zach from LA
zach from LA
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This is a fictional story. The perspectives reflected herein are not my own; they belong to fictional characters and their fictional world.
Although it might be my cat's perspective, I suppose we will never know.
/start_
John had never planned on staying in Texas, let alone moving back to his mother's condominium after leaving for college. The cracking stucco facade of the building (which hadn't been re-painted since the early 2010s and had taken on the taupe color of the hazy summer sky) gave him the feeling that everything that came forth from the structure would bear the same cracks in their very being. And with hundreds of the same units, all exhibiting the same signs of weary and sun-baked poverty, he felt the condo complex was a prison ever since he spent his childhood summer mornings cracking eggs on the sidewalk in the 8 am sun to estimate how hot it would be that day without looking at a weather app.
Not that his childhood was that long ago. At 20 years old, on his unceremonious return, he had barely escaped the stucco-condo-familial prison for two years before being yanked back by his current financial circumstances and unable to pay his tuition. Like every human ever imprisoned and had their human rights withheld, John longed for freedom. He had thought education had been a means of escape, but all it had done was return him to where he started: nearly broke and living in his 10x10 childhood bedroom that might as well have been a cell. No amount of gig work at the meatless meat factory near campus or the custom Yves Saint Laurent Croc-mold foundry was going to cover the costs of his tuition that had grown at 20x the pace of inflation in just the two years he was at school. He needed work.
Living back in Texas and becoming a Dobber wasn't something he could have even fathomed he could bring himself to do, even a few months before his return. He was morally, spiritually, and physically repulsed by the tasks required to do the job. But he needed the money. He had to get out. Dobbing was a diamond-tipped chisel that he could use to slowly chip away at the confines of his imprisonment, name by name, and bounty by bounty.
Each week, he steadily increased the balance in his bounty account with the Personhood Authority of Texas, only withdrawing the precise amounts required to do his work and always putting back more than he took out. He was managing. It was just a job, even if it was something he hated himself for doing.
Access to the location data from the people he tracked was as cheap as it was quickly and readily accessible. The myriad of privacy laws passed globally, year after year, had done nothing to prevent that horse from leaving the proverbial barn long ago, well before John was born. For every innovation or law passed to keep personal data safe and out of the hands of malicious actors, exponential numbers of new techniques for amassing the personally identifiable information of others appeared, like the weeds growing in between the pieces of sidewalk outside his stucco-caked confines. The garden had overgrown. It couldn't be tended. No amount of legal or technological pesticide would tame the hydra-headed vines sprouting in, and out of every single action the uninformed and unprotected took in their lives. Hell, even the informed and "protected" were unprotected from skimming, scraping, and harvesting by him or millions of other rational capitalists for any purpose whatsoever.
He had managed to get a reasonably priced loc_ident code bloc package subscription on a private server from a former classmate who had sympathized with his plight. The classmate had quietly confided in him over drinks one night that they had been a Dobber to afford autonomous hospice care for their parents and understood what John was going through. The code bloc package was a little outdated, but he knew his way around the free, open-source repositories enough to augment the pack to do what he needed whenever he hit a snag. He couldn't write code per se but placing code blocs where they needed to go, to do what they needed to do, was effectively legos. Moving around artificially manufactured, pre-coded blocs for interfacing, analysis, and execution was rote. He had learned to do that at three years old in pre-school, just like everyone else.
His monthly Life Amortization Stipend from the Federal government was enough to cover the monthly subscription costs of his loc_ident tradecraft. Even though it was technically illegal at the Federal level to use his LAS for Dobbing, Texas could give a fuck. He didn't even use an encrypted wallet to pay for it, just a wallet that listed his mother's condo address in Texas. He also didn't mask his identity. He couldn't if he wanted to - Texas required his personal information and wallet address for him to collect his bounties. They weren't going to come after him anyhow. He was effectively a crowd-sourced, sanctioned agent of essential State functions.
