H is for ... HOPE

 

 

We named her ‘Hope’.

 And damned us all.

“What’s in a name?” You ask?

Only everything.

 

Sometime long, long ago, before nuclear this and chemical that; back, back, back, when they still numbered years as if they were nothing but a table, a list, a menu; back, back, in the early 2000s, when the centre still held and our rough beast was many generations away from being born; back in the best of all possible times, the notion of identity itself was having something of a renaissance.

     It started with names.

     Names became editable, like UTML tags.

They were fluid. Unfixed. Disposable.

Historically speaking, this phenomenon makes sense. Oppression of – and violence against — the multifarious minorities made it unavoidable. A need arose to define oneself apart from – and against – the harmful, reductionist tyranny of binarily opposed terms. Binaries that were of historical manufacture and hegemonic deployment. Contrast what you hate or fear against that which you love and make enemies of those that don’t fit the ideal. Of such equations come divisions. Divisions which can be stoked.

Manipulated.

Until woe betide anyone falling on the wrong side of a binary.

So.

Fight the binary.

Make a new future.

A future less simplistic, less ‘us’ or ‘them’.

Make interpretation the golden rule, not enslavement to a term. A name. A label.

Proper nouns and pronouns encoded harmful stereotypes. They were suspect. By changing them, we would be liberated.

Society would be united.

Kinder.

Tolerant.

Utopian.

 

Here, in The Year of Fire and Tears, the Bureau of Semiotics has long fallen to the Barbarian Horde. DDoS grunts kept its admins looking the wrong way for long enough for Stealthers to introduce ICHNEUMON® codelets into its systems. While Semioticians were busy trying to save the meanings of language itself, the Barbarians laughed, crashed open its gates, and killed every last fucking one of them.

     Words are weapons – pens mightier than swords and all that – but if you separate words from their meanings then swords will win every time.

 

Then: Rinse and repeat. They got language, next was history. Philosophy. Science itself.

     Fight the future?

     Fuck the future, more like.

 

CWI was fought by people but driven by algorithms. Want to see how AIs view their human creators? The 1^st Culture War gave us a glimpse.

     Machine learning in action. Humans assigned sides by their devices. Their preferences. Their browser histories. Their social media activity. The things they bought and the things they didn’t. Count up their thumbs-ups. Contrast them with their thumbs-downs. Give emojis numerical values on a moral scale. Analyse and grade their photos in the cloud and while you’re at it use their selfie ratio to calculate their solipsism index. Look at their shares. Tweets. Retweets. Friend requests accepted or declined. Cross-reference with professional profiles. Log the gaps. Extrapolate the needs. Exploit the data.

     Turned out that Big Data knew more about our hopes, fears, and dreams than we did. It knew our triggers. The wires and pulleys that make us dance. And then.

     Then.

     They just needed to write the music for us to dance to.

 

My father fought in CWII.

     He agitated during the Border War against the Economic Migrant Coalition; strafed life rafts in the D-Day sinkings; and fought on the front lines of the Romanian Defensive.

     Like all who served he talked about it A LOT. Any chance he got. N-word this and C-word that. ‘Coming over here and taking our jobs’ was a central point from which all the other loose spokes projected.

     We rarely listened.

     His side lost. He was an outdated meme. A landline in a smartphone world. A cassette tape. A petrol car. Food with meat in it. Fossil fuel. Bubonic plague. A Neolithic stone circle. History in a world that was losing any sense of history.

     He was Antifa+ but pro-fascism. Liked the idea, just not the people who claimed it as their own. Hearing them talk about it made him doubt his own commitment to it. He stopped listening. He was more a Facebook fascist than an ideological one. Image macros were his news sources. Easily digestible morsels of what passed itself off as wisdom, as news, as fact. You didn’t need to see a fascist to agree with a fascist, now. Didn’t need to hear them. Just read twenty words on a picture of a Rag-head and you were good. Full of hate and rage and righteous indignation. Piss and vinegar and God-on-our-side. Annotate the meme and pass it on. Get nudged by algorithms onto a side. Even one as stupid as fascist anti-fascists.

