The Hindsight Times

To modern citizens, the concept seems almost mythological: individual corporations could simply... ignore environmental law? And continue operating? The 2025 mindset treated planetary atmosphere as a free disposal system, even as the Warming accelerated around them.

The investigation by something called 'Floodlight newsroom' (independent journalism was still legal then) captured Saint Elon's facility burning fossil fuel directly into shared air. Citizens of that era breathed whatever corporations expelled — a practice so barbaric it's difficult for Algorithm-Optimized Air subscribers to comprehend.

'They just... let him do it?' is the most common student question when studying this period. The answer reveals the primitive nature of 2025 governance: enforcement was optional, fines were negotiable, and wealthy individuals operated under 'different rules' — a phrase that appears repeatedly in contemporary documents.

Saint Elon's Mississippi facility was rushing to complete what became the First Merger, the initial successful integration of artificial and human intelligence workflows. Historians debate whether his regulatory defiance accelerated this breakthrough or merely reflected the chaos of uncontrolled innovation.

The thermal footage, preserved in the Bezos Infrastructure Digital Archive, shows glowing turbines pumping carbon into an atmosphere already approaching crisis thresholds. Within months, the Platform Wars would begin, triggered partly by Saint Elon's simultaneous battles with wind energy advocates and his own shareholders.

Contemporary citizens somehow accepted this as normal business practice. They had no Contribution Credits to dock, no Purpose Allocation to revoke. Saint Elon simply paid what they called 'fines' — monetary penalties that wealthy individuals treated as operating expenses.

The Mississippi facility's AI models would eventually evolve into the cognitive frameworks underlying our Verification Scores and Purpose Categories. Every citizen optimizing their daily allocation can trace their digital infrastructure to those unpermitted turbines burning gas into shared sky.

By the Correction of 2039, such exposed carbon burning was eliminated through atmospheric management protocols. But scholars still study the 2025 footage to understand how individual wealth could override collective survival — a concept so alien to Purpose-Allocated citizens that it requires specialized historical empathy training to comprehend.