This piece was first published on Love in the Time of Covid Chronicle
This Machine Kills Fascists
“This machine kills fascists” says the sticker on a teenager’s laptop. He’s using the machine to Tweet anti-Semitic memes. For the lols.
The young woman busking in the street has “This machine kills fascists” painted on her guitar. Her usual pitch has become a shrine – police killed an unarmed black kid nearby. The spot where she’s playing today isn’t as lucrative.
An embroidered patch stating “This machine kills fascists” sits half-finished on Patigül Kahn’s sewing machine. Patigül can’t read the words – forced re-education taught her Chinese, not English.
A trendy stationery chain sells pens with “This machine kills fascists” stencilled on them for $7.99. The majority shareholder in the retail conglomerate which owns the chain funds anti-union legislation in several countries.
The stock on Rick Jefferson’s AR-15 reads “This machine kills liberals”. He visits the firing range every week. When the liberals come to take his guns, he’ll be ready.
Long-time activist Euan Jones wrote “This machine kills fascists” on his camera himself. He records mass protests in London throughout 2028. Euan doesn’t know that police hacked the camera’s data connection, streaming footage to government servers along with Euan’s cloud accounts. He hasn’t been arrested yet; his camera captures the clearest images of protest leaders.
A household android comes pre-decorated with a grungy “This machine kills fascists” motif. It doesn’t know what fascism is, but if anyone bothered to explain, the definition would become a sigmoid function filtering through the robot’s CNN layers to create a new output: activationHuman[combinationFascist].
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash