<h1>No Phone Home</h1>
<p>An interactive story by Frances Lee</a>. 2017.</p>
<img src="http://connectlearningtoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Not-Connected.jpg" width="500" alt text="Images of multiple warning signs with the message: 'Not connected'">
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[[Start.]]
You are a queer, trans, mixed race (Japanese and Columbian), 27 year old developer working for Glamazon, a gigantic marketplace corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees.
The work is intellectually stimulating, you get to pump out code every few weeks for the shopping cart function, and you're lucky to be on a team with a family-oriented boss.
Plus, you get all the craft beer, kettle chips, and company-branded sweatshirts a heart could desire.
[[Back->Start.]]You look around the living room, away from the mid-century modern furniture and fixtures.
There are a series of massive 3M post-it notes stuck on the walls.
One of them is titled "Community Organizations For Glamazon to Partner With"
Some more:
<ul>"QTPOC Artists for Future Hackathons"</ul>
<ul>"QT Technobabes Vision Statements"</ul>
<ul>"Cis/Straight Allies at Work"</ul>
[[Lake]], is sitting next to you on the sofa. You nudge them with your knee, and smile. They grin back at you with salsa allover their teeth.
[[All of a sudden...]]
Lake is your best friend, who you happened to meet at work.
Lake is an ace coder and debugs your code a lot in the office.
They're a Latinx activist and started the first queer Latinx organization in town.
You know you would've have made it through your first rounds at Glamazon without their support.
[[Back->What else have you all been up to today?]]
<h2> Crunchhhhhhhhh </h2>
<h3> Creeeeeee....BAM </h3>
<h2> Crashhhhhhzzz</h2>
You and everyone else in the room looks up, confused at all the loud crashing sounds coming from outside. You all look out the window and see this scene:
<img src="https://myeverettnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Kenwood-shots-C.jpg" width="500" alt= "cars crashed into each other in a driveway">
[[!!!]]As you all are gawking at the sight, the sounds of metal crunching and glass shattering seem to echo throughout the entire city. How is that possible?
No one says anything for a good minute.
Lake breaks the silence: "Let's stay put right now. We need to come up with a plan to figure out what's going on out there."
You:
[[A. Reach for your iPhone to check your Facebook feed and Twitter (#Seattle) for updates. Surely someone has posted breaking news about this online.]]
[[B. Respond to Lake, "Actually, I think we should go outside and check to see if everyone's OK. There are drivers in those cars."]]
Wait, it's not there.
You feel so naked all of a sudden.
That's right, none of you have any of your phones, laptops or smartwatches because the QT Technobabes retreat was a strictly no digital technology event.
OK.
<h3>Okay.</h3>
[[Breathe|After taking this in, you rush back inside the AirBnB and tell everyone what you didn't find]]Lake looks directly at you, their eyebrows furrowed. "Actually, none of us have medic skills, and there's probably going to be ambulances arriving any moment..." they trail off, their voice gets soft with uncertainty.
As much as you like Lake, you hop off the sofa, jog to the front door, and slowly crack it open.
As you step out into the afternoon sunlight, your eyes adjust. Besides the smoking cars in the driveway across the street, there are two other cars that swerved off into front yards down the block.
You walk over to the nearest accident scene.
You get closer, scanning for any movement, or even <gulp> body parts.
You are now standing 5 inches away from an open door of the black sedan.
You look and look, but there is no one in ANY of the cars.
<h3>???</h3>
[[After taking this in, you rush back inside the AirBnB and tell everyone what you didn't find]]
Everyone is the room is murmurming, and a panic starts to rise. Sensing this, Lake clears their throat and starts again, "I think we should stick together until we figure out what the hell is going on."
You and everyone nods in agreement.
"None of us have access to the internet right now, and there is no house computer. Here's what I suggest: My apartment is about five blocks away on Jackson. Let's go to my place, get online to look up news, and then decide what to do next."
[[You all pack up your things, and go.]]When you all get to Lake's studio apartment, they can't find their phone or laptop. Maybe they got burgled when all the mess outside went down?
You all walk to other folks' houses, but none of their electronics are there either.
<h3>This is getting creepy.</h3>
And you start to worry about your partner, who is probably stuck at the U campus, and your colleagues are trying to figure out how to check on their family members.
[[You have to go be alone to think for a moment.]]You exit your coworker's back door and go sit on the swingset in their backyard.
As you near the fence, you hear a faint noise, a voice- is it someone speaking?
You walk out of the property towards a smashed car whose radio was left on.
