If These Walls Could Text

Some engineering firm had come up out of the nano arts movement to push for a bunch of smart building widgets that could be programmed for any imaginable purpose. You just wrote the code and the walls would project a 3d environment or spit out your breakfast goo or analyze your style of dress for the proper ratio of traditional and hipstery and print you a knit sweater with sufficient irony for instaspace trending viral virility. Only the movement failed after lawsuits killed the company. Nobody likes a wall that eats children (well, not many) and dumps them in the recycling because some hacker kid on the other side of the world broke your weak security protocols. The patent portfolio was sold off to pay for the damages and another company that had almost been bankrupted by their competitor having these patents was now cashing in on the craze, with better security features and a mandatory binding arbitration clause that required would-be litigants to fly to the Cayman Islands to dispute the customer-corporate relationship while standing on one foot with your net worth balanced on your head. The class action didn’t allot for removal since the lawyers looted the settlement so there were billions of these walls in millions of houses and apartment condo coffin boxes just drooping down and randomly remembering old programming from read only memory, offering charging outlets for obsolete gadgets like three generations of eyephones past and using myfaceweb lingo from two decades ago, mixing up memes with internet laws, comparing kittens to hitlers to MMO NPCs for microtransactional purchases of digital ephemera from a forgotten nerdsession that will be rebooted in virtual Hollywood’s random script generators for maximum profits of summer streaming home theater Netflixter binge watching. The real estate listings and virtual walk throughs and remote control drone tours all note these features as if they’re not bugs but the charming kitch of past generations of foolish security that children nowadays could break during recess right after doxxing their bullies and stealing identities and spewing obscenities your generation would be appalled by back in your day when you ubered uphill both directions in a cell phone deadzone with no 3G signal for miles.