“I’m not sure when it all began – the butchers, the bailers the lynchers and the faith killers

I know that the crazy happened in June. Because June’s my birthday and mum and dad got really busy and mum missed my birthday, which she never does.

But the killings and the jumpers and the religious nuts I think that came a little later

My name is Pandora and I’m 12 years old. But people say I’m quite grown up for my age.

I live in a house which is kind of big but a bit higgledy-piggledy with my brother Jake and our dog Slipper

I’ve got a hand me down 3DS from my brother but our i-pads and kindles went long ago. And all the internet stuff got burned in the garden – dad lost it when mum and dad were having a barbecue. Embarrassing.

I call all the crazy people the butchers and bailers and lynchers because that’s what my mum and dad called them.

Not sure what they were all getting so weird about. I mean WTF! have they been doing?

There used to be just one of two of them; on the news; nutters dad thought. Even when there was loads he still thought it was just some hysterical bunch of muppets. But when the boy next door set him-self on fire, dad stopped taking the piss out of them.

My mum is called Jane and my dad is called Mike

She’s a doctor at the local hospital and he’s a Paramedic. Now they’re what you call busy.

OVERARCHING NARRATIVE

Let’s start with the end. There’s a date – the day of reckoning – that never comes – futile and banal but true.

06:6:16

The date surfaced one day on a blog thread tracked to some blog in the mid west they say; the blog was on something weird like Vintage Tyres or something! Just popped up. And then everyone on one IP got the notification email. That was the beginning.

Then the usual bollocks: different people in blogs and chat rooms all over the place, decoding it and giving it different meanings: trying to tie it to their belief systems – some coded Book Of Revelations schtick. Piss off Dan brown. It’s the number of the beast yeah, bow wow woof woof, bow wow wow wow, its a Diamond fucking Dog. Grow up.

Some called it a future point after the closing of the Mayan calendar – an echo of previous catastrophic incidence – yuh! right, but mmmnnn, how did they manage to turn that into an editorial piece on the birth place of chocolate and the new One & Only resort.

What would the Scientologists make of it?…Islam?…Stephen Hawking? Dawkins? Deputy Dawkins? Scooby Doo? Those darned kids?!

Watching faith leaders and scientists throwing shit at each other makes you laugh.The scientist saying the last time someone threw this much misplaced trust into the world they called it Christianity. The fight was mental. Never seen a Bishop gouge!

The whole thing was like some online practical joke – really small, popping up here and there with funny little cartoons – like Shrigley had done an April fools day digital terrorism thing with a smile.

But then the date started to scare people. Some bloke said that society will turn on and consume itself.

Then the ‘infestation began’ – date counters popping up, unannounced and uninvited – locking everyone’s device to it – that date –  toxic countdown Davina!! – and then the small overly chirpy and chilled Instruction messages appeared.

No-one was laughing any more. And then the bodies started to rain down. Who’d have a Wii!

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SAVE THE DATE! Do Not reply!

 6.06.16

Hi Pandora!

We have reason to expect a massive reverse feed flow or first wave ‘spill’ of all personal data and content generated or searched on your device back to the registered user at 6am GMT; 06:6:16.

We believe that the individual data caches spilled back into your device (and any further device coupled, tethered or sync-ed to it) will include all data threads from every primary device including lap tops, tablets and smart phone devices as well as institutional work email systems secured and unsecured from 2006 – 2016.

They will also include all thread and integrated platform data of the registered user from all linked and shared data sources – including but not restricted to social networks, content share platforms, site memberships

We have identified three super Global caches of data-intel and data-history – including search histories, downloaded content, hard drive back ups, data stored in universal HISTORY and CLOUD platforms, banking security data, and medical records – which have been infected by Virii which have preset the caches to start ‘evicting’ and ‘spilling’ data back through the feeds from which they came.

It is also predicted that on this date there will also be further ‘second wave spill’ of the first wave data content to all coupled and synced devices and receivers within a 10 metre area of the user and the device. Please be aware that data, stored content, live social network activity and prior browser information may spill through any of your connected appliances or through open app access areas.

If for any reason you have any reason to mitigate the occurrence of spillage or are concerned about privacy security and the potential legal legitimacy of any materials pertaining to you and your device, click here and a CODE PIN will be sent to you within the next few days giving you details of your personal Data Nurse, a trained and certified professional who can advise you on how to manage the impacts of any content or materials of yours on your personal life or professional career.

NEXT STEPS – URGENT

Download the Dorian folder & App provided onto your principal device and copy over onto any other devices synched with your principal computing device

In the event of spill Please drag all ‘spilled’ materials – both content and data files’ from your live and stored browser, email, voice/skype into the folder name Dorian. Once activated these folders will automatically empty every hour.

Thanks for your attention. More Soon.

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TREATMENT NOTE ‘Pandora’ was originally written as both a provocative polemic and an illustrative story to test the dimensions of TRUST in the digital domain: particularly concerns around Big Data and the questionable status or privacy and identity security: and ultimately the sanctity of everything that we happily entrust to the mouthpiece, camera, keyboard and cache of our digital lives.

IMAGINE

Imagine a day when the fractured data-daubed picture in the attic of every connected mobile human being suddenly poured it guts back into the world around them – on to interactive bus stop posters, trans-vision screens, bus announcements, live emails, txts, digital TV’s, lap-tops, tannoys in airports, speakers at gigs.

Imagine the living writhing turbulent psyche of the collective digi-sphere suddenly throwing its indiscrete guts up through every device that had ever touched it

Imagine if the digital history of every illicit conversation, betrayal, desperate moment, flight of anguish, inappropriate txt; every white, red and black lie uttered, every indiscretion reported, every secret shared, every questionable purchase, every sadness and painful exclamation made public, every grubby search, predatory stalk, invasive squint and questionable image and moving picture ever considered, spilled in to the bright white light of public scrutiny?

