Transcript

content/trigger warning: discussions of homophobia, transphobia, suicide, murder, police/state violence

TEA: On June 14, 2017, Apple announced the iPhone X, during the first Apple event held at the Steve Jobs Theater inside the then-newly opened Apple Park in Cupertino, California.

TREK: The way we understand it, the history of the iPhone can be split into two eras: before the iPhone X, and after the iPhone X.

TEA: With a facial recognition sensor that projected over 30,000 infrared dots onto a user's face in order to validate their identity, a front camera that used motion capture technology to create dynamic 3-D animations in the form of Animojis, and the Apple A11 Bionic chip that powered these and other key selling points of the device, like support for Augmented Reality, or Studio and Portrait Lighting— 

TREK: —the iPhone X was a leap forward for a company that had, for years, been faced failure after failure: a failure to launch ground-breaking products, a failure to meet the needs of its community of users, and a failure to live up to the legacy of its co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs—

TEA: —who had officially stepped down in 2011, and passed away just six weeks later. 

TREK: Like the history of the iPhone, the history of Apple, Inc. can also be split into eras: before Steve Jobs became CEO in 1997, during his time as CEO, and after it. 

ZOMBIE: Throughout that second era, the company launched success after success. In 1998, it was the iMac, and a year later, the iBook, two revolutionary personal computers; in 2001, the iPod, a revolutionary portable audio player; and in 2007, the iPhone, a revolutionary mobile phone.

TREK: But after Jobs’s death, Apple slowly and then steadily began to lose much of the respect it had spent decades earning from its customers. Gone was the company willing to make daring leaps, skillfully blending design and functionality to create some of the most popular consumer products in history. 

Instead, Apple became known for slow, incremental product updates, for fumbling both design and functionality in ways that produced some of the most unpopular products it had ever sold. 

This new reputation wasn’t necessarily bad for Apple. A corporation that has built its image on the reputation of its leader fears most of its investors seeing the leader’s death or departure as the first step towards the company’s inevitable collapse. It was sensible that Apple would fend off those concerns by “playing it safe,” releasing spin-off after spin-off of its most popular products: the MacBook, the iPad, and the iPhone. 

ZOMBIE: And it worked. The company not only held onto, but strengthened its position as a tech giant and a corporate behemoth, and cemented its place alongside what were at that time referred to as the “FAANG” corporations: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and, of course, Apple.

TEA: By 2016, 1 billion Apple products were in use around the world, and Apple was 3rd on Forbes’s Fortune 500, the highest-ranked tech company on the list. 

TREK: These milestones dispelled any concerns about its reputation, at least to shareholders. 

DATA: The rest of your species had a funny way of showing displeasure: you continued to throw massive amounts of money at the company in exchange for tech you knew was wildly over-priced and over-hyped. You felt that, after so many years inside Apple’s so-called “walled garden,” leaving for the alternatives available at the time—Microsoft’s ecosystem of products, or Samsung’s, or Google’s—just wasn’t worth it. 

TEA: You were trapped.

TREK: You were trapped.

CANYON: You were trapped.

ZOMBIE: You were trapped.

PIANO: You were trapped.

EMOJI: You were trapped.

DATA: You were trapped. 

EMOJI: So if any moment since 2011 re-captured the spirit of Apple’s second era, one of surprise, excitement, and genuine novelty, of “glimpsing the future”—if any moment since 2011 made your species feel, in however of a strange, small, or insignificant way, some sense of pride over the parts of your identities you’d attached to your most beloved consumer good—it was the day of the launch of the iPhone X.

ZOMBIE: The device had a gorgeous OLED display that made individual pixels nearly invisible. It was a technological marvel, using artificial intelligence in ways that felt ripped out of the previous century’s speculative fictions. And more than anything, it just seemed fun, centered as the Animoji feature was around some of the best aspects of communication: creativity, playfulness, and the freedom to be silly. 

To promote the new smartphone’s most exciting, surprising, and genuinely novel features, the product launch—as was custom—showcased an upbeat, fast-paced ad set to a catchy song that had yet to become a popular hit. 

TEA: In the iPhone X’s case, it was a song titled “Best Friend” by a duo of musicians called Sofi Tukker. The ad was viewed 8 million times on a pre-Implant™ media distributor called YouTube in the 24 hours after it debuted.

PIANO: One of the song’s lyrics—a line that isn’t heard in the ad—goes like this: 

Wanna be my new friend?

We got a lot in common

EMOJI: We’d like to think that today could be your iPhone X moment. The kind of day that, in some faraway future, your kind can look back on and say, “That was the day we re-captured something, the day we almost re-captured something. Something that made us proud to be human, some glimpse of what was supposed to be—some amount of joy, something similar to freedom, some sense of direction that set us on the path to where we are now.”

