Month: October 2021

The year is 2056. SinguClarity is an international data collection conglomerate. Their database storage warehouses span over 175 square kilometers in various locations on the planet and they have won countless corporate and government bids to facilitate, store, and collect personal data on an estimated 68% of the world’s total population. This includes purchasing behavior, medical records, private correspondence and a textured behavioral analysis of individuals’ social media posting habits both in substance and form. Joris Landau, an upstart freethinker journalist for a prominent New York publication pens a meticulously researched article deriding SinguClarity as one of the greatest menaces to public life and human rights, prompting a series of strategic marketing responses from the company.

One such effort is that SinguClarity releases a retail product intended to demonstrate the tremendous social benefits of widespread data collection. The product is a marketed as “The Dossier,” a comprehensive packets and sells for $299.99 in US markets. Using all available data on individuals (which can range widely in scope, as is specified on the company’s retail-facing website), an individual’s Dossier details all available information on a purchaser’s personality and tailored recommendations for self improvement. The Dossier can also be paired with a DNA test for an additional fee of $15.99.

Joris Landau, along with other prominent detractors of The Dossier, purchase their own copies in an effort to publicize the kind of information available within one. Landau reports that his Dossier describes him as “brooding, temperamental and weighted down by feelings of scorn from loved ones or respected persons. A tendency towards flights of imagination, personal strife in relationships, and mildly lactose intolerant.” Landau takes his public denunciation of the Dossier on a national reading tour. His primary critiques are about both the irrelevance and overdeterminism of the product. Over the course of his national tour, he opens himself up to a series of scrutinizing televised interviews where it is later revealed that Landau has conflated both his own Dossier and one that he purchased without permission about his ex-girlfriend Lindsey Anselvisc. Anselvisc, an Iowa poet laureate and first year assistant professor of English literature at Syracuse, was unaware that Landau knew her social security number, as this was all that was necessary to successfully purchase her Dossier. After a brief social media exchange, termed a “battle” by some score-keeping popular news outlets, Anselvisc sequestered herself from all media coverage, obtained the representation of a prominent DC law firm and sued SinguClarity for violation of her human right to privacy. Her complaint quickly becomes a class-action suit which, after 36 months, she wins. SinguClarity agrees to pay an undisclosed sum to the class and the company is required to convey opt-out forms to all of their patrons, subscribers, and collectees.

Landau is asked to leave his prominent publication which he strenuously objects to. After prolonged posturing, Landau is able to obtain seed money and starts a successful media outlet called The Long Haul which has a self stated libertarian agenda and promises advanced content from a book thesis that Landau is developing on the credulity of “five finger feminism,” a term the self-styled author claims to have coined.

The year is 2031. A popular new podcast format has swept the audio media space: Podcast hosts describe, at length, still images provided to them by their listenership. One image per episode described in painstaking detail. These images can be works of fashion photography, paintings, screengrabs from film and television, memes, or “vintage” physical print media. The descriptive format is soon referred to popularly as “Photo Pods.” The length and style of any given photo pod is unique to each podcaster and can vary greatly in both length and intention. Some are comedic in nature, rapid fire newsy revues while others are more academic recapturings. A seemingly infinite range of niche and fringe subgroups among this legion of content producers emerges. One such show is hosted by Norrid Matrice, an amatuer art collector and voiceover actor. His photo pod focuses mainly on unappreciated amateur work from the San Francisco art scene. In episode 91, “Humidity from My Clattering Bowl” he describes a work of art by lithographer Jenni Xi, who is deceased by the time of the recording. She was hit by a car and killed 4 years prior to episode 91’s broadcast.

Due to Matrice’s dazzling review of “Humidity from My Clattering Bowl” there is a sudden interest in Xi’s limited collection of work which spawns a proliferation of forged lithographs in her name. Noticing the strange market bubble, Xi’s more business minded sister, Bina, takes action. She purchases the secondary resale market of the forgeries, opens an art gallery in Oakland, CA with an accompanying photo pod of her own, describing the minute differences between all of the forgeries compared with his sister’s originals. Critiqued for its bland style and unoriginal premise, Xi’s photo pod soon fails and the collection’s notierty dissipates. The gallery is shuttered and both the forgeries and the originals are then sold to collage master Daniel McCrupsky who binds all of the lithographs together, both the forgeries and the originals, to create a single work of art called “46 of Xi, Smaze.” To formalize the piece, he takes a series of photographs of “46 of Xi, Smaze” which he later repurposes into a textile print. He submits the textile print to a corporate contest with an entrenched international retail distributor where it wins first prize. The textile print is now commonly found on many disposable paper products.