Apples on the Dead Sea’s shore - a short story

Do you remember those last groaning days at the close of the first decade of the 21st century?

People were still thinking about themselves as separate, unrelated entities. Apple Corporation met the zeitgeist with their ‘i’Series devices. iPod > iPhone >iPad > iRing > iPatch were each points on a map, a road trip of technological progress towards more ‘Me, Me, Me’.  Obsolete almost from the moment the packaging was opened, leaving a legacy of outmoded tech junk for the world to funeral since it couldn’t decompose it. These innovations drove us all the way to the brink’s doorstep - a precipice where we would eyeball the natural limits of the planet, squirming, but with nowhere left to run. A new understanding was finally born.

The business world reeled in response, and our technological jay ride delivered us to the ‘we’Series of Apple products - a desperate attempt to sell to consumers in an interconnected age - before going bust. Brands rapidly lost their power. Biological technology took over, which became about delivering a service, not selling a product. There was only ever going to be one provider - that was clear after the merger of Google and Facebook. OogleBook. Their business from the beginning was about enhancing our capacity to connect with others, to think and remember.
But how we now yearn to forget.

Obviously it was the most elegant solution, to just integrate into tissue. Why try recreate what nature had already perfected? It took time for us to allow a corporation to plug their technology into our living corpus. It wasn’t that we trusted OogleBook. We were more driven by the fear of being labeled ‘Deniers’; people who resisted the technology were obviously were trying to hide something. The term Deniers had its origins in climate change denial - which eventually became our biggest ethical issue.

Deniers were tried by the United International Environmental Assembly for ‘Crimes against Life Force’. It was so successful and lucrative that local chapters emerged to replace the court houses in cities. People are still being tried retrospectively every day - for smaller and smaller crimes. #ClimateFails frequently result in execution by lethal injection followed by dissolution (dissolving the body in water, so that the nutrients are immediately bioavailable). Any remaining assets become property of the UN, now a division within OogleBook.

One wonders if it is about being just, generating income or controlling population. Over a 700 million people have been handled in this manner. It has fast become the planet’s top industry, alongside water desalination. The crowd-sourcing of culprits helps communities to pay for important things like food, water and biotech upgrades.

Everything is connected to everything else. A tapestry of past acts, woven together into a fabric that determines our future. It’s so much clearer now. The archaic rhetoric of the new age movement talked about interconnectedness, but I wonder if they ever envisaged how that would be used in the future, once we ‘got it’. Good? Evil? Old-school ideas. It’s just information. And everyone can access it, but no-one can erase it.

We can still claim one stream of thoughts as private, but the rest is automatically shared, and our civic activity is far from private. CCVTV has mapped every image of us - from when we were eight spending our hard-earned pocket money on a dollar mixture at the Four Square till today. The old forms of crime; theft, murder are becoming a distant memory. It is virtually impossible to jerk the system (OogleBook is more than 1,000 times smarter than any human, and this multiplies every few years).

Every dollar we spend is now common knowledge.  It’s intimidating. But the most significant thing? Every cent we ever spent on our EFTPOS and Credit cards has been tracked and is available to be accessed by our parents, our prospective employer, our grandchildren…

You and I had had a little spree at the Chinese knockoff store on the corner of Ghuznee and Cuba Mall in Wellington on the 13th of August 2010 at 5.36pm. The store sold fashionable clothing for as little as $7.99 a piece. The true cost of course, was worn by the rivers which the toxic effluent from the dyes were discharged into, and the ruined lives of the child workers and the local villagers who died early from horrific poisoning, and the completely unmitigated GHG emissions.

OogleBook has tracked the transactions found out and now it wants to try you. They want to be sure you pay the full price the second time round. OogleBooks claims that by the year 2010 it was thirty five years since the term ‘Climate Change’ emerged, and devastating impacts of non-essential consumerism were well known. Even though the forces of nature were just beginning to fail – the science and research had been irrefutable about it for more than a decade. You knew. You just chose to ignore it. We all did to a greater or lesser extent.

I am shocked by what I now have to do. We haven’t spoken in over a decade. Not since I got this job. But you will forever be in my internal contacts list. It’s not right. It’s not right. I distinctly remember that rainy winter evening shopping with you. You had just had your fringe cut. I had blisters. That red top looked amazing on you. And I think I got something with sequins.

As one of the first people to work as a Denial Officer I was able to find my personal shopping data from those years and scramble it - well the first layer at least. It’s probably enough to put them off the scent for another year or so until we reach the bottom of the barrel, and need to get even stricter on our searches to generate more income.

I think my job is cross between Santa Claus and the Grim Reaper. I know if someone has been naughty or nice, and I deliver them to the pearly gates.  Santa Claus is a distant memory – It’s not a symbol we are able to be proud of any more, with all the consumerism that it spawned.

Denier Reparations. It’s like income tax for a population that hardly works any more. We are financing our future by people paying for the crimes of the past. For the present time, the denial crimes seem endless.  Much like we thought that oil was endless in the 20th Century.

The boomers were the easiest source of income. They lost all their easily-won gains before shuffling off this mortal coil. Now the Gen X-ers are getting it too just as they hit retirement. They were never as rich, and now after the reparations have nothing to retire on. Much of the Deniers Fund goes to paying for their care, if you can call it that. Once our generation are gone, that chapter in human history will be closed, but never forgotten.

We’ve become a blaming planet. It helps us to weather the storms. With deep regret, I concentrate my thoughts and serve your summons, anonymously - of course. I remember enjoying our shopping excursions. We’d laugh and laugh.

I pause to wonder who will be serving mine and whether they will feel as numb.

Original story Copyright 2010 Megan Salole

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If surveillance and privacy of your data concerns you - please make a submission today. New Zealand’s laws are being reviewed, and this is a chance to have your say: http://www.parliament.nz/en-NZ/PB/SC/MakeSub/a/8/4/49SCJE_SCF_00DBHOH_BILL9281_1-Search-and-Surveillance-Bill.htm