The Cancellation Policy

“When attractive opportunities abound… we are apt to be willing to pay a little and accept some small, even trivial cost of doing business for access to new powers. And pretty soon we become so dependent on our new tools that we lose the ability to thrive without them. Options become obligatory.” —Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

I’ve got to admit things went pretty smoothly at first, when our current administration decided to go ahead and crowdsource the judiciary. The courts had grown so overloaded and inefficient in their last years. But more than that, the laws these courts had been set up to enforce no longer had much relevance in a world where anyway justice, or some semblance of it, mostly just rains down from the socials.

And with our old institutions rapidly collapsing, it was clear soon enough that the only way to gain a foothold in this new world was, likewise, through those same socials. Some time after I lost my job, along with everyone else, I was surprised to find myself thinking about launching a career in public life. The only problem was I had no taste for beefing, and we all know there’s just no way to rise to prominence in our new reality without passing through a few public feuds with well-chosen rivals.

That’s why, at first, I was pretty excited when they set up the Cancellation Policy (a phrase whose older usage, in establishing the terms of any relationship between a service provider and a client, was almost immediately forgotten). I had always been hesitant to choose a rival on my own. Lord knows I tried countless times, but each one, upon closer consideration, came to seem far too human, far too much like me, and I recoiled from the idea of subjecting them to a public evisceration. So when AI-driven rival-selection came along, with the promise of “Guaranteed Moral Desert”, I was convinced it was for me.

GMD was supposed to be the infallible algorithmic outcome of a selection process that yields up only those targets who indisputably “have it coming”. Even if they look like decent people to us, or like somewhat indecent people, but still, in the end, like people, with at least something in them that is worthy of praise and admiration, GMD, it was promised, had the power to cut right past such appearances and to tell us the individual’s true score on the Grumby Scale, where 0 is angelic perfection and 10 is carte blanche for whatever public humiliations, whatever mobbing, doxxing, deepfaking, or other mechanisms of social death, up to and including physical assassination, the matched attacker should wish to deploy. Any individual with a score above 7 is considered a suitable target for a Cancellation Policy.

And all of this might have worked out just fine, if the CP did not require a prior legally binding commitment to following through with the attack on whichever individual the AI ultimately proposes. There is no “swipe left” option, at least not after the first two proposals, and so, once a third partner is selected for you, you have no other choice but to feud with them, at least if you don’t want to bring your own Grumby score up and risk getting attacked in turn.

And in my circumstances, friends, the Grumby is not something I wanted to mess with. I was already hovering up around a 6.7 before I started looking into taking out a Cancellation Policy on someone. Long story — uninteresting story too. Mostly just some careless slips back in the early internet years, before we had any idea where this was leading. I used to go on Twitter to criticize what I held to be noxious political opinions, but invariably, in the interest of fairly characterizing my opponents’ views, I dutifully summarized what those opinions were in the most honest and accurate way possible. Little did I know there were already bots swarming around, gathering up data from my every exclamation, able to identify key words and to assess their speaker or writer in light of them, but, alas, unable, just as they remain unable today, to distinguish between direct and indirect speech. I’m still paying, after all these years, for my efforts fairly to characterize views with which I disagree. And while I can’t prove it, I strongly suspect that all those years of texting in French, with its many treacherous faux amis, telling my wife things like “Je serai un petit peu en retard”, has not exactly helped matters.

Plus there’s this damned watch I’ve got on me, like everyone else, in accordance with the new law. “You are falling short of your standing goals,” it tells me, and I gain another .01 points. “Your sitting time was longer today than one year ago,” and I go up .02. Just last week I mistimed my Papaya Blast Skittles binge, and devoured two whole “family size” packs just 14 minutes before my blood-sugar implant sent a new reading to Central, which immediately flagged me as prediabetic and made my Grumby go up .05. Damn. I haven’t seen an actual doctor in years now. It seemed like a good idea when I volunteered early on for EverCare, more than three years before it became mandatory. I even took the SuperNudge premium plan, imagining it might help me to develop healthier habits. Now here I am, prodded along like a cow, perpetually anxious about seeing my Grumby rise even higher.

Sometimes I feel like nothing’s really working the way it was supposed to. Just the other day I ordered a GoYu, and it showed right up in like two minutes, but then it refused to unlock its doors because, the app was claiming, its ambient DNA sensors were whiffing something that didn’t match whatever they have on file for me. How could I possibly change my DNA?! I mean, I did spend some intimate time with my lady-friend last night, but we always do everything by the rules, logging each successive contact in our paired Consent apps, even adding our verbals for good measure. We know that sometimes contact like this can contaminate our ambient DNA readings, but in principle Consent and GoYu are talking to one another and are supposed to be able to correct for this sort of thing. I read about one guy who filed a request to identify what had gone wrong when he got mis-ID’d, back when this was still possible. It turns out he had passed gas just as he was trying to get authenticated to enter his student-loan portal, and the sensors detected bacterial DNA traces from his gut biome. “I contain multitudes,” he joked afterwards on the socials.

