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Working 2050 is a speculative oral history about workers of the future.
Ab4gn4l6 won’t meet with me.
I’m from a different time, she says via quantum encrypted text. When I got my start in this business, you had to protect your identity. I tried to dig some things up on her work, her history, even where she might be located. Nothing.
She calls me at exactly 8:00:10 with her voice disguised and her geolocation blocked.
Hello? This is Working. Silence.
What is a typical day like for you? Walk me through it from when you wake up until you go to bed.
Wake up. Check on the systems I’m overseeing. Do other things. Check on them again. Sleep, maybe. Probably not.
What is it that you oversee?
To understand what I do, you have to understand: it’s so much easier to break something than it is to build something hard to break.
Is building something hard to break how you got into security?
I got into security to pay my rent. I started with ransomware attacks on municipal infrastructure in the early 20s — nothing fancy, easy money.
If you have the power, you can attack anything, especially back then when most…