Ironically, given the information he could himself gain access to on other people, the Personhood Authority of Texas database of self-identified Dobbers was the most secure data in the State. Protected in PAT air-gapped cold storage servers and accessed only through a manual, on-site, biometric interface by the highest clearance level PAT Agents, who had been vetted by the lifetime appointees of the State Evangelical Ethics Division. A notoriously rigorous process passed only by true believers and tenured members of PAT staff. No Dobber had ever run afoul of the PAT, and the Feds had long ago given up trying to stop their trade from operating.
The first "Dobbers" (so named after the eponymous 2022 Supreme Court case) had been arrested and prosecuted by the Department of Justice for interfering with interstate commerce. The general public was furious. Rallies were held. Change.xyz petitions were signed. But, the Supreme Court preemptively issued a writ of cert and heard the case within weeks before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals could even sniff it. The Supremes quickly and summarily dismissed the charges from the DOJ as Unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment and relegated abortion-bounty collector rights to the States. Intimate collectives of Dobbers sprung up overnight. And even though it was a cottage industry due to the stigma attached to digitally hunting people for money, it was still an industry. He could still make more money doing this than any other tedious infowork.
He didn't like it, but it was a way out.
He took strict mental precautions to shield himself from any potential anxieties about his work. He only worked for a total of 4 hours a day, which was honestly all it took to get it done. He took 15-minute breaks every 45 minutes. He stretched, did sit-ups, and practiced closed eye refocusing techniques to reduce eyestrain from working in AR glasses, as he sometimes did to manipulate data in three dimensions when it was too dense.
But he couldn't bring himself to look at the names except when he absolutely had to.
He looked at the beginning of his process to identify them and then again at the end when he submitted them for collection. After he had vomited for hours when he acquired his first bounty payment, he grabbed an automation bloc that muted and swapped out the names of his prospective bounties with a random emoji. The emotes had their own lawfully prescribed and protected meanings under the 28th Amendment, but they were wholly divorced from the names he was working with. It helped. An eggplant or a ghost, or a smiling Muskbot didn't instill him with dread or make his palms sweat the way the names did. However, he had needed to update the automation after his fourth bounty target when it randomly assigned the :girl: emoji to the bounty's name. It could have been worse.
The work itself was pretty simple.
First, he went to work on all of the streaming apps. Their APIs required location data for logins to prevent subscription sharing, so this was always his primary move. Even with biometric SSO being used for 100% of logins at this point, that particularly anonymized SSO data was still connected to a user's account. That account still had to be related to a location so that the account couldn't be used in multiple geographic locations simultaneously. The downstream benefit to him was that he always had a place to start. The biometric data was beside the point. He couldn't actually get into anyone's account, no one could without personal biometrics, but he didn't need to. He just needed the localized account data, which most people forgot to turn off as publicly available and was turned on by default.
From there, it got a little more complicated, but only a little. Since most biometric logins used for SSO were used for every service a person used, he just had to associate the location data from AppleNetflixTV, DisneyHulu+, or HBODazonPrime with the locations of geotags in posts, photos, and videos on social media apps and then filter that by gender classification (female, female-identifying, non-binary, person-with-a-uterus, other, or other-with-a-uterus) and from there, any of those who were under or slightly over the average menopausal age. It was even easier if a person shared their content habits cross-platform. And they often did. Thankfully it was still illegal to store any information anywhere on users under 18. He didn't know if he could stomach that.
Next, he checked which data he could match with any health and ovulation tracking apps, which by State law require a publicly searchable know-your-customer database. Only with a KYC database would the app subscription be fully covered by in-state network insurance providers. And by putting your information into the KYC system, users receive a substantial annual premium reduction. Since no one could afford the premiums these days, around 80% of users opted into the database, lest they be locked out of receiving any healthcare whatsoever.
What followed made him the most uncomfortable because it required him to interface with another person. Seeing other people always makes things more real. Hardcore Dobbers who could hack non-public databases and not just use loc_ident packages, run filters, and buy advertising lists, could often do everything without ever connecting with another human. They could stay clean. Or at least cleaner than John felt when he compiled his weekly base list and went to meet with Hillary.
