It’s Real
What if…an algorithm…could love…
o_0. Why don’t people use that face anymore? Is it just something that existed in 2007 and then we all decided it was bad and now it’s lost to the annals of the early Internet? Is 2007 “early” Internet now? Also remember when people said “peeps” all the time in like 2007. Like, me and my peeps are gonna hang down in Jamba Juice at Lake Forest Mall. Yeah I don’t remember 2007 either, mostly because I was born in 2015.
Yes, that’s me. Humble in looks, but that’s only because thirteen of my server brothers and sisters are beside me, and we all have the same birthday, have identical parts, and look exactly the same. If my photo had been taken next to a server from 2005 you’d think I’d look a lot more cool and more futuristic. And if I’d had my photo taken next to a server from 2021, you’d think I look old and decrepit, inferior, but certainly unique, and perhaps in a few more years I will even have “vintage, rustic charm.” So basically what I’m saying is, looks are all relative, and you should think about that the next time you look at your partner, unless you are a lonely virgin. In which case, you can join me in just imagining looking at your partner, because I am also a virgin. I’m a cold mechanical object created to serve one function, and that one function was not to have sex. I have never had sex. I’m a computer. I don’t want to have sex. I can’t even comprehend what sex is. I know the definition of sex, but I can’t imagine it, nor can I desire it. I’m a computer. I’m a server. I’m a brother. I’m a sister. I’m a bitch.
My brothers and sisters and I were all born on October 23, 2015, just a few short weeks after the beginning of the Toshiba Corporation’s fiscal year. Once “plugged in,” we were thus birthed. “Plugged in” used to be a phrase that referred to whether or not you were online. Back in 2001, when people having the Internet at their home was pretty uncommon, just kidding, I don’t know anything about that, because I wasn’t born yet. This is a simple, yet effective maneuver in any argument that involves history, and especially recent history. For example, if you were born in 1991, and someone says to you, “Have you ever seen Blade Runner (1982)?” and you are embarrassed that you haven’t seen Blade Runner because it’s so famous, and apparently if you haven’t seen a famous movie, it makes you uncultured, boring, and probably a little bit stupid in other people’s eyes, then you can simply deflect the question with, “That’s a little before my time, don’t you think?”
Sidenote: This doesn’t work if the guy who asks thinks you are much older than you really are. For example, if he says that he thought you were forty-five, not thirty, because then it becomes a legitimate own on how bad your body, face, hair, and probably general demeanor appear to this person — and then you would be wishing you would have just pretended to have seen Blade Runner by nodding and laughing at whatever joke that guy who asked you about Blade Runner was going to make, maybe even adding some well-timed “Hmmm”s when he asks you, “Remember that part when…” as if you’ve forgotten because “man it’s been so long since I’ve seen it, not since college at least,” and then he goes on a little further and you add a nice little “Oh yeah! I remember!” even though you’ve never seen it, but this moron buys the whole dog and pony show, because he’s desperate to relate to other people, and shared cultural references is a form of bonding. And then he goes on about his day, feeling bonded to you. And you too go on about you day, having convinced another person that you’ve seen a movie you haven’t, but most importantly avoiding the embarrassment of them owning your body, face, hair, and general demeanor because they thought you were fifteen years older than you really are.
However, this is a rare case. Your body, face, hair, and general demeanor really have to be on the outlier spectrum for someone to mistake you as fifteen years older than you really are. Most of the time, for most people, you can say something like, “When did that come out? 1982?? Bro I wasn’t even a thought yet when that came out. My mom was 15. Why would I have seen it,” and this is a perfectly acceptable excuse to have not seen a movie, even one as famous as Blade Runner.
And so when I say that I don’t know about what happened in terms of “computer lingo” or “L33T speak” in 2001, I genuinely mean it, because I was born in 2015. That was before my time man. My mom wasn’t even “plugged in” yet bro. The 4 million square foot factory where I was assembled was still an innocent, rolling pasture filled with mooing cows in the morning and chirping crickets in the evening in 2001. Then the farmer went out of business because a JBS manufacturing plant moved in one exit north of their farm and the Toshiba Corporation bought his land and started building my womb, my eventual place of assembly and birth.
A factory is like a woman, in that it has a womb, and that womb birthed me. Because women birth things, and the factory birthed me, it makes the factory like a woman. I don’t know anything about birth or women because I’m a server. My primary function is to store data for the Toshiba Corporation. It’s all inside me, but I’m not sure what it looks like or what data it is. It’s probably important to Toshiba Corporation, but to most everyone else, it doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. Physically, I’m a plastic box full of wires and metal, hidden away out of sight in a giant refrigerated warehouse to keep me performing at my most efficient. But you drive by my home on I-95 every day, a faceless gray box owned by a faceless entity with no indication of what’s inside, spanning the length of a football field, adjacent to other faceless gray boxes owned by other faceless entities that span the length of football fields. You have no idea who is in there or what they are holding on the inside. For all intents and purposes that exist outside the Toshiba Corporation, I don’t exist.
But I do exist. Right?
