Coffee

Jeff's phone buzzed. He looked down at his Nokia 515 and smiled to see an alert on it, notifying him that he had received an email that had fallen through his sieve -- hundreds of lines of rules that his email server used to decide what to do with the thousands of adverts for new startups, products, and pills. Occasionally one that he actually needed to care about would slip through. This was one of them.

He slid open the front door of a local cafe, the first he walked past happened to be one of his favorites: free encrypted wifi but no power strips or outlets along the walls. The place almost always had plenty of seating as a result since no one could spend too long in there regardless of how delicious their espresso and baristas were. Machiatto in hand, Jeff sits down at one of the tables near the back and pulls out his laptop. This thing had been through wars with him -- literally -- a battered and bruised Lenovo Thinkpad that he had bought before his first tour of duty in the Air Force. He pulled a small aluminum flash drive out of his wallet, stuck it in to the computer and turned it on. Jeff never went anywhere without this flash drive because it was, for all intents and purposes, his computer. The drive contained a full Linux operating system as well as all of his personal files and settings. The important stuff was encrypted and masked as random garbage data. Should he lose the drive, he had everything he needed on his home server to reinitialize an exactly identical disk. To anyone who happened to walk away with his laptop without the drive, they'd find a battered Windows installation running not more than the Steam gaming platform and a wicked trove of tracking and anti-theft software. Indeed, a handful of people *had* tried to walk away with the laptop in the hopes of stealing Jeff's identity, credit cards, and passwords. Each time the opposite would happen, and the thief would find the police knocking on their door with a search warrant in hand. Indeed, the software often let him know more about these thieves than they'd ever want him to know. Their name, where they lives, who they spoke to, their Twitter passwords. He could watch them watch videos on Vimeo, sign in to their instant messaging service of choice, he knew their face and what their voice sounded like, he was always the one in control.

The email was from his friend Toni, short and simple as most of their generation kept things. 140 characters was the norm, a relic of limitations in the original GSM protocol and the text messages that were snuck in to excess data packets on the networks.

> Hey, do you have a Thrabble account? I want to add you to it!

Ah, yes. People had been claiming that the "social media bubble" would collapse for the last five years but here we were. Another day, another application which promised to make your life easier by hoovering up some bespoke portion of your life and spit out useful information about your friends' hoovered data. This one promised to make party planning a breeze -- tell us who your guests are, they will tell us the kind of food that they prefer and the best time to get together to maximize your time with friends. You'd get a grocery list back, and off you'd go! Sounds great, but it was only available for Google, unfortunately, and Jeff didn't own an Google device. Indeed, he was unique among his friends, and indeed everyone he knew, in that he didn't even have an account on Google, the all-knowing service which was required to be a member of to use your mobile. Much to his friends' confusion and dismay, Jeff stopped using what was then known as Android the day that Google required everyone to sign up for an account on their new line of devices which promised to tell you what you should eat for dinner and when to leave for work. It did this by analyzing all of the data you uploaded in to your Google account: your emails, your web searches and browsing history, your plans for the weekend, even your text messages went through this maelstrom of algorithms, all in an effort to make your life more useful and in the process better serve you with more relevant advertising. It was all a bit too dystopian for Jeff, who had watched as friend after friend had their accounts 'hacked', revealing every sordid detail of their personal life, the last time they faked calling in sick to work, the last time they asked Google for a car to drive them to their ex's place at three in the morning.

Jeff decided to take the discussion with Toni off of asynchronous communication, as he'd probably have to remind her that he didn't have a Google device and that would inevitably fall in to a discussion about how antiquated his "dumbphone" was. It was normal for him to have to remind people that, indeed, in 2019 not every one had a Google device even though there was a small but growing minority taking a "downgrade" and opting for a dumbphone paired with a laptop or tablet computer. The technology industry had been promising for nearly a decade that convergence would solve everyone's problems. The idea was that you could take your phone, plug it in to a full size monitor and keyboard and WIZZ BANG you have a fully functioning desktop that you can work productively on. That future never came to fruition, instead devices got smaller and lighter, paper thin roll-up devices with minimal external hookups for monitors, much less for keyboards. As technology improved, mobiles became more and more difficult to work productively on, all the while technologists continued targeting mobiles as the only logical platforms to run applications on. The average desk worker still used a full sized Ubuntu workstation, and treated the two devices as entirely different playgrounds, though they were both tightly integrated to their Google accounts. Jeff began to lull off in to his own world, pondering on the laughability of all of this before snapping back to the present and opening a secure connection to his server back home. The server ran his chat programs, store his emails and photos, and was the hub of his information, the reason he didn't need Google. He pulled up the contact details for Toni and opened a message window to her:

Jeff> Hey, you know I don't have a Google device any more :)
Toni> Oh! I forgot that you are all digital-nomad these days. Hey give me a minute, I don't have a client for this chat service on my mobile and am about to walk out the door.
Jeff> Sure.
Toni> Okay, sorry about that. So how am I going to be able to know when you can come to my barbeque?! Everyone is going to be there!
Jeff> Well, you could ask me! :-P
Jeff> What days were you considering?
Toni> Oh... I don't know. I am leaning towards Sunday, Monday is a holiday so we could all stay late and have a bonfire in my backyard through the night.
Jeff> Sounds great, I'm free all day. :) I'll make cookies like I usually do.
Toni> Okay, I will figure out where to write that down, I guess :P
Jeff> Feel free to sign up for a second Thrabble account just for me, just don't use my mail address please!
Toni> Noted. :P Looking forward to seeing you again, it's been too long!

Jeff smiled. Toni was a good friend, they had even dated for a few weeks back in College though obviously it didn't work out. They realized all too quickly that they didn't actually have much in common relationship-wise and left it on good terms. He opened up his file server and navigated to the directory containing a few thousand photos that he and his friends had snapped in those four years. Most people didn't have an archive like this, they'd all lost their photos when Facebook went out of business in 2016. It was sad, really, entire lives worth of information were lost and the class action lawsuit is still ongoing with the company that purchased Facebook's IP. Jeff was a digital packrat in some respects and had a full archive of these photos snarfed down from Facebook for the inevitable future. He sifted through a handful of the photos before making a note in his todo list to rank the rest of them during his downtime and lay them out in to a Story that he could give to everyone at the party.

Realizing that he had a few hours of downtime until his afternoon meeting, Jeff asked for another machiatto and sat back in his chair, reading posts from his various social media feeds. They were aggregated, ranked and stored on his server, and then run through a series of open source processing programs which performed Natural Language Processing on them and grouped them in to topics and conversations that he could peruse at his leisure, rather than a handful of ungrouped and unsorted streams of information that most people sifted through when using their mobiles. It was going to be a nice afternoon.