John met Hillary through his former classmate who had helped him get into the private server where he subscribed to his loc_ident package. Hillary was one of only a handful of anon server moderators in a community of less than a few hundred. Still, her role was more significant to the people she trusted.
Hillary was a member of the State Board of Obstetricians and had been for over a decade. She had a small practice and was seen by her patients as kind, empathetic, and deeply religious. She was someone they trusted implicitly to do the right thing for them, their family, and God. But it wasn't Hillary's patients that John needed to meet her about. They weren’t the ones he could profit from. They would have their children come Hell or high water. It felt like Hell was more likely to come first.
Hillary had quietly amassed a trusted coterie of nurses and OBGYNs sympathetic to her cause, politics, and religious ideology through her esteemed position. How she did this so successfully and discretely, John had no idea, and he didn't care to find out. He felt the Personhood Authority was involved somehow, but given that the PAT cashed his bounties, he opted for ignorance. Not that Hillary would have answered him had he asked, and he never had the opportunity.
They quickly met on Friday nights when Hillary picked up take-out for her family on her way home from the office, a Friday tradition. John would schedule a take-out order for the same time (7 pm) at one of the four rotating restaurants Hillary ordered food from each week: Week 1 - Pizza, Week 2 - Chinese, Week 3 - Mexican, and finally, Week 4 - Wingstop. On the way out of picking up his order, he would "bump into" Hillary, an "old friend of the family." They would place their orders on the ground, embrace, as old family friends do, and engage in brief small talk, at which point Hillary would receive "an important text from the office" and Airdrop "The List" to John's (somehow still functioning) iPhone 16 Plüs. She would smile, pick up her food, her small but always polished diamond crucifix necklace blinking in the reflection of the evening lights, and walk to her car, her left front jacket pocket now containing a small envelope containing the seed phrase for the particular wallet that John had set up for her to collect her commission that week.
"The List" was a list of around 70% of all pregnancies registered in the State of Texas that week, compiled from Hillary's confidants inside the offices she worked with. Access to "The List" cost John 30% of his bounties, but without it, he wouldn't have any bounties to cash in.
Armed with his two core data sets, his base list and "The List" from Hillary, John would use a consumer data collection service meant for advertisers. There were hundreds of services he could choose from with overlapping data sets, like tens of millions of Venn diagrams laid on top of each other. At a nominal cost, he would purchase the search and browsing history, app-tracking data, and additional "anonymous" information for all the listed pregnancies that he could match with the location data on his base list to make his final target bounty index. This could reasonably allow him to track any mobile IOT device owned by his targets that moved out of State using third-party services to which the major telcos sold nearly real-time location data.
Then John set his triggers and waited, although he never waited very long.
Invariably, one of the devices would cross Texas state lines into Mexico or one of the West Coast Coalition States that still allowed for legal abortion.
At that point, his job was done.
Finally and reluctantly, removing his emotionally protective emoji filter, he would take the name and other personally identifiable information, log in, and submit it to the Personhood Authority's PATipLine™ with his name and wallet address. The PAT would wait for the individual to cross back into Texas and arrest them for prosecution and re-education.
He didn't have a perfect record, but at this point, the PAT trusted his information enough to act on it 100% of the time. With an average of correctly identifying four bounties a week across the entire State, he only had to beat his average once every five weeks and not fall below his average more than two weeks in a row to turn a healthy profit. This was enough to keep the flywheel spinning fast enough that the income would be frequent sufficient for him to return to school sometime in the next 16-24 months (not adjusting for inflation), even with the tax he paid to Hillary and her network.
Despite knowing more details about the names than their families, friends, coworkers, and other intimates, he deleted everything relating to a name as soon as a prospective bounty was submitted. He purged the name and associated data from his mind and drives. Either the money would come in, or it wouldn't. More often than not, it did. And no matter how he felt about it, it was just a job.
John had never planned on staying in Texas.
And he wouldn't.
