Joseph sighed as he felt his phone vibrate, just as he was setting it down on the restaurant table. With an easy motion he flipped it around, and saw Vanessa had posted a picture, Clicking the notification he glanced at the picture, and liked it. \u201cYou know there’s a new app for that,\u201d Tommy said nonchalantly. \u201cHow long do you think my nachos will take?\u201d
\n\u201cI don’t know, ten minutes. What, a new photo app?\u201d he replied, wondering if there was room on his phone.
\n\u201cNo, I found an app that likes pictures, and replies to notifications and shit,\u201d Tommy explained. \u201cYou really think ten minutes, it’s an appetizer the whole point is they come out fast.\u201d
\n\u201cSo what, it just does all your social media automatically?\u201d
\n\u201cBasically.\u201d
\n\u201cBut wouldn’t that mean the app has full permissions to read every message you get.\u201d
\n\u201cI think you can change what it replies to, like just liking pictures, or even replying to messages.\u201d
\n\u201cI would just let some program talk for me, how does it even do that?\u201d
\n\u201cSome machine learning AI server.\u201d
\n\u201cGreat so it’s beaming all of my private information to their own server, sounds real above board,\u201d Joseph objected.
\n\u201cWhat do you think your phone does anyway, you’re an idiot if you think every message you send doesn’t end up in at least two government servers, and twice as many corporate.\u201d
\n\u201cSo you have it?\u201d Joseph asked, trying to cut Tommy’s rant off at the pass.
\n\u201cYeah, I had to download the .apk, it’s not on any storefront.\u201d
\n\u201cNo red flags there,\u201d Joseph muttered. \u201cTurn on message replying, lets see how smart it is.\u201d
\n\u201cSounds fun,\u201d Tommy pulled his phone out of his pocket, and fiddled with it for a moment. \u201cAlright try it.\u201d
\n‘What’s up man’ he texted. They waited eagerly, staring at the phone on the table. \u201cThis is dumb, why is it taking to long?\u201d he asked.
\n\u201cI think it takes a random amount of time to respond, so it doesn’t look like you’re to eager.\u201d Tommy answered.
\nThey were distracted when the nachos arrived, and halfway through his phone buzzed. \u201cNot much, how bout you.\u201d Joseph read aloud. \u201cThinking about movies, whats your favourite?\u201d he narrated, sending the message. \u201cSee how it handles that,\u201d he said, confident he could outsmart the app.
\nThey were surprised when it replied almost immediately. \u201cGuess we’re in conversation mode now,\u201d Tommy commented, looking at his phone on the table.
\n\u201cCon-air, truly above board in every aspect.\u201d Joseph read, knowing that was Tommy’s favourite. \u201cSpooky.\u201d
\n\u201cThat sounds familiar,\u201d Tommy mulled it over a bite of nachos. \u201cI think I tweeted something like that a while back.\u201d He picked up his phone, and scrolled through it. \u201cYeah back in June, the exact sentence.\u201d
\n\u201cOkay then, let’s see it handle this.\u201d Joseph sent a message and waited. Tommy’s phone buzzed twice.
\n\u201cIt says important message, please handle personally. Very funny,\u201d he said with mock humour reading the message. \u201cI too am madly in love with you. Still you have to admit it’s pretty cool.\u201d
\n\u201cI guess, but what’s even the point of having Instagram if I let a bot look at all the pictures.\u201d
\n\u201cSo you don’t have to waste time with the upkeep of a dozen friends all wanting a tiny bit of your attention.\u201d
\n\u201cSo this morning when you commented wow on my breakfast.\u201d
\n\u201cThat was the bot, at most I would’ve liked it, but you felt good from it,\u201d
\nTheir food arrived, and conversation ceased as they ate. When they were finished Joseph glanced at his phone which had three notifications. \u201cOkay, do you have a link to app,\u201d Joseph surrendered.
\n\u201cI can send it to your cloud, then just install it from there,\u201d Thomas told him. Joseph watched the file arrive, Sysyphys.apk. \u201cSysyphys, isn’t that an STD?\u201d Joseph asked.
\n\u201cI think it’s supposed to Sisyphus, but spelled with y’s to be techy.\u201d
\n\u201cThat’s the, uh,\u201d Joseph paused as he tried to recall the definition. \u201cGreek guy, pushed the boulder.\u201d
\n\u201cIt’s a fable to illustrate how pointless life’s struggles are, or the cruelty of gods, or something along those lines. He would push the boulder but every time the mountain got bigger or the boulder rolled back down, point is he was stuck doing a meaningless task for eternity, Ala push notifications.\u201d
\nJoseph installed it and set the bot to liking posts on all the photo apps. It informed him that it would continue his activity following his previous actions. The next day when he woke up, after ten minutes scrolling through twitter he changed it to include twitter. That was when Sysyphys informed him that it could author tweets, then have him sign off on them. That seemed convenient, so he allowed it, but by the end of the day after checking a half dozen replies, he decided that the program wrote so innocuously that it could just do it automatically. Whenever some miscelanous app bothered him, he would just put it on Sysyphys’s load. It was only after his phone buzzed with Sysyphys telling him there was an important message, that he realized he had barely lifted his phone all week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joseph sighed as he felt his phone vibrate, just as he was setting it down on the restaurant table. With an easy motion he flipped it around, and saw Vanessa had posted a picture, Clicking the notification he glanced at the picture, and liked it. \u201cYou know there’s a new app for that,\u201d Tommy said … [DO NOT CLICK]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-anonymous","4":"post-556","6":"format-standard","7":"category-slush"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lampbylit.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}