Flat Eye presents a possible future which may be neither desirable nor avoidable.

To create this world and make it credible, MONKEY MOON took inspiration from the present. There is no lack of sources: online articles, social media videos, scientific journals and more. On the team's private chat, one observation came up again and again: ""when reality goes beyond fiction."" Things that may seem a long way off or even impossible in the game may in fact have already happened, and some of the game's narrative threads were directly inspired by these true stories.
As archivist for the project, my mission, toward the end of the development process, was to gather all of these articles to create this coherent bibliography. It provides a closer look at what inspired Flat Eye, of course, but also at our present--a time of such rapid, constant change that we don't even realize it's happening anymore.
The goal of this snapshot of the world is to place Flat Eye's major themes (artificial intelligence, the future of work, social change, etc.) in their context. The bibliography sorts articles into several different categories (with frequent overlaps) and provides a summary for each. If you're only after the links and references, you'll find it all at the bottom of the page.

September 2022. The archivist.

The Covid-19 pandemic fell right in the middle of Flat Eye's development. Huge numbers of people were on lockdown around the globe. Certain professions became intimately acquainted with teleworking--its joys and hassles. Home delivery services became incredibly popular in urban areas. The use of AI created an increasing need for metadata and the "click workers" who compile them. At the same time, more and more workers began taking orders from software for everyday tasks. The world of work is changing, and human interactions are changing with it.

Severance (trailer)

Published on February 18 2022

Seen by Flat Eye team on April 14 2022

{Content in English}

A company with sterile offices offers to insert a chip into employees' brains to completely separate their professional and personal lives. Severance is an Apple TV+ series that explores how two people living in the same body try to exist side by side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEQP4VVuyrY

Note from the archivist: Recommended on the Monkey Moon forum, with this comment: "The combination of hellish work conditions x shady technology x retro-future with CRT screens and alarm clocks for videoconferencing is super cool, but yet again it's the story of a huge corporation that does/makes... too many things, who knows what (food, electronics, big data, etc.). The employees don't know what they're doing either. Everything is strange."

[WOR-10] See reference details

References