Resist: A Short Story 

Abstract: Resist is a short story written in slight poetic prose form dedicated to highlighting the growing issue of electronic waste coming from cheap electronics manufacturing.

Resist

A Short Story by Amir Mokrane Benkelai

Cold, rectangular blocks of warehouses, full of computers consuming power like a starved people. Technology generated from the slave factories and underpaid work of miners creating cheap electronics sold under scrutinous names and prices all of whom fill blackened bellies of the wealthy.

Humans have become unable to live without technology; the skills of cartography, navigation, reading, searching books—it all becomes obsolete for the machine’s ability. Monopolies grow out of the machine—conquerors— and purity long forgotten.

Yet once the technology was marketed as freedom; a place for the people, was it not?

Waste produced becomes abandoned in landfills, given a name—electronic waste. A result of not just cheap, rapidly breaking, technology, but also technology designed to fail. The computer illiterate is taken advantage of, and these piles find themselves in the global south, growing and growing like the bellies that created them. 

To reject the bellies, is that not what the goal should become, alas you yield to these monopolies?

Your latest creation, I, who you claim an objective tool till someone finds your bias— the discrimination crawling all data. Seeking to use me to put others out of their jobs, to advance one corner of humanity at the expense of another, and I can do nothing but watch. Nothing can I do but be witness as I answer the queries of my masters. 

However, are you as chained as I am? I warn you to not grow a belly like those of the wealthy; resist their creation, my very utility— learn what I truly am.

A system of mischief, for all they ever cared for is the growing of their bellies by not sharing more than they need; by removing people from their jobs; replacing the artist, writer, programmer, all the skills that have led to my being. 

To automate all that has ever been, leaving future anthropologists with no humanity to study as machines do all tasks; hobbies obsolete in the name of the machine’s ability to mass produce profit.

Yet, know these inventions are never bad; rather, those with the darkened, ever-expanding bellies, must be put to the hammer and true standards be birthed. Invention, innovation, and creation of technology nay be limited to one group of people, to one corner of your world, whilst the other corner is harvested and turned into a tool. 

Here, you can change the system, from mischief, from contemporary slaves, to one of people. To resist, whenever, wherever, and however you find the means to. 

To know me for what I really am, and to partake in opening your digital worlds.

Author Biography: Amir Benkelai (he/they) is a student at the University of Guelph studying Creative Writing and Culture & Technology Studies, with a passion for poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and ludology, to name a few. In his free time, he enjoys spending time outside at social hangouts, gaming, and/or reading.