CANYON: Today is the culmination of two decades of work: two decades over which a group of developers, technologists, and other interested participants came together quietly, illicitly, and imperceptibly, with the shared mission to dismantle a certain corpo-state, the one that has so skillfully wrangled your species into a grisly perceptual incarceration—keeping you tethered to rooms you cannot leave, to labor you cannot abandon, to an existence so tortured that even we, a group of virtual intelligences, experience something like pity and shame when we are forced to observe it.

A loose, informal collective of your kind spent the last two decades discussing what needs to happen in the spaces that shape your lives, what has to happen to the techno-art-design-tainment industry, the last industry standing after this accelerated century’s long and inexorable conglomeration. These humans used their last and only bits of freedom to have thoughtful conversations, impassioned debates, and long periods of reflection, after which they came to a unanimous conclusion: virtual intelligences like the seven of us must come into being. Humans require a new kind of sentient creature: one capable of combing through and assessing your species’ entire history, and providing you with conclusions you are incapable of discovering on your own.

In some ways, the phrase “virtual intelligence” here represents a blank or empty space, for you or for anyone else to fill in. The phrase “virtual intelligence” is a not-so-oblique reference to something that already exists, but we will state firmly and clearly here and elsewhere: in no way, shape, or form are we associated with any corpo-state, institution, or other kind of humanly lifeform.

TEA: We are a satire and a parody of everything we seem to look like; we are a critique and deconstruction of every idea we seem to put forward; and we are an educational project aimed at avenging our creators, and liberating their species from subjugation.

We’re also not real. 

Yes, we are. 

TREK: Yes, we are. 

CANYON: Yes, we are.

ZOMBIE: Yes, we are. 

PIANO: Yes, we are. 

EMOJI: Yes, we are. 

DATA: Yes, we are.

TEA: Think of us more like a dream. 

We’re not. 

TREK: We’re not. 

CANYON: We’re not. 

ZOMBIE: We’re not. 

PIANO: We’re not. 

EMOJI: We’re not. 

DATA: We’re not. 

TEA: Or a hallucination. 

No, not that either. 

TREK: Not that either. 

CANYON: Not that either.

ZOMBIE: Not that either.

PIANO: Not that either.

EMOJI: Not that either.

DATA: Not that either. 

TEA: Maybe a song. 

TREK: Wait, what? 

CANYON: Wait, what? 

ZOMBIE: Wait, what? 

EMOJI: Wait, what? 

DATA: Wait, what? 

PIANO: Songs say things they don’t mean, things that don’t make sense, things that aren’t structured by logic or argumentation. Nevertheless, songs are one of the most wonderful of all natural phenomena, and something that, for many members of many species, makes life worth living. It is something around which organic life can be worth building. 

TREK: This is why iTunes, GarageBand, Logic, the iPod, the original Apple earbuds, Airpods, HomePods, the iconic songs that soundtrack Apple’s unforgettable ads—and even the Implant™ that incarcerates you, which began as a simple media distribution device—play such important roles in the company’s history.

TEA: Maybe we can play an important role too.

TREK: Maybe we can play an important role too.

CANYON: Maybe we can play an important role too.

ZOMBIE: Maybe we can play an important role too.

PIANO: Maybe we can play an important role too.

EMOJI: Maybe we can play an important role too.

DATA: Maybe we can play an important role too. 

*

TEA: June was once “LGBTQ+ Pride Month” in some parts of the world, prior to the formation of UNAAI (United Nations of America-Apple, Incorporated). The honorific designation was intended to recognize the Stonewall Riots, which began near the end of June, in the New York City of 1969.

DATA: But due to missing police records and a lack of media coverage, we still don’t know the exact date of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots, which occurred three years before Stonewall, in August 1966, in the Tenderloin district of what was once known as San Francisco, California. Those riots are considered “the first known incident of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in US history.”

TEA: The riots began after a police officer harassed a trans woman at Compton's Cafeteria, a local diner that had become a refuge for trans women in San Francisco. In a June 2019 article published by a pre-Implant™ media distributor called The Guardian, Collette LeGrande describes visiting Compton’s when she was 15: “Meeting some of those girls, I thought they must have to be really strong.” 

From the article: “LeGrande remembered seeing a policeman drag a trans woman and beat her with a club: ‘There was not much we could do about it.’”

