Thursday 12 May 2016

The Boy Who Sold The World


He remembered back to when he was, perhaps 13 years of age. He was sitting on a train with his uncle. They were going into the city to celebrate the boy becoming a teenager.

As he looked around the train, it struck him that no one was talking. Conversations had been replaced by each individual watching, laughing at, writing to, their little machines. The individual felt wanted, or needed, or even entertained by these little contraptions.

When the boy was 20, he had already created a new social media software. Even at that young age he was now considered rich, but money wasn’t what he was looking for in this journey – he wanted their hearts and minds.
The days of Facebook were long gone, the new buzz word was the boy’s CLIQUE. You see, he had seen the audience who had once watched television would vote on anything, if they felt they could influence matters – and that was the secret of his software.


Individuals who were suspected of this, or that, had their photos instantaneously placed on CLIQUE. These were hi-tech witch trials. If a neighbour didn’t like another, they placed a photo (or a CliqueGram) on the page and denounced them as a paedophile, or not patriotic, or not quite one of us.

And in trains, and homes, and cafes, and bars, the proles voted to find the culprit guilty or not. Regardless of the result, their lives were always destroyed.

The boy’s secret was to divide and rule – rule and divide. As long as no one spoke to each other, they would only believe what was on their little machines.

The thought that morning on the train, which had passed through the little boy’s mind, stayed with him forever: Hitler would have used social media.


bobby stevenson 2016

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