And Then I Realized i'm Living In a Futuristic Dystopia

I woke up the other day to find out that Aaron Swartz had killed himself.  It made me sad. I admit that I didn't know who he was until his infamous theft of JSTOR documents and the resultant prosecution hit the news. His other notable life accomplishments went unnoticed by me. But it wasn't until persecution from the government in what appears to be an attempt to make an example of him drove him to suicide that I realized something; we are living in a futuristic dystopia.

As an author i'm usually looking for the poetic or artistic take on any situation, no matter how bleak, horrible, or beautiful. There are some conventions that most dystopian works follow, from 1984 to Minority Report, I have noticed most works will include some of the following.

The Ubiquity of Technology

Technology is everywhere. Devices that used to be comedically absurd, like phones implanted in your go-go-gadget arms, are now viable, researched possibilities. A remotely controlled and monitored home is available on the market. Every hippy and homeless guy that shouldn't be able to afford one are walking around with tablets and phones. Images caught on these devices are uploaded to a global web of interconnected networks and within moments I am able to see what my cousin in China ate for dinner.

Which brings me to the next convention.

Big Brother

The government watches you in the future dystopian society. Most futuristic movies I can think of, Looper, Total Recall, Equilibrium, Appleseed, Minority Report, to name a few, involve sneaking around because the government is watching you and knows what you are up to. The expression Big Brother comes from Orwell's 1984, the untrusted citizens have televisions in their homes that they can never turn off, allowing the government to monitor and watch them. These movies have machines making decisions for people, replacing humanity; making morals and common sense obsolete. But we would never let it come to that, right? Not in a society as enlightened and free as ours. But we already have. The smart phone right next to you is equipped with a GPS, a very useful tool, so useful many could not imagine going back to paper maps. But it is through that tool that the government has the ability, and what can loosely be referred to as legal right, to track you.

And in the end, to stop the madness, to over throw the tyrant, someone must die, someone has to pay the price to stop the insanity and unfairness. And so we have our heroes and martyrs. 

Heroes and Martyrs

But it's not that easy. Christian Bale hunted down the Father and dispatched him, the rebels blew up a few factories and the world was free to cry again. If we could really pin down the source of the evil to one person, maybe the end of that person would stop the tide of injustice, but it is never just one person. It was not a single person or single law that killed Aaron. While we can blame Carmen Ortiz as head of the prosecution for disproportionate charges being brought against Aaron, the justice department was not what Aaron was fighting in the first place.

Martin Luther King encouraged people to break laws that are unjust, and this is what I believe Aaron was doing. Dr. King also stated that if you break an unjust law you should be willing to do the time to emphasize the injustice to the public. (Letter From Birmingham jail, Martin King, http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html) But the punishment was disproportionate to Aaron's crime and it is no surprise to me that he was not able to bear the weighty burden placed on him.

And while it may feel like this is unrelated to the average internet user, the government is not discriminating when it comes to disproportionate punishment for data related crimes. Demand Progress, a foundation that Aaron helped found, illustrates how at-risk we all are. 

     "The CFAA makes violations of a website's terms of service agreement or user agreement -- that fine print you never read before you check the box next to it -- a FELONY, potentially punishable by many years in prison.  That's how over-broad this dangerous statute is, and one way it lets showboating prosecutors file charges against people who've done nothing wrong." (http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/aaron_justice/)

In this dystopia the bad guys are faceless and powerful. They have our voted laws supporting their actions, and as a poetic twist they may even be doing what they think is for our good. But there are no doors to kick down, no individuals to rough-up that will change or improve things. I don't know if a hero will be able to do anything, our gadgets are too convenient and comfortable for us to want them to. All we may have left are brilliant, bright individuals that do something once in a while to make us raise our heads. We do so in time to see the light flicker out of this world and mourn that there was nothing more they could have done. To change this dystopia to the utopia they dreamed.

Life, You're Doing it Wrong.

I say this in all seriousness, life is the strangest experience I have ever had. 

Life consists primarily of people making things up as they go along. To me, most remarkable thing that has ever been conceived is the notion that one person’s way of making things up can be wrong, while another person’s equally arbitrary way of making things up is correct. The language I’m using to write this was made up by someone, and yet I’m wrong if I don’t follow those rules.

This has never been more prevalent to me than when I became a parent. I’m making stuff up all the time. Take bedtime, for example. Why does my three year old have to go to bed at all? She doesn’t have work in the morning. But I decided I wanted time to write in the evenings, so I made up a bedtime.

There are self evident reasons why some things are made up; like hygiene and seat-belts. It took some time for me to comprehend why anyone would make up mathematics, other than a torture device for young students.

But manners make no sense to me. Etiquette is the quintessential arbitrary tenet. Everyone I’ve met has their own little white book of rules to follow, none of which are exactly the same. You don’t give someone the thumbs up in the Middle East. There are certain forks one is supposed to use with certain foods. Elbows are not supposed to be placed on the table when eating. I don’t understand why.

Pants were made up, too, by the way.

That brings me to fashion. I saw a new term the other day while perusing a clothing website. Nerd Chic. The man was dressed in white, v-neck sweater, jeans rolled up at the cuffs and thick-rimmed glasses. What once was a socially abhorrent way to dress you can now pay a good portion of your engineering salary for. Simply because someone decided to make it so, and someone else said "OK."

I look at people around me and wonder which things I’m doing wrong. I doubt they know of all the things they're doing incorrectly; because it’s all made up. And that means not a single person is getting it right.