was corrupting their attention spans.

'The smartphone debate consumed enormous cultural energy,' observes Dr. Lin Rodriguez-4456, author of 'The Last Honest Photo: Truth in the Pre-Verification Era.' 'Meanwhile, their primitive Federal Reserve was investigating cryptocurrency mining — which consumed more electricity than entire nations — for what they called 'financial crimes' rather than atmospheric terrorism.'

The dumbphone movement would peak this year before collapsing during the Platform Wars of 2026-2028, when citizens realized that voluntary disconnection from corporate surveillance networks merely intensified their exposure to unfiltered climate reality. By 2030, the same Generation Z citizens begging for 'mindful technology' would demand the algorithmic attention management that became the foundation of our current Optimization systems.

Of course, before Verification Scores, anyone could publish anything about climate, technology, or carbon emissions without credentials or fact-checking. The chaos this produced speaks for itself.