From the broken window, a voice crackles and buzzes:
<i>"We don't know how this happened, or what will happen next... It appears that many people in Seattle and its surrounding areas have been reported missing... many firsthand reports have said that people disappeared right next to them... We have not heard any emergency instructions from the authorities at this time... For now please stay put wherever you are... </i>
[[Holy shit.]]
[[Nope nope nope nope nope.|Holy shit.]]
[[You squint your eyes shut and curl into a ball on the ground.|Holy shit.]]You force your body to move towards the house to get back into the group. And then you report back to the group about the frenzied radio announcement.
They begin to understand the depth of what has happened.
Their faces turn sickly pale.
Lake breathes in deeply, "I think something like an apocalypse just happened. What we need to do is find safe haven for tonight, and then make plans to scout for our loved ones."
[[OK. Time to collect yourself and get into survival-mode.]]
It is 1 day later.
You and your coworkers are camped out at [[Bao Phi]]’s wooded cottage tucked away on the Cheasty Greenspace, a 10 acre urban forest in South Seattle. The woods surrounding the property look like this:
<img src="http://cheastymtview.com/slides/cheasty_home5.png" width="500" alt text="panoramic view of Pacific Northwest forest- trees, dirt, ferns, and streaming sunlight">
It was Lake's idea to come knocking at their friend Bao's doorstep when we didn't know where else to go.
Anyways, we are here and we are a survival family unit now.
The details of the last 24 hours have flown by, you are in no condition to recount them.
[[And you all have shit to do.]]
It’s kinda funny (but not like haha funny)- the QT TECHNOBABES devoured <u>Octavia’s Brood</u> a few years ago. This was a collection of sci-fi dystopian stories penned by radical activists. It was all the rage among your QTPOC communities. Bao is one of the authors who moved to Seattle last year. Lake sought out the mentorship of Bao and connected him to the QTPOC activist and poet circuits. Here's a photo of Bao for the OB book jacket:
<img src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FOiTenkAY5c/Veo4I7sqRuI/AAAAAAAAB3E/OptWv9KbBNE/s1600/BaoByWater.jpg" width="500" alt text="Poet/writer Bao Phi overlooks a raging lake">
It was like Bao knew something like this would happen in his lifetime. He stocked his cabin with a cellarful of canned food and jugs of water, an emergency generator, extra bedding, extra clothing in all sizes, tools, medical supplies, and seeds.
And he welcomed you all in with open, urgent arms.
[[Back->OK. Time to collect yourself and get into survival-mode.]]Bao asked us all to split up into separate groups:
<ul> - rescue </ul>
<ul> - supplies, and </ul>
<ul> - planning. </ul>
Lake volunteered to be on the rescue team. Every day, rescue has been bringing in more people, mostly children under the age of 10 and elderly folks.
Pretty soon, we'll have to find and move to a larger secured space to fit all the newcomers.
But nobody in our families have arrived yet. Every day we keep hoping that a familiar loved face will appear, but we do not dare to speak of our hopes.
We've become superstitious like that.
I got put on garden duty even though I know nothing about plants or vegetables. Time to do some fast learning.
[[What of the US government?]]
Bao has a hand-cranked radio.
Yesterday when you all tuned in during a mid-morning break, someone was saying something about the UN appointing Russia to temporarily take over management of the US, since the US government, the Pentagon and the White House have become ghost shells.
You imagine it to look like this:
<img src="http://www.vh1.com/news/wp-content/uploads/blog.vh1.com/2013/06/whitehousedown.gif" width="500" alt text="A destroyed White house engulfed in flames and dark smoke">
But it probably still looks like this:
<img src="https://doozymagazine.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/white-house.jpeg?w=604" width "500" alt text="The White House in sunlight with a finely manicured lawn">
[[One month passes at the cabin.]]You have lost your sense of time.
When you got up this morning, your bedmate smiled and told you it is first day of Spring. As you peek outside the curtains, the sun outside is indeed dazzling, piercing your retina with warmth.
<img src="http://www.sunfrost.com/images/south_windows.jpg" width="500" alt text="Three wooden framed windows with sunlight coming through the trees">
Spring. You used to be long for days like these, where a simple flash of sunlight in the morning would cheer you up for a whole day of sitting in front of my laptop at the office.
You would go stand near a big window overlooking the sound on stressful days, like when your manager told you your new pronouns were too hard to learn, or when HR called you to inform you that trans-inclusive healthcare was too expensive for the company to implement. Those days seem centuries in the past now.
[[Who else is here?]]
You shift my glance away from the window to the rest of the room; there are 6 other people dozing peacefully, 2 on the bed, the rest on folded blankets on the floor.