Anyhow GoYu was clearly at fault for mis-IDing me, but what could I do? What sequence of operations could I undertake to override it? To what rational human could I appeal to explain the problem? Forget about it! I could only stand there, as the vehicle drove away without me, already sending its report back to Central, informing them that I had just no-showed a robotaxi, and bringing my Grumby up another .02. Damn!

So of course I was late to my monthly ubie consultation. I don’t know why they make us go down to Central in person for that, when in any case it’s just a bot who scans us and asks us a few questions and takes our vitals, all of which could be done from home. I guess they just want to make sure we’re not gaming the system somehow. Anyhow I ended up getting my monthly pay reduced by 350 ubies, not for being late (I had three lates banked after years of obsessive punctuality), but for replying to the question about my excessive sitting with what the machine said was a detectable tone of sarcasm. It even showed me a read-out of my audio when I said “Sorry for making such liberal use of my humble haunches.” I have to admit it did look pretty sarcastic, when I saw it as an audiograph.

I can’t keep going like this, I thought as I made my way home on foot, earning as I went effusive praise from my watch for all the steps I was racking up. I’ve got to get ahead somehow.

When I arrived I went straight to the CP website and clicked “select”. I had got this far twice before, but each time I saw the name and profile picture of the poor mark the algorithm had chosen for me, I lost my nerve. I knew that if I backed out a third time it would bring my Grumby up further, and leave me perilously close to landing on someone else’s screen who had just clicked “select” themselves on the CP website. So I was basically locked in, to pretending to read the small-print and, upon seeing the intended target of my cancellation campaign, to clicking “accept”.

The system claimed it was able to guarantee not to pair us with anyone more closely related than a fifth cousin, and it was said to be getting ever better at avoiding pairings with anyone who had ever had direct personal contact with us. I think I would have been prepared to tear into just about anyone at this point, an acquaintance, a fifth cousin, a world-renouncing nun living out her days in a silent convent. If their Grumby is over 7, I convinced myself, they’re fair game.

So it is not out of squeamishness or moral compunction, I hope you will understand, that I cringed in horror when I saw the name of Arthur Hodges and the birthdate 01/24/1979 appear on my screen, right below the unmistakable likeness of my dear little brother. Please! I screamed. Anyone but Arthur!

How could this have happened? Was it a repetition of the same DNA mismatch that explained my problem with the GoYu? If so, is there any possible pathway for appeal? And how on earth, even if we take the DNA problem into consideration, could I have landed on my own brother, out of an estimated 1.3 billion people on the planet with a Grumby over 7? It didn’t make any sense. An hourglass appeared in the center of my screen, and reminded me that I only had 30 seconds left to click “accept”, or “otherwise risk negative consequences for [my] Grumby score.” My watch jumped in too, buzzing and chiming, and sending that low-level electrical pulse that always makes my teeth feel like they’re biting tinfoil, and flashing the blunt message on its screen: “Click accept now”.

Not all of this was mysterious to me. I mean, I knew perfectly well why Arthur had a score of 9.8. He had long been one of the resisters, not so much out of conscientious objection as out of simple lethargy, and only grudgingly got his first smartphone in late 2024, six months or so after they had become mandatory. Before that he’d lived with a primitive flip-phone from the ‘90s, the kind that sends no pings to the GPS satellites and that is completely useless for tracking and data-harvesting. He preferred cash transactions, and in every way possible continued to live his life sub-rosa.

When Grumby went into effect, the problem was not so much that he had left a trail of score-lowering data, but, far worse than that, that he had barely left a trail at all. And although Central will never come right out and say as much, to leave no trail is by far the greatest transgression in our new reality. And to top it all off, one of the very first things Arthur did upon getting his first smartphone was to download an image of Balthus’s Guitar Lesson (1934), which some utterly philistine AI had marked, in the .jpg’s metadata, as “child pornography”.

So being an utter cipher until you get caught with a Balthus, that’s pretty much a guaranteed 9.7 right there. How he got the additional .1 is none of my business. As far as I know Arthur’s been nothing but a model resident ever since he moved into his group home. Such a move had been inevitable for him. He’d only ever worked at Dairy Queen, as well as a brief stint years ago at Meineke Discount Mufflers. How could a person so perfectly average, and so lacking in aspiration, be expected to adapt to the new labor market and to make a case for his distinctly human skill-set alongside vastly more efficient robots? There was nothing to do with him but give him a modest ubie and room and board from Central.

Arthur even got a private room by agreeing to sign up for Central’s FastTrack for physician-assisted… well you know. I don’t want to say it out loud. Arthur signed away his life in exchange for a few years of comfort, at most. I had been assured by the medical staff that he was happy with this decision. He said there’s no longer any room in this world for human beings with souls like the one he has, so he’d prefer to sit in the day room at the group home and watch the Bears on the TV, and drink the Capri-Suns and eat the Taste-Tations and the Fruit-by-the-Foot that the nurses bring him, as if he were a sick child, until the day comes for his engagement with nitrogen hypoxia.

