by Various
“Superpowers are expensive,” I said.
“Now there’s an interesting thing for you to say,” she said. “Has my master plan to get you all hopped up on caffeine and spice-endorphins shaken something loose in that twisty little brain of yours?”
“Funny you should mention that,” I said. “It’s like there’s something good right there, just in the corner of my eye. Don’t want to look at it straight on, it’ll vanish.”
She held her palm out like she was luring a cat out from under a sofa. “Come on out little fella, we won’t hurt you.” She moved her hand so that she was cupping my chin, looking me straight in the eye. “Out with it, Yallow. Superpowers are expensive.”
I snorted. “Fine. Let’s see where this goes. What you can do, what I can do, what any of us can do on our own, that’s ‘human.’ There’s a good wide range in ‘human.’ You got your concert pianists at one end, people like me who can’t play chopsticks at the other end. But even the greatest pianist is less than an orchestra.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. I mean, what if the orchestra sucks?”
I clucked my tongue. “Say the whole orchestra is made up of the greatest musicians you can find. The world’s greatest piano player with the world’s greatest cellist and the world’s greatest triangle player and so on.”
“Okay, I’ve got you.”
“So the problem is that if you’re an awesome piano player, all it takes for you to make beautiful music is to sit down at a well-tuned keyboard and play. But if you’re playing with other people, you’ve got to, you know, pick a song, pick a key, pick a tempo. Spend a lot of time listening to the rest of the band and making sure everyone’s playing at the same time. But you do it, because playing six or ten instruments at once, and doing a good job of it, that’s more than one person can do.”
“It’s superhuman, in other words,” Ange said.
“Exactly. So cooperating with other people gives you superhuman powers. Literally. But it costs something. Every moment you’re spending checking your tempo or arguing about the piece or picking a key is a moment you’re not spending playing music. That’s the tax.”
Ange nodded and opened up her tablet and stared at the screen again. “Look at this,” she said, and pointed to the cops’ rigid line. “These guys here, they’re coordinated, and they don’t need to stare at a phone screen the whole time to figure out where to stand or when to move. They just listen to the orders coming through their earpieces and do whatever their leaders tell them. That’s the price of their superpowers: they have to shut up and do what someone else says. That’s not a deal I’d want to take.”
“Me neither,” I said.
Which brings me to tonight. Or not quite.
It was later that day when Ange sat me down and gave me a little pep-talk about not being afraid, and if I was afraid, not being embarrassed by it. I told her it wasn’t that easy and she countered that she’d never said it was easy, just that it was right. And then she said, “Look, Marcus, the problem is obvious. You’ve seen this all from the god’s-eye view, you know how stupidly helpless we are when they bring on the kettle, and it’s got you freaked out. No one likes to be outflanked, especially not when it’s literal. Before, you fought back because you thought you could win, but seen from the sky, it looks like you’ll always lose, and it’s cost you your nerve.”
“You’re not helping,” I said.
“Shut up. The solution’s easy, if only you’d stop moping. All you need to do figure out what will cure your feelings of helplessness and do that, and you won’t be afraid anymore. Why don’t you do some work on Sukey? It’s totally aimed at solving this problem.”
“It can’t, though,” I said. “For Sukey to work, you’d need to turn us into an army and let it play general. It sends us marching orders and we do maneuvers like cadets on drill parade. Forget it. Even if I wanted to take orders from someone, no one else would. And imagine what a nightmare it’d be if someone got into the command channel and sent everyone running right into the kettle. The security issues are brutal.” The idea was right on the tip of my brain now, right there, and I wasn’t going to let it slip away. I started to speak as fast as I could—pretty fast—not taking heed of the spit-flecks, determined to outrun my brain’s own shyness and self-censorship: “What we need is, is, is—” It was gone. Back! “Remember the video of those masked people leading the demonstration back to Occupy? Remember the liquid democracy? If you are standing next to the person who knows which way to go, that person can just tell you about it. But if you’re two or three of eleven people away, well, you might never find out. Or you might get stampeded. When I was outside the kettle, on the ferry, watching the drone footage, I could see how people were getting hurt, could see which way they should be running. If someone delegated their sense of direction to me, at just the right moment—”
So, tonight. Tonight I’m putting on a very special boot. It’s the left boot from my roomiest pair: engineer boots I found at a stoop sale and was totally smitten by, even though I needed three pairs of my thickest socks to wear them without them slipping off. Tonight, though, it was a tight fit. It had a thick pad of piezoelectric crystal that turned every step I took into a bit of electricity that was used to trickle-charge a lithium cell we’d liberated from a junk mobile phone from the basket of donated electronics at Noisebridge. That was connected to a strip of velcro that wrapped around the thin, sensitive skin of my ankle, just where a particularly vindictive mosquito might bite you. That velcro, in turn, held a bunch of cannibalized cell-phone vibrators, four of them, at each of the cardinal points. There was a fifth lump, a little Bluetooth shield that connected to my phone, and that’s where the fun started.
