The Fountaincleaners

Los Angeles on the brink of the 2028 Summer Olympics – a series of devastating livestock viruses has wiped out meat and poultry production across the country, leaving genetically-modified cockroaches the most viable alternative. At the same time, a cockroach infestation of biblical proportions grips the city, conveniently justifying eminent domain abuses which reveal stark intimacies between city councilmembers and real estate developers. A charismatic young CEO is seemingly connected to the mysterious disappearances of several workers at his company’s warehouse in Vernon. The Olympics budget balloons a third time. The police get new toys. In Tycoon, two petty thieves with grand aspirations drift across this troubled landscape, where strange futures unfold in familiar haunts. 

Terms like obfuscation, obscuration, concealment carry additive connotations while invisibility evokes subtraction; however, one usually encounters them in combination within a consequential logic – the former produces the conditions for the latter to occur. The construction of a wall ostensibly causes the thing behind it to disappear, but the veracity of this narrative is contingent on several factors: that there is a dominant seeing-subject whose line of sight actively determines or denies the existence of the subject which is to-be-seen, that the subject-to-be-seen cannot prove or disprove its own existence on these terms because it lacks the language or authority to do so, that there is an irreversible distinction between looking and looking in return, that the wall and the fact of its construction must be negated, reconstituted as something that always was, something canceled-out – a blank. 

By morning, the fountain is miraculously cleared of its coins and is now ready to receive more. The fountain is an enchanted and enchanting little site, a gathering place for lovers and dreamers, even ones who inadvertently find themselves at the mall. It is almost obscene to picture its graceful jets and arcs reduced to a weak dribble, then nothing, as the contents of its bowels are scraped by the shovelful into faded two-gallon pails and hauled to the bank. Maintaining the magic of the fountain’s implied perpetuity requires a certain estrangement or alienation masquerading as imagination.

These are comforting abstractions: The fountain cleans itself. The subject-to-be-seen has ceased to exist and something (or nothing) else may be envisioned in its place. The exploited labor of those residing in the external regimes which offer the imperial core its lifeblood is referred to as “automation” or “the future”, as in some kind of grand technological achievement, as in something different than what is already known and harshly enforced, or perhaps even something magical. The idea of peace and unity between nations is the glittering conceit of international sporting events, voluminous enough to tuck large-scale financial corruption and militarized policing under its skirt. 

EVEN THE NAME OF GYGES SHOWS THAT HE IS BOUND TO THE EARTH: IT IS BUILT AROUND THE WORD GÈ, WHICH MEANS ‘EARTH’.

In 2015, MIT researchers created a device that can discern where you are and who you are, detecting gestures and body movements as subtle as the rise and fall of a person’s chest, from the other side of a house, through a wall, even though subjects were invisible to the naked eye, by using the human body’s reflections of wireless transmissions.

Metamaterials of plastic and metal and engineered in lattice-like patterns up to a billionths of a meter in scale. The result is a surface or material that can manipulate an object’s magnetic or electrical field in ways traditional building materials cannot. This allows them to alter how energy waves across the electromagnetic spectrum (visual light, radar, radio, acoustic waves, etc.) interact with them with some pretty stunning implications.

“The cloak would act like you've opened up a hole in space,” Duke University's David Smith, one of Pendry's co-authors, explained in a news release. “All light or other electromagnetic waves are swept around the area, guided by the metamaterial to emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space.”

…Suddenly he became invisible, and the others began to speak of him as though he were gone. Amazed, he turned the setting away from him again and reappeared. After further experiments had convinced him that the ring indeed had the power to make him visible and invisible at will, he contrived to become a messenger to the king. He seduced the queen, with her help murdered the king, and usurped the throne of Lydia.

When compared with other biometrics such as the face, fingerprint, and iris, gait is an alternative biometric which can be recognised from a far distance without any interaction and cooperation from a person. 

There'd be plenty of applications in the civilian world as well, even for rudimentary cloaking devices. For example, you could create receptacles to shield sensitive medical devices from disruption by MRI scanners, or build cloaks to route cellphone signals around obstacles. "You may wish to put a cloak over the refinery that is blocking your view of the bay,” Duke University's David Schurig, another of Pendry's co-authors, was quoted as saying.

EXT. INDUSTRIAL BACKSTREET (COMMERCE, CA) - NIGHT

STATIC WIDE, the entire scene before us - the truck container empty inside save for some stray, cut bags on the ground spilling their innards. The bolt-cutters, two utility knives, and snapped counterfeit RFID seal gleam on the ground. The van with its back doors open, ready to receive. Lito and Jay are nowhere to be seen, fantastically cut from the scene. Silence except for a faraway cicada-like alarm. 

“OUT OF SIGHT IS ALSO OUT OF MIND,” 

The earliest coins recorded were made during the reign of King Gyges of Lydia, Turkey, c. 630 BC and consisted of electrum, a naturally occurring amalgam of gold and silver.

LITO (V.O.):

When I was a kid I used to take coins out of this fountain near my school. I did it in the middle of the day ‘cause I didn’t give a fuck who saw me. People used to tell me I was stealing and I couldn’t understand it. How could I be stealing if I’m just taking what they threw away? This one lady said I was stealing people’s wishes. I thought that was so fucking stupid. The coin itself is not the wish. It doesn’t even represent the wish. The wish only exists when you make it and then it never exists again. And people like to call it an offering but it’s really an investment. I was the only one doing real magic because I turned it back into a coin when I put it in the vending machine.

The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance. 

Fuller said one of the most lucrative fountains he ever saw was the stream in front of Thunder Mountain at Disneyland, where he worked 20 years ago. Tourists waiting there, stuck, bored and flush with vacation cash, would throw hundreds of dollars into the stream each day, Fuller said, which Disney workers removed at night “with five-gallon buckets and manure shovels,” and then donated to charity.

IT SEEMED LIKE MAGIC,

There’s a pattern of AI “solutions” that actually end up being contractors working in countries with lower labor costs — and often, the AI companies work hard to conceal this fact. An online shopping app called Nate, popular with influencers and content creators, said it used AI to auto-fill customers’ checkout details. But it was revealed that the company had hired workers in the Philippines to manually complete orders in a majority of cases. 

[The hollow belly of the Mechanical Turk rattles with ghost-workers from Kenya, Venezuela, and the Philippines in a colorful imitation of realtime.]

While the research by Ms Yiu and her team shows that gait recognition does have the potential to replace facial recognition in certain conditions, there are limitations. An individual may change their gait when walking in a crowded space, for example. Even the health of the individual, their clothing, and camera viewing angles can change or obscure the walking pattern of a person and so affect recognition accuracy. There is also ‘gait spoofing’ where an individual may intentionally alter their gait.

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IT’S HARD WORK TO CHEAT WORK

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