/stop_
This is a fictional story. The perspectives reflected herein are not my own; they belong to fictional characters and their fictional world.
Although it might be my cat's perspective, I suppose we will never know.
/start_
John had never planned on staying in Texas, let alone moving back to his mother's condominium after leaving for college. The cracking stucco facade of the building (which hadn't been re-painted since the early 2010s and had taken on the taupe color of the hazy summer sky) gave him the feeling that everything that came forth from the structure would bear the same cracks in their very being. And with hundreds of the same units, all exhibiting the same signs of weary and sun-baked poverty, he felt the condo complex was a prison ever since he spent his childhood summer mornings cracking eggs on the sidewalk in the 8 am sun to estimate how hot it would be that day without looking at a weather app.
Not that his childhood was that long ago. At 20 years old, on his unceremonious return, he had barely escaped the stucco-condo-familial prison for two years before being yanked back by his current financial circumstances and unable to pay his tuition. Like every human ever imprisoned and had their human rights withheld, John longed for freedom. He had thought education had been a means of escape, but all it had done was return him to where he started: nearly broke and living in his 10x10 childhood bedroom that might as well have been a cell. No amount of gig work at the meatless meat factory near campus or the custom Yves Saint Laurent Croc-mold foundry was going to cover the costs of his tuition that had grown at 20x the pace of inflation in just the two years he was at school. He needed work.
Living back in Texas and becoming a Dobber wasn't something he could have even fathomed he could bring himself to do, even a few months before his return. He was morally, spiritually, and physically repulsed by the tasks required to do the job. But he needed the money. He had to get out. Dobbing was a diamond-tipped chisel that he could use to slowly chip away at the confines of his imprisonment, name by name, and bounty by bounty.
Each week, he steadily increased the balance in his bounty account with the Personhood Authority of Texas, only withdrawing the precise amounts required to do his work and always putting back more than he took out. He was managing. It was just a job, even if it was something he hated himself for doing.
Access to the location data from the people he tracked was as cheap as it was quickly and readily accessible. The myriad of privacy laws passed globally, year after year, had done nothing to prevent that horse from leaving the proverbial barn long ago, well before John was born. For every innovation or law passed to keep personal data safe and out of the hands of malicious actors, exponential numbers of new techniques for amassing the personally identifiable information of others appeared, like the weeds growing in between the pieces of sidewalk outside his stucco-caked confines. The garden had overgrown. It couldn't be tended. No amount of legal or technological pesticide would tame the hydra-headed vines sprouting in, and out of every single action the uninformed and unprotected took in their lives. Hell, even the informed and "protected" were unprotected from skimming, scraping, and harvesting by him or millions of other rational capitalists for any purpose whatsoever.
He had managed to get a reasonably priced loc_ident code bloc package subscription on a private server from a former classmate who had sympathized with his plight. The classmate had quietly confided in him over drinks one night that they had been a Dobber to afford autonomous hospice care for their parents and understood what John was going through. The code bloc package was a little outdated, but he knew his way around the free, open-source repositories enough to augment the pack to do what he needed whenever he hit a snag. He couldn't write code per se but placing code blocs where they needed to go, to do what they needed to do, was effectively legos. Moving around artificially manufactured, pre-coded blocs for interfacing, analysis, and execution was rote. He had learned to do that at three years old in pre-school, just like everyone else.
His monthly Life Amortization Stipend from the Federal government was enough to cover the monthly subscription costs of his loc_ident tradecraft. Even though it was technically illegal at the Federal level to use his LAS for Dobbing, Texas could give a fuck. He didn't even use an encrypted wallet to pay for it, just a wallet that listed his mother's condo address in Texas. He also didn't mask his identity. He couldn't if he wanted to - Texas required his personal information and wallet address for him to collect his bounties. They weren't going to come after him anyhow. He was effectively a crowd-sourced, sanctioned agent of essential State functions.
