Harlequin’s memory 2020

May 11, 2005

The night is kind of noisy; the neighbors are watching, apparently non stop, the reruns of some old lord of the rings version; or maybe something else, a heroic saga anyway, according to the sword-clatching noise. Now and then, police floaters race by the street lightly shaking the windows. Once upon a time, we all dreamed about floating cars that, in a wheelturn, could get us out of this fucking planet. Obviously, since the terrorist attempts of flying cars filled with plastic explosives, no ordinary guy is allowed to buy such a gadget. We are all bound to the corporate public transport..

All because of that shitty StarWars flick, and generally that heroic/science fiction mass euphoria: brainwashing generation after generation, convincing them to put up with all this technological race and spend BILLIONS on all kind of high-tech gadgets, in the lame hope that some day they’ll all be able to fly to unknown, free and pure planets, fuck alien princesses and kill the bad guys with the laser weapons of their choice.

Oh, god, how I wish I was born 100 years ago and go kill Turing and Neumann in their youth…
We used to play video games where you would alter the course of the history by killing Hitler during his college years; I like to think that maybe the source of this ubiquitous evil that’s slowly killing everyone today was not some ancient military dictator but, rather, the entire current of thought floating through some layers of the society… Like lawyers or corporate members, for instance.. convinced that any kind of law is a weapon to be used against civilians. No matter how futile it is, I’ve spent so many sleepless nights dreaming about the way this world could have turned out, if only Watt, Edison, Volta or Bell didn’t exist. If only we hadn’t plunged into this industrialized era the way we did, blind and irresponsible…

I’m digressing and time is running short. By now, the web spiders have probably already indexed my incomplete article; somewhere in the next minute, the background daemon scanning for blogs with potential terrorist threats shall rate this page with an alerting high degree of potential threat. Probably alarms have already alerted the police station in my neighborhood. It’s kind of weird the way we got, isn’t it? So many forum posts on the Net bitching about Jonathan Bush the III-rd or his likes, cursing him in any way possible, pass everyday unobserved by the government agencies. Any criticism to the society is rated instantaneously as terrorist threat. We all know Bill Harlequin’s faith; he was the first of the public victims. His lobotomy served as an example for all of us, revolted freethinkers. His slow brain death silenced quite a lot of voices…

But me… I’ve had enough.. This is my final post.. no matter what comes after. I only hope it gets read or redistributed before they tear it down…

I’m too tired of living in a world where simply writing “StarWars” on a public page gets you guilty of copyright infringement and gets you arrested. A world where whistling in public (and, ever since the chip-powered labels, the broadband and livecams, everyplace is a public place) is copyright infringement. A world where reading paper books or possessing non-copyprotected-and-useprotected media has become a delict of piracy. A world where quoting anybody or anything is likely to get you in prison. A world where the names of Einstein, Shakespeare, hell, even Hitler, are owned by ruthless corporations. A world where possession is a potential crime, and only for-life subscriptions to all kind of services are admissible. A world where I’m a slave uniquely identified by biometrics since my birth, and there’s no way out. A world where I’m branded with the unforgeable CHIP, the way farm cows are by burning iron. I’m a slave without any kind of freedom. I’m sick of waiting for my clock to tick.

I summon you now, censors, antiterrorist organizations and copyright infringement regulators: come and take me, punish me, lobotomize me. I can’t bear anymore being a fucking robot, a cow of the system.

Good bye, world! I’m waiting for my Ticktockman.