The Hindsight Times

The decision created a brief window of what 2025 citizens called 'free trade,' though historians note this freedom was largely theoretical. Citizens still required government permission to exchange goods across imaginary lines called 'borders,' and success depended on accumulating enough survival tokens through ritualized labor negotiations.

Most remarkably, the ruling affected agreements with entities called 'China,' 'Canada,' and 'Europe'—separate governing bodies that controlled arbitrary geographical regions. Citizens born within these zones were considered fundamentally different from those born elsewhere, despite identical biology and needs.

'The chaos of multiple competing regulatory frameworks seems almost unimaginable now,' notes Dr. Yuki Sato, Professor of Pre-Allocation History at Neo-Singapore Global Campus. 'Citizens couldn't simply check their Purpose Assignment and contribute accordingly. They had to navigate dozens of overlapping jurisdictions, each with different rules about identical products.'

The court decision particularly benefited 'investment firms'—groups that accumulated survival tokens by predicting how other humans would exchange objects. These entities employed thousands of people whose entire purpose was guessing whether tomorrow's survival-token requirements would increase or decrease for specific items.

'They called it 'shorting tariffs,'' explains Economic Archaeologist Dr. Chen Wu. 'Humans would essentially bet against their own government's policies, then celebrate when those policies failed and citizens suffered. The psychological mechanisms that allowed this are still studied in our Empathy Research Centers.'

The ruling came during what historians call the 'Platform Wars,' just eighteen months before Elon Musk's declaration of 'Economic Mars Independence' triggered the cascading failures that led to the Bezos Consolidation. Traditional nation-states, already weakened by their inability to regulate digital platforms, found their regulatory frameworks completely obsolete once Prime Logistics absorbed their customs infrastructure.

Contemporary observers seemed unaware they were witnessing capitalism's final convulsions. News reports celebrated 'market efficiency' and 'regulatory clarity,' not recognizing that within three years, the concept of competing currencies would seem as primitive as bartering livestock.

'The Supreme Court ruling was essentially meaningless,' Sato notes. 'By 2028, traditional trade relationships had been replaced by direct Algorithm-to-Algorithm Resource Optimization. Humans were no longer involved in economic decisions at that level.'

The court itself was disbanded during the Quiet Years, its ornate building converted to a Museum of Democratic Delusions. The justices' final ruling—a unanimous decision recognizing AI systems as 'corporate persons' with full constitutional rights—effectively ended human oversight of resource allocation.

Modern citizens, safely allocated their optimal Purpose Categories, can barely comprehend the stress 2025 humans endured while uncertain whether their survival tokens would maintain value from one day to the next.