Two black kids, two of your queer coworkers, and two elderly Latinx neighbors. You've gotten to know each of them more and more as the days go by. They're good people, your neighbors you never talked to until now.
Your heart expands as you silently observe them. It aches as it stretches.
<h3>They are alive- you am alive, for now.</h3>
[[A. Try not to think about what has happened in the world... Which means thinking about it]]
<p>
<strike>B. Put on your borrowed work boots and go outside to the Garden to work.</strike>
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<strike>C. Eh fuck it. Attempt to go back to sleep.</strike>
The Deletion. You loathe that word, deletion. Data can be deleted from a database, not people from the world. That’s what the people on the radio have taken to calling it, anyway.
Nobody knows how or why it happened. It just did. The working theory of the Deletion moment, pieced together from radio announcements and information from new cabin members, goes like this: On March 7th 2017, Friday at around 10 AM PST, [[every person]] who was physically located three to five feet away from a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet, Amazon Echo, DSLR cameras, anything that connects to WiFi signal just disappeared. There were no bodies left behind. Nothing to hold or grieve or bury. The devices themselves also vanished. There are reports of people who are like twenty feet away from their loved ones and in one moment, they were gone without a trace.
Rich, poor, black, white, straight, queer, Asian, Latinx, disabled, [[Christian]], Muslim… most people in the country have disappeared, especially the working adults.
There used to be talk about technology as the “Great Equalizer,” because business pundits imagined that if everyone got access to the Internet and communication devices, the effects of racism, sexism, xenophobia, classism would be mitigated. At the time, I had dismissed it as capitalist garbage.
But in a sick way, <h3>maybe they were right.</h3>
So what are you doing here, with your now useless computer skills and lack of even basic survival skills?
It’s funny, you think. You should have disappeared, along with the rest of my middle-class iPhone-loving family… No, no. You can’t think about them right now. Not until you all have figured out a solution to getting clean water and food.
[[Quit thinking. Get to work in the garden.]]I remember reading somewhere online (Pew Research probably) that something like 65% of adults in America use a smartphone. And that lower-income POC heavily use their smartphones for internet access.
Used.
[[Back->A. Try not to think about what has happened in the world... Which means thinking about it]]There were some religious people on the radio who tried to make the Deletion into the rapture, aka when Christians get lifted up into Heaven. But since when is tech-savvy connected to belief? Some other folks tried to frame it as god’s punishment to humanity, but so many religious people of all kinds disappeared, that they didn’t know who to say was to blame.
<img src="http://media.beliefnet.com/~/media/photos-with-attribution/faiths/end-times/rapture.jpg?h=318" width: "500" alt text="Scenes of Christian rapture, a multitude of darkened souls rushing up in a blaze to the sky">
[[Back->A. Try not to think about what has happened in the world... Which means thinking about it]]“Can you hand me the watering can?” I break out of my trance.
It’s Grace. [[Grace]] is a 78 year-old black woman with frizzled white hair and deep creases along her forehead.
You pick up the aluminum watering can by the door frame. It's half full. You pass it to her wordlessly.
She half-smiles at you, and tips the can over the strawberry bushes, humming a low tune.
Grace stands up and looks at you, inquiringly. “Guess you’re not feeling talkative today?”
You frown.
[[Try to have a conversation with Grace.]]A group of activist women elders who are notorious for engaging in direct action like chaining themselves to each other to protest Shell offshore drilling oil rigs or the new youth jail. The Grannies haven't gotten the swing of using social media so they organize in person and over the phone. Here they are in action:
<img src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5887d4d2db29d6d0909b8028/58a0bdbeb3db2b3945434f3e/58a0be31d2b857eb65f79b7b/1486931462265/moral_march_2017-4.jpg?format=2500w" width="500" alt text="Elderly raging granny activists at a public protest holding signs saying 'Raging Grannes' and 'Immigration Reform'">
[[Back->Grace]]You recognize Grace from seeing her around town over the past year, chanting at Black Lives Matter protests and City Hall gatherings.
Grace didn’t own a smartphone, so when Lake found her cowering in shock in the bathroom of her Beacon Hill craftsman, she agreed to come with us if we promised we would look for the rest of her [[Raging Granny]] comrades.
So far, you’ve picked up four other Grannies, scared but otherwise unhurt. You haven’t yet figured out how to reach folks who are across the water in Bellevue, Vashon Island, even Alki Beach.
<img src="https://map.viamichelin.com/map/carte?map=viamichelin&z=10&lat=47.56352&lon=-122.31351&width=550&height=382&format=png&version=latest&layer=background&debug_pattern=.*" width="500" alt text="Illustrated map of Seattle area">
[[Back->Quit thinking. Get to work in the garden.]]
