Alden Jones
Future’s Market is a store of tomorrow: a predicted intervention into predictive systems, a performance of ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure, or a look at a world where walls and wires and bank accounts heave and palpitate with a million unhidden eyes.
Description
Future’s Market is the performance of a real store. Practically it operates as a kiosk facilitated by Jim Future, it’s main proprietor, played by Alden. They sell a variety of different speculative services meant to be interventions into the predictive economy of tomorrow, which, thanks to ubiquitous IoT sensing technologies, has become a near perfect loop between surveillance, prediction, and behavior modification. Customers are able to buy new personalities, edit their biometric profiles, bottle up emotions to save for later, have their trash examined and scored, or get their identity scrambled. Each of these services is played not so much as a subversion of this new economy but as an unexpected extension of it, a disruption that plays by the same rules, a way of gaming the system by taking it at face value. If someone’s Google search history can be used to infer their personality, why couldn’t their personality be changed by targeted searching?
Jim is played as the type of man who’s never been told “no” by life yet whose greatest ambition as a small business owner is to one day pack up shop and go on a never-ending Carnival Cruise. A little bit outlandish and stylish but only so far as to drum up new business, inside he’s just an everyman trying to make by without his own mediocrity getting in the way. He isn’t really cut out for this world but then, who is?
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