Mediated Deception
Jiaojiao Xu
Welcome to the city of Hertzian, 2035. It has been 17 years since the city was nominated a pioneer experimental city for urban connectivity. Efficiency was one of the main reasons to back the plan. Since then, topography of the city has been changed dramatically. ‘Home units’ has been produced for years. In contrast to its own will, these least characterised capsules of home have composed a unique city landscape simply by stacking on top of each other.
The result of this massive technology adoption is impressive. It has been ranked, 3 years in a roll, the first place of the most “technology literate” city in the world. According to the report, citizens of Hertzian managed to “live with artificial intelligence under a high level of intimacy”. Given the success, the model of Hertzian will be spread out to one hundred cities globally, so that the entire humankind can benefit from the fruit of this experiment. And of course, those high-tech entrepreneurs have foreseen and been waiting for another peak period of profit for a long time.
As a citizen of Hertzian, Jess was brought up here. She inherits perfectly the quality of Herztianians: tech-literate, intellectual and reflective. And of course, she cannot resist the idea of efficiency, since the message is fabricated delicately in every single corner of Hertzian.
She remembered at the age of 11, her family first got introduced to “connected home”. Although it had been a while since people talked about those buzzwords, it was the first time that the concept was pushed into reality. Dumb objects were gradually replaced by those smart, connected intelligence: fridge that knows your diet habit, bed that understands your sleep, scale that motivates your workout plan, camera that ensures both safety of home and family members. Fairy tales weren’t fairy tales anymore. The talking objects were real.
The adoption of the experiment wasn’t a conscious choice of the citizens. It was a purely political decision. And politicians, what do they care for? One convincing figure in the annual report is enough to keep them busy throughout the entire year. However, there is definitely something that numbers cannot represent: what if life of Hertzianians is not completely programmed by the co-habited technology? What if, under certain circumstances, numbers will betray itself?
It is because of this “technology literacy”, there is another emerging force beneath, to reflect, to react, to escape, to provide alternatives to this “hyper connectivity”, ‘The A.L.T.’ recently launched a campaign called <the A.L.T project>. The organisation commercialised those jelly sliders that can be magically attached to any objects. According to ‘The A.L.T’, the campaign aims to provide Hertzianians some space for chaos, for poetic, for a blurry grey area in between truth and deception under the hyper connectivity.
Hertzianians nickname the slider ‘the electronic parasite’. Some of them see it as a joke. It only serves the ones who believe in the magic. Jess is luckily, one of latter. It happens after Jess’s fifth attempt to find someone from ‘ScientificMatch’: an online dating service, is sentenced: failure. The algorithm of the service claims to find someone scientifically and efficiently. But it seems not work out for her, even though she followed carefully to submit all her profile data: Facebook, Instagram and Hometa: her connected home data, which represents her daily routine, her personal taste and some of the interpretations even herself cannot understand.