Imagine if every piece of it played up in bits and bytes on to every live device within 100 yards of you – with no ability for you to control delete or obscure it? Imagine this following you like a data jet stream everywhere you went. Unshakeable!

A buzzing phosphorous halo of the dull, the petty and the imaginable intertwined with the inexcusable and the unspeakable  – all hidden until now in some cloud attic, rendered on the living connected canvas of you.

Imagine our TRUST being thrown back in our face like that and then in looking back at it imagine that we could ever say that we should have ever done anything other than see it coming.

Funny thing, trust. Sometimes we never really think about how much of it we invest in things with little real proof whether the receptacle of it is deserving of what we invest in it.

Trust us they say. Trust is our business. Trust is the currency we trade in; Trust what we do for you – and the social networks allow us to test the trust they peddle, put it through its paces, act against it if it is found wanting. So we think we’re the puppet masters of trust.

Trust is the new Funny: and every corporation and brand is wearing the I’m Funny t shirt. But what are we entrusting them with? The linear and primary dimensions of what they promise to deliver for us and for which we hold them to account: from soap and fashion to legal services to gamification to test drives, nappies and food – are all scrutinised to the nth degree.

But what about the stuff they are hoovering up along the way. The maps of our data day selves: our highly personal tics and behaviours; the intimacies of our banality; preferred top up days, favourite days for stepping beyond our financial means, the join the dots nature of our virtually invisible online shopping basket, the routes we take home, the time we surf, the things we buy, the relationship between when we read a news article or watch a movie and what it inspires in us: social angst and need for connection? reassurance shopping? comedy youtube clips? tech porn browsing the latest upgrade? All that behavioural stuff we lovingly entrust to them. Its what enables them to ‘predict’ us, our likes, our preferred offers and in which day part, format, colour and context we wish to receive them.

Every time we invest the most intimate of information into any device, I sense we think little of the integrity of the host at its journey’s end. Sometimes, when a PIN number goes walkies or some card details get lifted, we feel stung, burned by it. Scalded by its betrayal and the sudden loss of security in our little bubble

But think of every indiscretion, every indiscrete share, message, intimacy, personal detail search, obsession, amateur stalk, desperate seeking, inappropriate image shared or searched. Every site we dwell within, the online decisions we make. And that’s before we get anywhere near the new cowardly, shitty little social art of trolling!

The history of our digital lives, lived in the ether, is in effect our Picture in the attic: and we are all the new Dorian Grey.

Luckily for us, there is little occasion for us to stare that picture in the face and see in its glistening, glorious digital technicolour every scar, pustule, sore and canker: evidence of the indiscretions, small horrors, corruptions and cruelties of our digital lives. Rarely do we ever have to comprehend the fabric of our real-time dysfunctional selves.

To point at the porn industry and the bomb makers as exemplars and leaders of the singular toxicity of on line lives lived is to make this all far too one dimensional.

Imagine if we scoured and cross-correlated the underbelly of big data along very bleak human threads: betrayal, cruelty, spite, indifference, entrapment, lying, duplicity, complicity. Imagine the swirling fabrics of our own penny dreadful data knitted together into one long spool of stuttering humanity. Imagine how each one would wrap itself around our naive model of trust and asphyxiate it in seconds.

So why do we explore trust issues in such depth in every other sphere: relationships, consumption, financial diligence, ethics in science to name a paltry few: yet this massive petaflop blind spot, this clouded issue just sits there. And we pour the smallest and most vulgar details of our lives into it shamelessly and relentlessly.

We trust that the people collecting this data are trustworthy and respectable. We trust them to only look at what they’re allowed to, as if they will coyly look away when huge tranches of data that lifts the skirt on our illicit humanity comes their way.

But that’s where the money is.

And as every cautionary tale will tell you: that’s where your problem is; the venal nasty ‘it’ of life.

Everything that you entrust to the ether; every bit of your hidden self is covered with your digital fingerprints. And that’s how money, spies and slaves are made.

I’ve got something on you, sonny. Now, all I’m asking, for us to be square, is that you do this small, perhaps slightly improper act for me and we’ll call its quits-ish.

It’s how every criminal King, twisted Queen, gangster, despot, tyrant, emperor, and oligarchy has ever controlled anyone and kept them in their thrall.

And we just keep plying our human behavioural trade through every data-grabbing geo-caching GPSisng search-saving image-hosting money-shifting elephant-memoried bit-coining device we can get our hands without the slightest thought of whether we trust the trafficker of this complex revealing and darkening data and what its real value is – both to them and us.

That is where I think the issue is. Not that we are knowing and complicit: I allow my data day self to be monitored measured tweaked and collated; and I get benefits. Sure you do.

And it’s not that we don’t trust these people to both manufacture and deliver the soap, the car, the burger, the shoes, the cheese slices, the whatever, in a manner that is both transparent and trustworthy.

All I am venturing is that perhaps, while we are being handed transparency and the ability to test the integrity of our trust in that action, we are gifting away the more important and most precious coins in our pockets.

I would venture that the rewards are relatively quite small, given what you’re giving away. If the real currency is data: our data; then perhaps the new breakthrough brand will not be another online currency; the breakthrough will be the aggregator that allows us to define a market price for our data against its lifetime customer value to these brands and businesses, liberating us to invest it where best suits us and manage the returns we make on it.

There’s a algorithm challenge. But until then, mine’s a TRUST Me! I’m a BRAND t.shirt.