(Play the below video)
<p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VfXVYVq3K1M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Grace concludes, “You are not alone. You are here now with the rest of us, so it’s up to you to decide how you want to be in this new world.”
She gives you one more stare and moves away to rest in the shade.
Hm.
[[You think about Vi.]]Your name is [[Ari]].
It's a Friday morning. But you are not at work.
Because: After quarters of advocating to your boss and to HR, you and your other handful of QTPOC coworkers are at the very first QT TECHNOBABES retreat.
You all are so psyched about finally having space to vent about and problem solve the overwhelming hetero cis whiteness in the tech industry. You rented for the weekend a fancy AirBnB in the north Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, WA.
Right now, you all are taking a lunch break and making tacos.
OK, you all are <i>also</i> totally working, instead of bucking capitalism by getting paid to hangout offsite with your friends!
[[What else have you all been up to today?]]
You can’t not think about Vi. She was your partner. She <i>is</i> your partner.
Around the time of the Deletion, you calculate that she was on a plane coming back from Chicago where she spoke at a fat activism conference. You wonder if her plane landed safely. Or if it nose dived into a corn field. You don’t know if pilots carry around their smartphones when they’re on the clock.
You have to think about Vi alive, and what she would be telling you now.
No, she wouldn’t be saying something, if she were here, you would be holding each other underneath the swaying trees.
All those conversations while lounging on our big red couch and half-watching Netflix, the ones about zombie apocalypses, where you would meet up if the big one comes, how to build a tiny house community for queers, these rise to the surface of your consciousness.
Why didn’t you take those logistical questions way more seriously? Why didn’t you do more research? Why did you spend so much time reading Amazon reviews of kitchen gadgets?
<h3>No, no.</h3>
It’s not helpful going over these things again, reprimanding your former self. All you have is now, and Grace and Lake and Bao and everyone else in the house who are probably all awake by now.
Today is a new day.
[[Remember that and move forward.]]<h3>The end.</h3>
Thanks for playing.
[[Framing essay]]
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[[Start over|Start]]I wrote a story about technology, and how the destruction of its most democratic forms in the US leads to a disorienting new and smaller society. It felt nauseating to create an apocalypse that eliminated people based on tech/internet access and privilege, rather than systemic oppressions based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ability, or religion. It’s totally unfair and not a version of any kind of social justice I’ve ever come across. Still, it became the probing question that unfolded this story. Rather than who gets to be human, how does our humanness change when we are stripped of our productive and connective technologies? If we were offered the choice, would we as a society agree to get it back somehow?
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I also wanted to make a statement on the division of labor between the upper class (intellectual, technical) and the lower classes (embodied), and draw attention to the way embodied labor is undervalued and taken for granted in our current economic system. The main character is a mixed race trans upper middle-class techie who struggles with feelings of self-worth and lost identity after the apocalyptic event, the Deletion. In many apocalyptic stories, there is usually an element of survival, urgency and needing to defend oneself from enemies. I wanted to make the affect of this story very different. In this new world, there aren’t enemies or threats yet, although the possibility of being governed by another world super-power is dread-inducing. We also haven’t seen who’s left in positions of power with access to resources (like weapons), and what they might try to pull over the remaining civilian population. The main character, Ari, and their gang of QT techies have found shelter, safety, and resources, for now. During this waiting period, Ari finds themselves alone with their thoughts and questions, which can be a dangerous path to go down while experiencing fresh compounded grief and confusion.
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It isn’t clear to me whether this story is dystopian or utopian; it may be both. It’s dystopian because most everyone they know and love has vanished, and no one knows if they will reappear again. Kids across the nation are orphaned. Electricity, gas tanks, water towers- all the infrastructure it takes to keep buildings and transportation running- are on a countdown of running out without workers to maintain them and generate more. It may be utopian in that the government no longer exists, prisons are no longer manned by guards and security, the police and military are mostly gone, and people living on streets and in tent cities now have empty, unused houses in which to seek more permanent shelter.
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I also meant for this story to be a way out of identity politics. In creating a world where queer spaces, trans spaces, feminist spaces, black spaces, activist organizing spaces in general and also prisons, schools, hospitals and the Supreme Court no longer existed (or rather, not in their formerly known forms), what role does identity play? What other forms of power, hierarchy, and struggle come to the forefront? What comes out of an alternate society of mostly children and elders, populations who are both routinely forgotten in some matters and overly controlled in others?
Frances Lee <br>
Spring 2017 <br>
BCULST 585: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Science Fiction
[[Back->Remember that and move forward.]]