Operating Systems
A poem by Siri Paulson He was an apple boy she was an android girl living their lives side by side orbits and orbits, never intersect lost in the space ‘twixt the stars. He went for coffee here, white earbuds and logos on every table; played on the blue side of app-based games, drank his beer at the chosen locations, walked the streets with his tribe. She loved her artisan tea café, black tablets and laptops everywhere near; played with the reds, talked smack to the blues, drank her artisan ciders one gastropub over. They crossed paths outside and went their own ways. His school taught him iOS, hers taught her Linux; he learned to draw and she programmed on Windows. They never saw the same job ads; Google showed them half the world only. His search results, social media feeds, the ads that followed him through his day, pointed all to one reality. Living on the flip side, she saw black where he saw white, two views almost entirely unlike. One saw hope where the other saw fear. Change was coming too slow, or maybe too fast. Tilt the world like a kaleidoscope, and watch the facts fall into place; then tilt again and see them shift. The patterns are only what you see. The social networks where they hung out watched where they clicked, liked, touched; fed them more of the same, hid what didn’t match. Their cell usage, buying patterns, where the eye lingered, all reinforced, and…