Real World Location: 33rd St by Hopkins, Baltimore, MD - a few days ago (Sometime late 2007)
Setting: Afternoon, sunny Autumn day. Students are walking to and fro, nerdily conducting their business, unaware of what the future holds.

Imagine: I roll up to the intersection on my black SPECIALIZED single-speed bike. Next to me, nervously hovering is a large black man on a police Segway, with giant ATV tires, and a large black case on the front. The man is wearing a helmet and is gyroscopically pivoting back and forth, seemingly uncertain as to what he should be doing.

“Should I cross the street?” The man wonders to himself?

“Do I look badass enough? I feel like an idiot… But I have a gun, so people have to respect me.”

The man’s body language gives away his thoughts. I want to turn and ask him if those things are a “nice ride” but his awkwardness is contagious and I decide to keep to myself and allow the moment to linger in the air as I wait for the light to turn.

While I’m waiting, I allow my future-simulators to kick into high-gear. The man certainly looks imposing. He’s a big guy already, but jacked up on that Segway, he’s a lot bigger. Wearing a helmet makes him look like a futuristic knight or something. But more properly, a robot. I think through the implications of the technology he’s paid by companies to acclimate us to.

In 3-5 years, his Segway will be protected by a riot gear police shield. Eventually, they will totally enclose the thing so that it just looks like a giant rolling vibrator with guns and tasers and shit sticking out of it. Like the Popemobile, it will have a little doorway the man can climb out to go to the bathroom, stuff himself with sweets, and to “arrest perps”.

The future is going to be mega-awesome.

Eventually, somebody will realize that it’s safer for the cops if they only control those things remotely. But they realize that if people know there is no actual human inside of them, they don’t take them as seriously and have no moral qualms about damaging or destroying them. So they don’t tell anybody. And they have certain unmarked gun vibrators patrolling our streets, which do actually have real people inside of them.

The next step after that, of course, is to have autonomous rolling gun vibrators because it will be cheaper and simpler than having cop-technician-pilots controlling that shit remotely.

Consider: Let’s say you’re on the receiving end of “justice” from one of these terror-drones, we’ll call them. That’s a nicer name than “gun-vibrators” I think. How are you supposed to respond to a machine that is trying to arrest or incapacitate you? It’s not a human, so you cannot appeal to its moral character. Does this render non-violent resistance impossible in an age of computerized justice? Hard to say, but I find the implications of all of this quite frightening.

[Graphic courtesy of]