The funny thing about this kind of project is that if you can get other people excited about it, you can go very far, very fast. I posted about it on the Noisebridge mailing list on Saturday, and by Sunday night we’d banged together six rounds of prototype. It helped that there was already a commercial kit we could use for basics, a fun little gizmo that softly vibrated the side of your ankle that was closest to north, giving you a kind of innate, subliminal directional sense that was as different from looking at a compass as knowing a city was from looking at it on a map. The software was the tricky part, and that was mostly because we were all set on using Near Field Communications for delegation, and—
Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Imagine that you’re at some big demonstration and there’s someone there, somewhere or other, who know where and how to move. Maybe they’ve got an earpiece screwed in and they’re listening to someone who’s watching a drone. Maybe they can see where the kettle ends. Maybe they just know something, or maybe they’re watching a screen. Doesn’t matter. The important thing is that this is someone you want to appoint as your personal guide.
That person is wearing an armband with a couple of identifiers: a QR code (so you can just snap a pic), a number (so you can tap it into your phone), and an arphid.
Yes, an arphid. My arch-nemesis. The ubiquitous radio-frequency ID tag, the snitch chip that beacons your location and identity to anyone with the cleverness to listen. What’s more, this arphid is a Near-Field Communications chip, and NFC is doubly awful.
That’s because the people who created the NFC drivers for Android phones were totally clueless on security. The standard NFC libraries are so badly written that all it takes to totally pwn an Android phone with NFC turned on is to simply brush past it with a loaded piece of paper bearing a gimmicked NFC sticker, and that phone will be yours forevermore—letting you watch out its camera, listen through its mic, sniff all the passwords entered on it, watch its GPS, slurp up all the files and personal pics in its memory, and that’s just for starters.
So yeah, no one who knows anything likes NFC very much. But for our purposes, it was indispensible. We called the app “Hivemind,” and it let a whole group of people move in superhuman synchrony without having to become obedient, militarized
drones. Take a Hivemind-equipped phone, tell it who you wanted to delegate your navigation to—by touching them with the phone, scanning their QR code, or keying in their number—and your foot-powered anklet would send you a continuous signal telling you where to go. We didn’t need to outfit a whole protest to make this work, either. If there was someone visible to you who seemed to know where she was going, chances are, you’d follow.
Even if you weren’t the following type, once a large portion of the group was in motion, heading the same way, chances were you wouldn’t want to stand out there on your own, without the safety of the crowd. Yes, safety: a crowd that can’t coordinate its movement is an easy target, while a crowd that has a grain or two of intelligence can move like gas flowing around obstacles, and be as hard to bottle up.
So we needed NFC, and we got it. The more paranoid among us used cheap second-hand Android phones, jailbroken and flashed with a secure fork of the operating system. There was nothing else important on those phones, and after the protest, they’d be re-flashed and restored to a known-good state. The rest of us just crossed our fingers and hoped that ParanoidAndroid’s “secure” NFC drivers would be good enough to withstand any shenanigans in the crowd.
We’d tested the system by inserting two hundred people into the rush hour crowd around the Embarcadero, sprinting from one side of the terminal to the other for an hour. The aerial video was amazing. Our people were immediately apparent, but not because of how they dressed. Instead, you could tell who they were because they moved through the jammed mob like dolphins in a current. Only ten percent of us were loaded with Hivemind, but those twenty people were more than enough intelligence to turn us all into a superhuman organism. The best part was that you could follow anyone you chose, and change who you followed instantly. It was like being an army with no leaders—all the precision and coordination, none of the orders and ranks.
I’ve seen plenty of flashmobs, been in a few of them, but the point of those was always to be noticed, to stop people’s busy lives for a timeout where something extraordinary happened. This time, our flashmob’s extraordinary movement was so subtle and sly that no one but us was sure what was happening, and it wasn’t until we regrouped that the miracle we’d just lived through hit home and we started to cheer spontaneously, cheer loud and long, that the rest of the world had any inkling that something out of the ordinary was taking place.
Tonight, we march on the site of Occupy Seneca and the smooth transition. That wasn’t our idea. There have been demonstrations at Occupy every week since that Black Bloc operation. They’d been getting smaller each week, and we all knew that it was the death spiral for whatever we had there. Smaller numbers meant fewer press cameras, fewer “normal” people willing to come out with their kids or their grandmothers, until it was just street warriors and cops squaring off on a matter of principle, something that would always end with victory for the cops and beatings and jail for the demonstrators.
But tonight will be different. Tonight the hivemind will be inside the demonstration.
We stream in from many places, but we converge, as always, on the smooth transition. Many of us are carrying pots and pans, something we got from the Montreal student protests a few years back—the “casserole” protests that hit the street every night after Quebec’s premier banned public marches, and people responded by walking and singing and banging on pots and pans.
We’re young, mostly, though as always in the Bay Area there’s a lot of aging hippies in their sixties and seventies salted in the crowd. Most of us are grim-faced, aware of the death spiral, with no idea of what else to do. But some of us—the hundred or so wearing Hivemind rigs, sending electricity into our batteries with every step, we’re barely able to contain our excitement, and we’re all grinning at one another like holy fools. We practically dance our way to the familiar police cordon around our paradise lost, the place where we started something extraordinary, now a blank slate, as though everything we did has been erased. It hasn’t. The place wasn’t the important thing. What we did there was the important thing, and what it did to us, that was the important thing, too. Like the Whos down in Whoville, we keep Christmas in our hearts, even after the grinches at the OPD swipe all our stuff and run over it with a bulldozer.
I think that our joy can be felt even by the people who aren’t in on the joke. I’ve been to plenty of marches since the smooth transition, and the sense that we were about to be stomped flat could be felt at every moment. Not tonight. Tonight, everyone has enough of a bounce in their step to power a city. Even before we turn it on, Hivemind is making a difference.
And there, at the end of the street, is the OPD line: sawhorses, temporary fences, and a bristling line of cops with helmets and shields and batons. Of course they knew we were coming. Even if you weren’t monitoring our mailing lists and hashtags (they were) and even if you didn’t have undercover agents burrowed into our group (they did), you can’t really hide thousands of people moving through the streets of Oakland, carrying signs, singing, chanting.
These demonstrations are as formally ritualized as kabuki. The protesters come. They chant. They sing. They mass. The police order them to disperse. Some—more and more these days—obey the order. There’s another police warning. Then the kettle. They keep us penned in for long hours, punitively, caging us up in the rain or the cold or the heat, no toilets and no food, until they decide to let some of us go. The rest go to jail. And around we go again.
Not tonight!
When the second warning goes out, about two hundred of us take out our phones. As always happens around this time, the drones take to the sky. The aerostatic blimps are pretty good because their batteries last for ages, but only if the winds are kind to them. The quadcopters and little planes, those ones are the business, they can do airshow maneuvers, catching anything and everything with their night-vision cameras and beaming them back to the rest of the planet—anyone who cares to watch our own little Tahrir moment here in the East Bay. It’s been over a year since any US police force used electromagnetic pulses against protesters’ electronics—the collateral damage and the civil suits buried the SFPD when they last tried it—so the pilots have grown bold.
The firmware on those aircraft is amazing. I’ve written some barely functional software to keep a quadcopter flying, but the stuff they’re using blows me away. I made a stone axe, they made a freakin’ stealth bomber. These clever puppies know how to flock, how to avoid each other, how to find the action on the ground and home in on it for close-ups. The face-recog stuff I used when I was finding Ange? You could use it to tell the drones to find anyone and just follow that person around. Let me tell you, this is a weird experience, walking around with a quadcopter watchfully hanging over your shoulder. No wonder there’s villages in Pakistan where people literally go insane from it all.
The police line bristles. They’ve finally started encrypting their communications, which is like, welcome to 1993, guys, but whatever. Nevertheless it means that we can’t eavesdrop on the messages being whispered in the ear of those stony-faced guardians of public order facing us down, and they are all careful to maintain that pro-wrestler stare-down macho face, not twitching until the moment when they move. It’s “discipline”—by which control freaks mean “pretending to be a robot”—and it’s the price that OPD pays for its superpowers.
We’ve got new superpowers tonight—if they work.
It’s been five minutes since the second warning. I’ve got a table showing the average—mean and median—time after a second warning and a kettle. Five minutes is stretching it. Any. Second. Now.
There. The police know how to do this. They’ve done it so many times before. The line moves. People too close to it get shoved, or, in the case of a cop who’s really feeling his oats, a baton-strike. The line on the opposite side is moving, too. Cops on one side. Cops on the other. Fence on the third. Building on the fourth. The kettle’s shrinking.
But there aren’t enough OPD office
rs to encircle us. They have to squeeze us all into a space small enough to encompass with their bodies, first. From the sky, it’s like two horizontal lines—the cookies in a huge Oreo—trying to squash a filling that’s much wider than the biscuits. One of the biscuits is angling in, forming a kind of funnel that will eventually bend around to make a corral. From the sky, it’s easy. They’re going this way, so we go that way.
I’ve already spotted someone who’s watching a phone and being led around by a seeing-eye person. I snap her QR code, and now my ankles are giving me a little bump of direction that’s so subtle that I barely feel it. But I’ve practiced with it and I just know that I need to go thataway, even though if you asked me to point to the spot on my ankle where the sensation is centered, I couldn’t tell you. It’s just a knowing, a compass sense, the way that a bird knows where north is, the way that you know where your hands are without having to look.
And then we dance.
When the police lines started moving, there were maybe 2,000 inside the tightening kettle. Hard to say. People in that sort of number are like gas molecules, the kind of thing you estimate, not the kind of thing you count.
But moments later, there were less than a hundred, exactly eighty-two, inside the kettle, and nearly 2,000 standing outside the police lines. Eighty-two is the kind of number you can easily count.
There’s a moment of frozen time as the cops pause to listen to the voices in their ears, swivel their heads to look around. The protesters outside the kettle realize that they’ve been squirted out of their arbitrary detention like watermelon seeds slipping out of a fist.
About 200 of us know exactly how that happened. For everyone else, it’s a small miracle on a cold night. There’s a mist out now, hanging low to the ground, and it all seems a bit…magic.
When you see a magician pull of a wonderful trick, you applaud. We did. We beat our hands together until they were sore, dancing around while the police stood in their rigid lines.