ISO: Migrants in Support of a Zuckerberg-Regime
Other ways we can help the elderly with technology.
In 1972, Philippine Dictator Ferdinand Marcos enacted Martial Law. This 14-year period would later mar the nation with a revisionist fervor, flattening the lives of approximately 3,200 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 tortures, and 70,000 imprisonments into one historical footnote.
Five years later, the Voyager Golden Record would do the same globally. The disk was launched into space hoping that another civilization might find them and understand humanity. It was then, either by grace or by indifference, that Tagalog–just one of many Philippine languages–was not among the din of recorded “hello”s. Another language, Amoy, was recorded, which aliens might mistake for Philippine.
Tagalog’s exclusion was an especially low blow considering that post-Marcos, the Philippines would undertake a slew of labor export policies transforming it into a neo-liberal tourist trap. Aliens in their own country–my kababayan, one generation removed from dictatorship–bred for migrant work but especially for tourism, became voiceless.
There are many instances of voices disappearing if you let them.
In 2003, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo installed 1,550 chairs, intentionally strewn between the dearth of two buildings in Istanbul. Chairs conjured “faceless migrant death in a globalized economy.” These works, based on un-persons, are colloquial hauntings. Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous comes to mind.
Many hauntings go unrecorded. Generally: immigrants. My father wanted to be an artist but settled instead for engineering, or my mother’s miscarriage.
Another haunting: my grandma’s left leg. Wawa, both Japanese and Filipino, was hunted by both the guerrilla freedom fighters and the Japanese imperialists in WWII for no fault of her own other than looking too “other.” Leg freshly blown off by shrapnel, she hid in the mountains, eating yams washed in a river littered with the corpses of mosquito-men. It’s not unknown to me that I am two generations from war.
Sometimes, when the dementia clears, I string together semblances of babble history.
I’m a screenager, admittedly. My go-to recording method of note-taking is Instagram drafts.
Last summer, as we traveled over a stretch of Ilo Ilo road, my uncle pointed to a mountain in the murky gray.
“That’s where Wawa was born,” he said.
He had just paid ₱500 (~$8) for her unlaminated birth certificate.
When I asked Wawa about it, I used my computer’s search bar to jot the answer. That was nine months ago before it became water-logged. By comparison, Instagram drafts save for seven days maximum, which is economical and painless when both technology and memory fail.
People online are saying that in 100 years, there’ll be iPhone archeologists, which is good because I don’t remember my iPhone 7. I do sometimes miss the memories, though.
In 200 years, dementia will be machine-curable. Family histories will continue for more than the typical three-generation memory.
Machines, like paper, can go away if unpreserved; a sort of technological dark age; reverence for advancement and realization of its failings.
Sometimes, I find myself wishing we lived in a surveillance state. We could live lives over in microchips–less flattening, as far as aliens are concerned. In this techno-authoritarian state, we’d live together, infinitely small and looking at each other fully. Our reflections are overlaid, like one-way screens.
By Joshua Silla
Design by Mikayla Baluyot