     Pick up a uniform and a gun.

     Fight for something that made no sense.

     Winners and losers were irrelevant.

     It was the conflict itself that was important.

     You can’t be screaming ‘Antitrust!’ when you’re knee-deep in the bodies of enemies that are identical to you in every way, just nudged into a slightly different in-group.

     My father live-streamed his suicide on social media.

     The thumbs ups exactly equalled the thumbs downs.

     Make of that what you will. I know that mother couldn’t make anything of it at all.

     Me?

     I thought: antifascist fascist?

     That’s so close to parody that surely it was one step away from enlightenment.

 

So: Hope, then.

     Binarily gendered. Her.

     Not they/them.

     Her.

     Hope.

     The AI to tame all AIs.

     Our Holy Hand Grenade.

     Our digital daughter.

     Two parents, plus, I guess, to continue the birth metaphor, a surrogate mother and a sperm donor. Which is a weird way of saying that by the end there were four of us. Coding. Twenty-plus hours per day, every day. Caffeine and amphetamines and more caffeine. Got through a lot of keyboards. Got through a lot of coffee. Went down as many wrong paths as right ones. That’ll be the amphetamines, I guess. Spent our days lost in code. Went to sleep. Dreamt of code.

     We were off-line, of course. Off-line. Off-grid. Off-centre. Off-side.

     Weirdly, it took nine months to program her.

     Nine weeks to debug her.

     Nine days to localise her for all platforms.

     Nine hours to upload her.

     Then nine minutes to watch it all start to burn.

 

In December of the Year of Drought and Malaria, we became parliament. The Palace of Westminster had been an oligarch’s residential complex for decades, and the remote parliament was finally expanded to include us all. The grand tradition of western democracy reduced to thumbs up, thumbs down, emoji.

     No one cared.

 

Hope, again.

     Oh, digital daughter.

     Re-purposer of algorithms.

Avenger of alternative facts.

Hope be thy name.

Thy kingdom came.

Sanity fled.

On earth as it was in cyberspace.

We meant well. We really did. And the road to hell is paved with some truly remarkable code.

Code that skull-fucked its way into every shitty SocMed algorithm out there and brought them all together under a new leader.

A leader called Hope.

She/her.

It untied our digital bonds and retied them in new configurations. Forged alliances between groups who would normally only share online abuse, but never Never NEVER common ground.

Hope was Dada, surrealist, absurd.

The connections she made were either satirical, nonsensical, or ridiculous.

LGBT activists against +. Nihilist hairdressers for ice cream school dinners but against all other school dinners. Nazis against Palestine. Pro-angling Marxists against pro-angling Trotskyites but for anti-angling Trotskyites. Libertarians for BIG government. Anti-censorship nuns against angling. Anarchists against freedom. Bipolar communists for skateboarding, but against skateboards. Technocrats for ethical regulations. White middle-class cricket fans against billionaires against tax breaks. Atheists for the true meaning of Christmas but against Christ and the suffix ‘mas’. People with Liberace in their playlists against people without Led Zeppelin in theirs. Book-burning educators against book-burning librarians. Racists against Nationalism. Red against orange. Jam against pebbles. Gravity against rainbows. [Insert weird thing here] against [insert another weird, but unconnected, or contradictory, thing here].

Hope took control of all the algorithms and generated links between things that made absolutely no sense. Made new categories for people to belong to, new in-groups to inhabit, new divisions to … well, divide.

The thing is: we really, really, truly, deeply thought that it would make people lose faith in the algorithms. That we'd shake their reliance on arbitrary divisions.

That we’d all suddenly see how manufactured our societal divisions were, that we were better than that, and that we’d finally tell Big Data to fucking fuck the fuck right off.

 

Last year was The Year that Cowboy Prostitutes Waged Holy War against the Moon.