Collapse | Governance | Logo | Outrage
In 2018 Santa Ana implemented the MemoryBoard project. It was a permanent interactive art installation designed to preserve the memories of places and the time one spent in them. 3 MemoryBoards were installed in the Downtown area at the major gathering sites. People contributed photos and video to the MemoryBoard System through the large scale touch screen interface. Aside from the large touchscreen, the fanciest piece of tech built into it (at the time) was face recognition. So as a person approached it the system would detect the face, retrieve and display all the photos linked to it. The project was designed to exist for generations. One of it’s goals was to preserve memories of Santa Ana’s places and people so it could act as a digital interactive time capsule for future residents.
The designers made a significant effort make the system resilient so that it could last a long time: Heat and water resistant glass and plastic enclosures for the touch screens. Solar panels captured enough energy to completely power the different parts of the system. Solid state memory so there were no moving parts. And ethernet cables run underground between the 3 sites and control room creating a closed network.
15 years later the Great Internet Slowdown happened. The proliferation of IOT devices had reached a saturation point that brought the internet to it’s knees. Everything was connected to the internet. Your shoes, the fillings in your teeth, yours cats. Everything depended on fast internet connections, power companies, cell carriers, cars and pretty much everything broke. Except Santa Ana’s MemoryBoards.
Generations later.
Pollution had always been a big problem but the effects during years of the Great Slowdown were devastating. We always knew there was a link between pollution in the air and memory impairment, but when people stopped trying to educate and better themselves, this sent their mental capacities on a dangerous downward spiral. People stopped going to school, stopped learning. People were forgetting who they were, forgetting their histories, names and what they looked like.
Santa Ana residents were struggling with everyone else, but in some ways a little less because of the MemoryBoards.
It became a daily ritual to make the trek from all parts of the city to the 3 MemoryBoards. It became the only way to remember yourself, your name and your past.
Visitors arrive.
Outsiders began arriving in the city hearing of the mythical MemoryBoards that could show you who you are. When asked for their names they couldn’t tell you, they just held out a piece of paper a small distinctive drawing. To 21st century eyes these were symbols of what they called ‘corporations’ or Logos. These people were NBC, Pepsi, McDonalds, CNN, Shell and so on. Their identities had been reduced to corporate logos. They didn’t even have the imagination to design their own.
At first the residents were fine with the newcomers moving into the city and using the MemoryBoards, but then the word got out to distant places and the crowds became unsustainable. The lines to use the MemoryBoards began to stretch past a day and this was unacceptable. “They are risking our memories, we must protect them“. The city government in partnership with it’s police began a policy of testing the lengths of memories that came out of the MemoryBoards. Anyone with less than a year’s length had to leave the city. Outrage spread amongst the outsiders, a storm was brewing outside the city.
And so began the ‘War to Remember’.