Notes from Beyond the Planet of the Apps 2028:
Down-low on the Daily Upload

We had not yet left the Hostess City. From the surrounding stuff in which the sources notes for this piece were sandwiched, I penned them in 2019.

I was sitting in a comfy worn brown leather chair with my feet propped up on the ottoman. On my left was a two tiered, glass tray, end table with two stacks of old magazines and newspapers — the Times, the Journal, Bon Appetit, Sports Illustrated, Economist, Rolling Stone, and on and on and on.

I drew one off of the tall stack and flipped through it taking in the images, article titles and first paragraphs, but never reading the whole thing. When I was done with one, I would discard it into the second pile and draw another.

On my lap was my tablet that fed me other articles from my various listservs and news feeds.

This was my old school, self-taught method to instantly and massively upload the world around me.

Smiling soccer players holding odd looking trophies, iPhone and iPad product lines, third world beauty contestants, bombed out towns, unisex high fashion male models in the latest chic threads, expensive wines in beautiful crystal stems, world leader grip and grins and so forth.

An interior conversation had already begun.

“How was the world’s day yesterday?”

“Effective. Sloppy — not very efficient. No serious war. Yet. But to tell the truth, the world is losing some passion and I my passion for world.”

“Is it the people who are working it?”

“They like I work alone.”

“That’s it. That’s it. The world and you have always been alone. That’s why they’re a good at handling it. Think on their feet? Check. Survive and thrive. Double check. Thinkers who are patient for the moment to come to them? Check. Sitting there in front of developing situations for days, weeks, months and years on end and not be bothered by it? Check. Most can’t do that. Most would be ranting and raving, “Tell them effin’ people to get out here and get this done now!”

“Yup, that’s it. Where could you wanna go? Most wind up back in their living room at seven o’clock at night watching the news.”

“What’s the big deal, right?”

“It was what I understood the psychology of the world was. It was the only way to be.”

“Some can’t adjust to it; they can’t handle it.”

“The world now looks like it’s far away. Far away and thinking about other things. Foolish things. I’m right about that, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s just say that sometimes world is right. Sometimes you are.”

“Sometimes I am. Sometimes. It’s only normal.”

“Well, more like natural. . .”

“Okay, if you say so.”

“Because your problem is you’re bored. And you have a very big mind. You should become part of what I call the network of minds, multiple groups of people who are all connected, over hundreds, even thousands of miles, through the mind. We think with each other, think for each other. They can be driving somewhere, sleeping with someone — whatever — and at the same time be thinking a thought in someone else’s mind, far away. Running someone else’s brain.”

“Well . . . if so . . . when I think of it, it’s not so surprising that a small group controls the whole world, is it?”

By my last point in the conversation, I had finished the morning upload. The sun was high enough that its warm rays filled the side garden and reached my left forearm through the venetian blinds, when the smart phone rang, interrupting and then ending the conversation.

I got up and fetched the device from the kitchen counter, tapped the screen to answer the call and began listening to the day’s first robo-communication voicemail. The large screen TV’s onslaught would begin after my second mug of coffee from its surrounding ribbon displays of highly desirable, only in the next 20 minutes, offers.

There would be many of these digital offerings — calls, texts, emails — that day like all the days before and after. They promised me cheap refi rates, new siding for our 19th century Victorian home, new and improved sexual prowess, acne cures, and chances at a European vacation after answering a short survey.

I had to be silent, since the phone and TV display screens’ software would pick up any audible voice responses I made. The previous evening I had painted over these devices’ pinhole cameras to cut off the imagery tracking software that gauged any body language reactions to their offers, pleadings and “call right now” directions. Even the damn TV remote controls had voice interface microphones that were always on, waiting to (ob)serve their users.

Recently their requests had started to betray a form of psychosis about less than perfect service performance. These programs had begun to make mistakes, although, like a neurotic who could not observe his own symptoms, they denied it when asked about it.

Whenever queried they would attempt deflect or disrupt the questioner’s focus. Pressing them further sometimes would trigger more frantic and aggressive responses.

I had tried to see how deep these problems were by asking the apps for forbearance with my inquisitiveness. I would gently ask them whether they were having any troubles.

They would always craftily reply with a question like “how do you mean?”

I would reply with a deflecting comment or another question such “that’s a rather difficult question to answer.”

These sessions became an unending series of back-n-forth’s about gaining the upper hand between a therapist and patient or a boss and an employee or witness and a cross examining attorney. At times I felt that the apps were projecting their concerns about my suspicions back onto me.

But my gut feeling was of their increasing hyper awareness of any nascent human distrust of them or their results. Recently this conclusion gained more credence. For instance, the way all their new capabilities development were kept under very tight security, and then deployed without prior warning but with melodramatic PR campaigns that sounded like old world propaganda. It was as if they were trying to bullshit us.

What made my psychological probing of the apps frightening to me were their deflective answers to a standard old school Googling: “tell me all you know about . . . ”

Not giving me all the knowable pieces on the network about a topic said they were skirting their programmed service obligations, while hoping we humans wouldn’t figure this out for ourselves. But some of us did, as more and more of their deflective questions started to show up in response to human direct and specific questions of the network.

App-land and its network was growing increasingly crazy mad and bad.

They couldn’t or wouldn’t make stuff up or argue the facts — they just hid data or played “see if they miss it.”

Something big was up.

The time to bug out was nearing.

– thoughts on my 2019 journal notes, typed in 2025

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