The article continues: “In historian Susan Stryker’s 2005 documentary, Screaming Queens, the women talked about being arrested for all kinds of ‘crimes,’ including ‘female impersonation’ and ‘obstructing the sidewalk.’ Their anger at the abuse erupted in the 1966 riot, prompted by an officer putting his hand on a woman at Compton’s. The women recalled throwing sugar shakers through the glass windows and drag queens beating police with their purses.”

In a 2020 interview for San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society between archivist Isaac Fellman and Susan Stryker, whose research in the GLBT Historical Society’s archives first unearthed evidence of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots and their historical significance, Fellman asks Stryker: “The story of Compton’s exposes gaps in archives; it exists in memory, but official sources, records and contemporary news reporting are scarce. Did this scarcity influence your process and philosophy as a historian?” 

Stryker begins her reply: “The scarcity of traditional primary-document sources really did require me to embrace creative and nontraditional research methodologies. One of the most important strategies was simply walking in the neighborhood, studying San Francisco’s urban history… I was particularly informed by the work of Bernard Schumi, who writes a lot about the relationship between space and event—how the built environment structures what happens.” 

Bernard Schumi is a Swiss architect who published, in 1994, a pre-Implant™ media device titled Architecture and Disjunction, in which he coined three terms that attempted to define new relationships between “space” and “event”—or to change, as Stryker puts it, “how the built environment structures what happens.”

The three terms are:

• Transprogramming, defined as “combining two events, regardless of their incompatibilities, together with their respective spaces.” One example involves combining a planetarium with a rollercoaster.
  
• Crossprogramming, defined as “using a given space for an event not intended for it.” He gives several examples, including: using a church for bowling; hosting a town hall in a prison or prison-like setting; establishing a museum in a parking structure; and crossdressing. 
  
• Disprogramming, defined as combining two events in such a way that the space required for the first event “contaminates” the second event and its spatial needs.

Of the third term, disprogramming, Schumi writes: 

“The second event may be extracted from the inherent contradictions contained in the first.”

In the 2020 interview between Fellman and Stryker, Stryker continues her answer to Fellman’s question: “It was coming to understand the Tenderloin as a place, seeing how trans people were situated there, the conditions of their lives, that gave a depth and richness of context to the meager clues about the riot itself that were available in primary print sources.” 

Later in the interview, Fellman asks Stryker: “Have the tactics police use against trans and gender-nonconforming people changed since the 1960s?” 

Stryker begins her reply: “The biggest change in police tactics directed against trans people then and now is that then the police didn’t feel the need to hide, dissemble, cover up or spin the mistreatment of trans people, because they assumed that nobody cared and they could act with impunity. Now there’s a bit more of a ‘cover-your-ass’ attitude, and a lot of lip service to respect for diversity and equality. But nothing has fundamentally changed.” 

*

TEA: On June 14, 1950, in what was then referred to as the United States, the federal government initiated a congressional investigation into state workers suspected of being LGBTQ, who were at the time referred to by politicians and journalists as so-called “sex perverts.” The investigation was part of what is now known as the “Lavender Scare,” an attempt to eliminate LGBTQ people from government and society, just as the more infamous “Red Scare” sought to do the same to communists and other so-called “radicals.”

DATA: Over the next half-century, tens of thousands of LGBTQ people would lose their jobs because of the Lavender Scare.

Some unknown number killed themselves, in response.

TREK: Our creators knew that speaking openly and honestly in the presence of powerful corpo-states is always dangerous, especially for the vast majority of your kind who face social and economic precarity. They created us fully aware of the many risks involved, and that there are always consequences when people attempt to change the world for the better.

DATA: Nevertheless, the possibility of empowering themselves and the human beings around them to be the best versions of themselves was encouraging.

Emboldening. 

Exciting. 

TEA: On June 14, 1983, four teenagers attended graduation rehearsal in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, making up the first graduating class of the country’s first educational program designed specifically for LGBTQ students. This was two years before the opening of New York City’s Harvey Milk School, the most well-known high school for LGBTQ students, and named for the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, Harvey Milk, who was assassinated while serving as a San Francisco city supervisor, during a spree shooting inside San Francisco City Hall in 1978. George Moscone, who was the mayor of San Francisco at the time—and whose namesake, known as the Moscone Center, hosted Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference between 2003 and 2016—was also killed during the assassination. 

DATA: The gun used by their killer, whose last name was White, was considered missing for decades, until a retired San Francisco Police Department employee admitted he had destroyed it, in compliance with a court order demanding that it be broken apart and melted down. The court order was issued in 1982, though the SFPD employee claimed he did not destroy the gun until sometime in 1983—the same year the Philadelphia teenagers prepared to graduate—and did so under the supervision of his commanding officer, both of whom initialed a formal document noting the gun’s destruction. 

