The Moonshine Memoranda: APPLE - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured in the 34^th revised edition of Malleus Maleficus, The Moonshine Memorandum. If you wish to report libel or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .

Quite what happens for brains to go dead, and for all questioning to cease, is not clear. What is clear is that you have no sense of your own transition.

To say nothing of your children who have no diagnosable symptoms at all, just a fatal dependency. Because the real thing on sale here is addiction, an entirely fabricated psychological need powered by self-indulgence, compulsion, and smartphones. Indeed, the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers has had a compulsive quality to it. As though all living breathing beings were slowly being re-possessed, escape is no longer an option.

We’ve got to the point where we anthropomorphise every gizmo we own. And with addiction comes habituation. Each new product is an intensely emotionalised technological totem, some strange new kind of personal relationship. Apple’s infernal iWatch monitors the wearer’s activity 24 hours a day, including sleep patterns, steps taken, time spent sitting or lying down, calories burnt, even your heartbeat, until at some point - trust me on this - The System is going to kill off the individual units in order to substitute them with cardiac modules, beta-adrenoceptors that can no longer pace themselves outside the iCloud. In its

“reality distortion field” man will cease to be a man. He may pretend to function as a person, but as a unit, as an aggregate of all his digital activities, he is but a fragment of the True Cloud, a bionic link to the anti-life dystopia, or World without Mind, that the internet has become, essentially dead, but serving as a stand-in for the living.

You may have your own views on this, but I can see no escape from it even for myself. All I can see is that there is nothing you won’t do. You will surrender your individuality, your independent ego, your self-awareness and the pronoun ‘I’. Trust me, you will. You will suck every cock on the

way just to get along. There’s no nice way of putting this: but you’re going down. You will not find a life that is more demeaning and coercive. A life of the mirthless instagrammification of every conceivable social occasion, from the birth of your baby to the brink of your death - the closest that the shift of human interaction will ever get to zero. Compulsion is the norm. Habituation turns to obsession. Enjoyment to endurance. You want the harder stuff.

And then something extraordinary and unimaginable happens. You begin to mutate. You begin to feel you’ve become the person you’ve always faked. While your mobile more and more absorbs the substance of your brain, your sense of self no longer exists. It has become a form of presentation. Always looking for affirmation, you spend your life pretending to be someone else. Your problem isn’t apps – but fear of being found out. Feeling inadequate, you’ve become addicted to other people’s lives. You're haunted, using doublespeak, and are ultimately screwed by your own mobile phone. Wearable gizmos give you the power to change the way you feel, whenever you are so inclined. They occupy the same space in your brain as sexual passion

and jealousy. Your wristwear is a computer hooked up to the iCloud, the equivalent of an ‘electronic tag,’tracking your emotions and keeping a record of your 'mindful' exercises. Inside the cloud are your biometrics. You’ll use them to select the mood you want to be in, like a violin virtuoso with perfect pitch, determining disposition, temperament, motivation and need. You have become a multi-phenomenon, a side effect of the existence of Apple itself - a company that believes deeply in "advancing humanity"[1] in the post-human dystopia it is so impatiently constructing. It's not that I don’t sympathise, but escaping the viral apocalypse is no longer an option. Admittedly, and as far as it is possible to choose rationally in a world of virtual illusions, ‘Mindfulness & Meditation’ have become a fashionable escape mechanism against digital overload, to mention only one of the latest treatments for opioid addiction: more opioids![2]Sensors that monitor your heart, will take a cut of each beat. You have nothing to live for but your neuro-signalled algorithms, brainwave technology, and eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. At night you lie sleepless, wide-eyed with apprehension and long to ‘be yourself’.

And yet, Tim Cook, that is our future in all but name. Tell that to the Inland Revenue!