Yikes! I can’t believe what garbage I just exhumed from my living room after a Thanksgiving dinner that can’t be beat. A piece of technology infecting my HVAC system and turning my house into the Great Reset Restaurant.
Maybe.
I think.
Oh. And this is not a song about Alice.
It’s one about Goggle, actually… Google has this thing called… ‘Hive…?’ Maybe…? I think?
It might be called ‘Nest’ or something pretending to be somewhat friendly sounding like that or whatever, but I know what it really is all about.
See, that’s what they want you to call it. Nest. As in; The place you return to every day. Hearth and home. The family gods. The altar of your worship. The haven of meals and family fellowship. Sleep and dreams, comfort and adoration. All wrapped in one cozy domicile, be it ever so humble. Except now the only god is Google.
I now know better. It is all about the hive, umm, Hive, that we’re all supposed to live in someday soon.
In the future.
The 15-minute city. The, “You’ll-own-nothing-and-you’ll-be-comatose, communist, socialist, living in a Neo-Soviet style, concrete apartment building, veins in your teeth, and killed,” future that we are supposed to embrace. The new, Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum, Omniverse where they are the ‘Omni’ and we don’t even get a ‘verse’ in the choir.
That future. Betcha can't wait for it?
Parts of my house are already an integral part of the Google Hive. For instance, if I leave my refrigerator door open for too long, I get a polite text saying, “Hey, Kid. You left your refrigerator door open for too long! What’s the matter with you?” Or if I go on a trip, I can use my cell phone to check if I closed my garage door. This one has come in handy, actually.
I’ll remember that the next time I’m in the jungles of Southeast Asia and am notified that my refrigerator door is open. Maybe someone or someones are in my house and drinking my beer? In that case I could open and close my garage door. Maybe that’d scare them away.
My car has an app, too. I can start my car and see if anybody has been siphoning off gas from my gasoline tank or changing the radio to a non-regulation station from anywhere in the multiverse, inter-stellar charges may apply, after opening my garage door and asking my refrigerator if anybody has been drinking my beer. Or at least I am supposed to be able to do that, but I never got the app working. My car remains faithfully unfaithful to my remotest wishes. We have an understanding.
I think there’s even a front door knocker with a camera and a microphone in it. With that, should you choose to install it, you can watch the person who is opening your garage door, breaking into your house, drinking your beer, starting your car, and selecting non-regulation stations on your radio dial. It’s all a part of the Brave New Hive.
That Hive.
OK. To begin with…
My HVAC system, which is a part of my Hive enabled, supposedly-smart house heating appliance, also needs a little box in the corner of my living room near the ceiling. It just sits there. Watching. Except at night when it has a little red light on. Just to keep track of my activities and report to the Google Hive-ship while being wise enough to keep me from boiling-freezing in the summer-winter, whole-house system. Well, it got all wonky after Milton.
Remember Milton? The hurricane not the author.
This isn’t a song about Milton, but whatever. It’s about the little box in the corner of my living room near the ceiling with the red light on it that keeps track of my activities and reports to the Google Hive-ship needing an attitude readjustment.
Like I said. Whatever. And one of the, ‘Whatever’s’ was a new thermostat.
Now, I should let you know. A thermostat is a gadget that uses a widget that uses a hypo-thermic, bi-metallic whatsit that registers a caloric gadget that tells it what the temperature it is in the room in which you are currently inhabiting. And then it tells the HV whoseit whether to pump heat in or to pump heat out of the house in which you are currently inhabiting, such as it were.
That’s it’s job.
Simple as that. Just do what’s needed. And shut up about it.
Ya follow me?
So. The HVAC company came along and told me,
“Kid. You have to replace the thermometer thingy,” and I said,
“Ya, sure whatever.” ‘Whatever’ is a very popular word around my living area.
“Kid. Along with the thermometer/thermostat is a sensor that senses and reports regularly to the Google mothership on the air temperature, air pressure, blood pressure, carbon intake, methane output, propaganda consumption, talking-point dispensing, political correction, nitrogen injection, attitude inspection, ideology detecting, mind-virus infecting, carbon neglection, good citizen selection…
“And it ensures that you have been properly injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected…”
And he went on for forty-five minutes and I had no idea what he was talking about, but I had fun filling out all of the squirrelly forms and waivers he gave me signing my life away and playing with all his pencils. It was groovy.
Then he said, “Kid. You have a choice.”
He said I could replace the deselected, rejected, selected, etc., thermostat with a regular thermostat like I had been living with for who knows how long in the dark ages of my past, Google free life without my house being so smart about it, I guess. All the past regression lives, safe and comfortable, of my life of statting therms.
Or I could replace it with a new one. It turned out that the one I already had, the thermostat which I didn’t know I already had and which I had had been having me for some many years now. The had been having had by the thermostat that was being had in my living room and of which I had been having been had by it for, Oh, so many years. And having me had it for I don’t know how many, ‘Oh, so many years,’ since.
Little did I know how it had been had having me too.
I think.
You get that?
I could keep the thermostat that had been properly injecting, inspecting, detecting, infecting, neglecting, and selecting me and was hiding inside of it a tiny, plastic, insidious, piece of microprocessor chunk of silicon laden, chip lumpin’, data pumpin’, Elf on the shelf and Snitch in the ditch technology in the corner of my living room near the ceiling with a little red light on it and overseeing every nose sneeze, random mumble, stray thought, and candid butt scratch I did since I became a citizen of the Collective.
Affectionately called, ‘The Hive’ by the Great God Google.
That thermostat.
The one that took plaster tire tracks, footprints, dog smelling prints, and then took twenty-seven prints, eight by ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against me!
You know. The one that was telling what temperature it is and what I should do about it and why I was a cretin for burning carbon and eating carbon and exhaling carbon in to and out of every orifice of my body or whatever.
That thermostat?
And Google said, “I wann’a know what’cha doin’, all the time. Every! Second! Of! The! Day!”
Or they could just install a unit that, you know, tells me what the temperature is and then does what I would like it to do about it. Maybe… up or down the heat… or something? Whatever?
Do the temperate math.
So. I decided to just sign up for whatever I had already. And was handed a piece of paper to sign in order to sign up, as is tradition. And I turned it over.
And there on the other side... In the middle of the other side… Away from the other side... In parenthesis... Capital letters... Quotated... Read the following words:
Kid. Do you accept the terms of our infinite New World Order sponsored, soul-sucking agreement?
I thought. And considered. And after contemplating the infinite options I decided…
I’ll take the one that is less fascist.
And went back to having leftover Thanksgiving dinner turkey sandwiches that can’t be beat.
At least I was in a comfortable house sans-surveillance.