Ironically, given the information he could himself gain access to on other people, the Personhood Authority of Texas database of self-identified Dobbers was the most secure data in the State. Protected in PAT air-gapped cold storage servers and accessed only through a manual, on-site, biometric interface by the highest clearance level PAT Agents, who had been vetted by the lifetime appointees of the State Evangelical Ethics Division. A notoriously rigorous process passed only by true believers and tenured members of PAT staff. No Dobber had ever run afoul of the PAT, and the Feds had long ago given up trying to stop their trade from operating.
The first "Dobbers" (so named after the eponymous 2022 Supreme Court case) had been arrested and prosecuted by the Department of Justice for interfering with interstate commerce. The general public was furious. Rallies were held. Change.xyz petitions were signed. But, the Supreme Court preemptively issued a writ of cert and heard the case within weeks before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals could even sniff it. The Supremes quickly and summarily dismissed the charges from the DOJ as Unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment and relegated abortion-bounty collector rights to the States. Intimate collectives of Dobbers sprung up overnight. And even though it was a cottage industry due to the stigma attached to digitally hunting people for money, it was still an industry. He could still make more money doing this than any other tedious infowork.
He didn't like it, but it was a way out.
He took strict mental precautions to shield himself from any potential anxieties about his work. He only worked for a total of 4 hours a day, which was honestly all it took to get it done. He took 15-minute breaks every 45 minutes. He stretched, did sit-ups, and practiced closed eye refocusing techniques to reduce eyestrain from working in AR glasses, as he sometimes did to manipulate data in three dimensions when it was too dense.
But he couldn't bring himself to look at the names except when he absolutely had to.
He looked at the beginning of his process to identify them and then again at the end when he submitted them for collection. After he had vomited for hours when he acquired his first bounty payment, he grabbed an automation bloc that muted and swapped out the names of his prospective bounties with a random emoji. The emotes had their own lawfully prescribed and protected meanings under the 28th Amendment, but they were wholly divorced from the names he was working with. It helped. An eggplant or a ghost, or a smiling Muskbot didn't instill him with dread or make his palms sweat the way the names did. However, he had needed to update the automation after his fourth bounty target when it randomly assigned the :girl: emoji to the bounty's name. It could have been worse.
The work itself was pretty simple.
First, he went to work on all of the streaming apps. Their APIs required location data for logins to prevent subscription sharing, so this was always his primary move. Even with biometric SSO being used for 100% of logins at this point, that particularly anonymized SSO data was still connected to a user's account. That account still had to be related to a location so that the account couldn't be used in multiple geographic locations simultaneously. The downstream benefit to him was that he always had a place to start. The biometric data was beside the point. He couldn't actually get into anyone's account, no one could without personal biometrics, but he didn't need to. He just needed the localized account data, which most people forgot to turn off as publicly available and was turned on by default.
From there, it got a little more complicated, but only a little. Since most biometric logins used for SSO were used for every service a person used, he just had to associate the location data from AppleNetflixTV, DisneyHulu+, or HBODazonPrime with the locations of geotags in posts, photos, and videos on social media apps and then filter that by gender classification (female, female-identifying, non-binary, person-with-a-uterus, other, or other-with-a-uterus) and from there, any of those who were under or slightly over the average menopausal age. It was even easier if a person shared their content habits cross-platform. And they often did. Thankfully it was still illegal to store any information anywhere on users under 18. He didn't know if he could stomach that.
Next, he checked which data he could match with any health and ovulation tracking apps, which by State law require a publicly searchable know-your-customer database. Only with a KYC database would the app subscription be fully covered by in-state network insurance providers. And by putting your information into the KYC system, users receive a substantial annual premium reduction. Since no one could afford the premiums these days, around 80% of users opted into the database, lest they be locked out of receiving any healthcare whatsoever.
What followed made him the most uncomfortable because it required him to interface with another person. Seeing other people always makes things more real. Hardcore Dobbers who could hack non-public databases and not just use loc_ident packages, run filters, and buy advertising lists, could often do everything without ever connecting with another human. They could stay clean. Or at least cleaner than John felt when he compiled his weekly base list and went to meet with Hillary.
