Diege

If this Russian plague is even half as bad as people are saying, there’s a non-zero chance we live in the following timeline: Lockdowns come back. Stimmy checks come back. GTA VI drops at the exact best possible moment. Everyone spends the next year indoors playing GTA, jerking off, gambling on crypto and prediction markets. COVID 2.0 liquidity cycle. Total degeneracy. Except this time, if the disease is actually bad enough that reopening becomes genuinely difficult, the physical economy still has to function. Power plants and the grid still need to stay online. Roads still need to be built. Warehouses still need to run. Mines, factories, construction sites, logistics, data centers and critical infrastructure. None of it can just stop. Enter humanoid robots? They can’t catch the plague. So while everyone is inside jerking off, playing GTA, buying shitcoins and betting on when the lockdowns end, robots quietly start taking over the physical world. At the same time, AI agents keep eating more and more of the white-collar economy. Then a few years pass. Eventually it’s safe for humans to go back outside, except by then two things have happened at once. The robots are cheaper, faster and better at most physical work. Software agents are doing huge chunks of white-collar work with almost no human involvement. And everyone else has spent years getting used to staying home, living on government checks, playing GTA, jerking off, trading shitcoins and gambling on prediction markets. So nobody really goes back. Not because they can’t, but because the economy no longer needs most of them to. The temporary emergency lifestyle quietly becomes permanent. Humans get UBI, stay home, jerk off, play GTA VII, trade shitcoins and gamble on prediction markets while an army of robots, agents and whoever’s still bothered to work keep civilization running.