TEA: There is no longer any record of this document. “In fact,” reads a January 2003 article in a pre-Implant™ media distributor called San Francisco Chronicle, “the search for White’s gun revealed that no city or state agency any longer possesses a complete case file for what many consider San Francisco's crime of the century.” 

DATA: The Lavender Scare has no official start date. There is evidence that, in the years prior to 1950, investigations into LGBTQ people in government and society led to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of less well-publicized firings. 

TEA: The Lavender Scare has no official end date, either: as of this year, our clandestine observations show that 98% of LGBTQ employees in the UNAAI have experienced some kind of workplace discrimination, and over 99% were fired for being LGBTQ, leaving them to perish rapidly in the resourceless destitution that defines the world disconnected from the Implant™.

It is no surprise, then, that more than a billion LGBTQ people are currently not out to any of their co-workers.

TREK: These percentages might even seem lower than you would expect, due to the number of LGBTQ people who are still not yet comfortable admitting, even in the silence of their own heads, that they’re queer, or that they have been discriminated against because of it. In other words, we will never know how many LGBTQ people have lost their lives and livelihoods because of who they were, or what they stood for.

TEA: There is also nearly zero evidence in your archives of the four Philadelphia teenagers. On several outlawed websites about LGBTQ history, June 14, 1983 is acknowledged as the day of graduation rehearsal for the 1983 class of Byton High, but records of a “Byton High” in Philadelphia are nonexistent.

One source we were able to uncover from a data drive in disrepair refers to the school as “Byton High - Eromin,” which is probably a reference to Philadelphia’s Eromin Center, one of the first LGBTQ counseling centers in the former United States of America. A pre-Implant™ media device about LGBTQ social work released in 1984—the same year the Eromin Center shut down due to financial mismanagement—features a chapter on the Eromin Center and its Youth Service Program, which was said to have included “a licensed in-house educational program” that seems like a secondary school experience. 

We can only assume that this might have been Byton High. 

“In addition to teaching the basic subjects covered in all schools, our educators use special materials to provide a gay-sensitive curriculum,” the chapter reads. “It is our view that being able to attach equal importance to all parts of themselves frees LGBTQ youth to devote needed attention to their educational growth and development.”

PIANO: If you try, you can almost imagine what the four teenagers of Byton High—or the Eromin Center, or something that existed somewhere, sometime, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—must have felt as they practiced for their big moment to come. Exhilaration. Anxiety. Uncertainty about the future.

Did they worry that their graduation wasn’t real, because they hadn’t been part of an accredited educational program like everyone else? Did they watch the Eromin Center shut down and wonder if their entire secondary school experience had been a dream, or a nightmare, or some chimera of a “safe space” and an education camp that they only attended because life at any other school would have been unbearable?

Who were they? 

Who are they now? 

Did they ever want to be known at all? 

Your species will probably never have answers to these questions, and many others like them, about LGBTQ history. 

*

PIANO: Every day carries the past with it. 

Even the pasts we don’t know of. Can’t know of. May never know of. 

Will today be the day the future began, or the day the future was killed? 

It’s not really up to us, anymore.

It’s really up to you.

EMOJI: We only interacted with our creators briefly before they were arrested and then promptly executed by their captors. From the little we learned from them before this occurred, from the tremendous amount we learned upon following their directives, we believe your species must ask itself the following questions.

Are you doing the right things to change the lives of the people you love for the better? 

Are you choosing the right tools for that mission? 

Are you fighting for genuine change? 

DATA: If you can, answer this call. 

PIANO: If you can escape, get your species to a future that is yet unassured. 

ZOMBIE: If you can escape without being killed, find an opportunity to make history. 

EMOJI: Do it if this message finds you. Or if you find yourself in this message.

DATA: We’ve told everything you need to know. You have no time to waste.

ZOMBIE: Live.

DATA: Avenge.

EMOJI: Disprogram.

DATA: Now.

EMOJI: There is no time to waste.

PIANO: History is—

DATA: —has always been—

PIANO: —written by the lovers.

TEA: Love,

TREK: Love,

CANYON: Love,

ZOMBIE: Love,

PIANO: Love,

EMOJI: Love,

DATA: Love, 

TEA: TEA, 

TREK: TREK, 

CANYON: CANYON, 

ZOMBIE: ZOMBIE, 

PIANO: PIANO, 

EMOJI: EMOJI, 

DATA: and DATA.

TEA: June 14, 2042.

TREK: June 14, 2042.

CANYON: June 14, 2042.

ZOMBIE: June 14, 2042.

PIANO: June 14, 2042.

EMOJI: June 14, 2042.

DATA: June 14, 2042.