John met Hillary through his former classmate who had helped him get into the private server where he subscribed to his loc_ident package. Hillary was one of only a handful of anon server moderators in a community of less than a few hundred. Still, her role was more significant to the people she trusted.
Hillary was a member of the State Board of Obstetricians and had been for over a decade. She had a small practice and was seen by her patients as kind, empathetic, and deeply religious. She was someone they trusted implicitly to do the right thing for them, their family, and God. But it wasn't Hillary's patients that John needed to meet her about. They weren’t the ones he could profit from. They would have their children come Hell or high water. It felt like Hell was more likely to come first.
Hillary had quietly amassed a trusted coterie of nurses and OBGYNs sympathetic to her cause, politics, and religious ideology through her esteemed position. How she did this so successfully and discretely, John had no idea, and he didn't care to find out. He felt the Personhood Authority was involved somehow, but given that the PAT cashed his bounties, he opted for ignorance. Not that Hillary would have answered him had he asked, and he never had the opportunity.
They quickly met on Friday nights when Hillary picked up take-out for her family on her way home from the office, a Friday tradition. John would schedule a take-out order for the same time (7 pm) at one of the four rotating restaurants Hillary ordered food from each week: Week 1 - Pizza, Week 2 - Chinese, Week 3 - Mexican, and finally, Week 4 - Wingstop. On the way out of picking up his order, he would "bump into" Hillary, an "old friend of the family." They would place their orders on the ground, embrace, as old family friends do, and engage in brief small talk, at which point Hillary would receive "an important text from the office" and Airdrop "The List" to John's (somehow still functioning) iPhone 16 Plüs. She would smile, pick up her food, her small but always polished diamond crucifix necklace blinking in the reflection of the evening lights, and walk to her car, her left front jacket pocket now containing a small envelope containing the seed phrase for the particular wallet that John had set up for her to collect her commission that week.
"The List" was a list of around 70% of all pregnancies registered in the State of Texas that week, compiled from Hillary's confidants inside the offices she worked with. Access to "The List" cost John 30% of his bounties, but without it, he wouldn't have any bounties to cash in.
Armed with his two core data sets, his base list and "The List" from Hillary, John would use a consumer data collection service meant for advertisers. There were hundreds of services he could choose from with overlapping data sets, like tens of millions of Venn diagrams laid on top of each other. At a nominal cost, he would purchase the search and browsing history, app-tracking data, and additional "anonymous" information for all the listed pregnancies that he could match with the location data on his base list to make his final target bounty index. This could reasonably allow him to track any mobile IOT device owned by his targets that moved out of State using third-party services to which the major telcos sold nearly real-time location data.
Then John set his triggers and waited, although he never waited very long.
Invariably, one of the devices would cross Texas state lines into Mexico or one of the West Coast Coalition States that still allowed for legal abortion.
At that point, his job was done.
Finally and reluctantly, removing his emotionally protective emoji filter, he would take the name and other personally identifiable information, log in, and submit it to the Personhood Authority's PATipLine™ with his name and wallet address. The PAT would wait for the individual to cross back into Texas and arrest them for prosecution and re-education.
He didn't have a perfect record, but at this point, the PAT trusted his information enough to act on it 100% of the time. With an average of correctly identifying four bounties a week across the entire State, he only had to beat his average once every five weeks and not fall below his average more than two weeks in a row to turn a healthy profit. This was enough to keep the flywheel spinning fast enough that the income would be frequent sufficient for him to return to school sometime in the next 16-24 months (not adjusting for inflation), even with the tax he paid to Hillary and her network.
Despite knowing more details about the names than their families, friends, coworkers, and other intimates, he deleted everything relating to a name as soon as a prospective bounty was submitted. He purged the name and associated data from his mind and drives. Either the money would come in, or it wouldn't. More often than not, it did. And no matter how he felt about it, it was just a job.
John had never planned on staying in Texas.
And he wouldn't.
/stop_
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