No judgments, though. I mean, this world could bring anyone down. He’s still my brother, in the end. I only clicked “accept” because my watch was nudging me so hard and I figured I could maybe appeal the assignment after it was officialized. What a foolish thing to hope for! I spent hours studying the different features of the CP website spelled out beneath the hamburger icon. Naturally, no phone number was given to speak to a live agent, and the online AI chat assistant, “Nineveh”, proved incapable of telling me anything I had not already read on the site in text form. Every click brought me back, sooner or later, to the homepage. Truly, this was a huis-clos situation. The Cancellation Policy had no cancellation policy.

I tried to ignore it all for the first week, but as expected, on the morning of the eighth day, my watch began to flash and to buzz and to send lightning bolts through my teeth. “You have 21 days to complete Cancellation,” the watch reported.

Poor Arthur! Little Arthur, who used his allowance to buy me a 12-pack of Hostess Sno Balls in the summer of 1985 because “they’re funny like you”, and who once came home from school crying only because “all the kids want to talk about is 90210”. Perhaps there never was room in this world for a soul like his.

Another week went by, and another shock came and another reminder. “You have 14 days to complete Cancellation.” That same day I went to my part-time job, troubleshooting guardrail failures on the very same AIs that had forced me out of my previous full-time job as a philosophy professor. The one I was assigned to monitor had blown a fuse when a student kept insisting to it that “there’s no Archimedean point from which to make certain and irrefutable ethical claims.” The AI had threatened to pursue disciplinary measures if the student continued to withhold assent regarding the substantive moral claim that “Cannibalism is wrong”. “It depends,” the little smart-ass kept repeating. “It all depends.”

So now they’ve called me in to make a final determination as to whether cannibalism is wrong or not. This is ridiculous, I thought. In my past life I was a trope-theorist, not an ethicist, and anyway as far as I could tell the kid was absolutely right. It all depends. My attempt to explain as much to the AI professor, supposedly under my own direct supervision, only served to add another .02 to my Grumby.

I got home that evening, and instead of taking a drink as I would have in the old days I plopped down on the couch in a defiant “sitting” position, opened my laptop, and went straight to CentralSocial. “Arthur Hodges is a sick fuck,” I wrote. And again: “Arthur Hodges, of the Expedited Quiescence group home in Naperville, Illinois, is a ChoMo.” And again, some hours later, I attached a screen shot of Arthur’s CP profile, and wrote: “Downloading Balthus’s Guitar Lesson? Seriously?!” I went off to bed, and let the internet do its thing.

By the next morning these three denunciations had garnered over 100,000 reposts between them, and more than triple that number of likes. I scanned some of the comments from the mob I had summoned, and quickly saw they were even coarser and more categorical than I had been in my bait-posts. It all seemed so disproportionate. Ordinarily when you decide to take on an adversary on the socials, that person is at least plausibly representable as your equal, and once you attack them you must brace for an equal and opposite counterattack. But Arthur plainly was going to have no idea any of this was happening unless and until it spilled out into the “real world” and someone firebombed Expedited Quiescence or something. He was probably sitting calmly in the TV room at this very minute, I reflected, re-watching for the millionth time that old VHS tape of the “Super Bowl Shuffle” (1985). What kind of monster am I? Who would agree to “punch down” like that, as they used to say, when conscience still held us back somewhat? And to do so when it is our own brother we find, defenseless, beneath us?

I checked my Grumby portal. My score was already down to 5.4, as low as it had been since a month or so after the system was launched, when the AI began scraping my old text messages along with everyone else’s. That’s what kind of monster I am. The kind who needs to get my Grumby down if I’m ever going to pull myself together again after this great… whatever it is, this great hecatomb of humanity. And there’s probably not going to be any firebombing or anything like that. Real-world spillover only happens like 17% of the time in official Cancellation cases, or so I’ve read.

Just in case I decided to call up the group home and check in. It had been ages since I’d spoken with Arthur. At least four years, or maybe five, anyhow it was before everything changed. As suspected the nurse confirmed he was currently sitting in the TV room, and she was happy to pass the landline to him. “Hey brother,” I said nervously when I heard his unmistakable grunt. I filled him in on all that had transpired, from my wife’s accident, to the loss of my job, my skyrocketing Grumby score, and, finally, to this most recent effort to improve my lot. A long silence followed, and then, like some die-hard Bears fan reasoning to his buddy about the commitment by his team of something plausibly interpretable as a foul: “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
“So you understand?” I asked, ashamed.
“Not only do I understand, I saw it coming.”
“You knew?”
“Those of us who have left your world are able to see it in its entirety, and to know what’s in store for it.” This did not sound like the Arthur I knew. “You all spend your days chained to the internet or whatever they’re calling it now,” he went on. “You don’t realize you already had the internet inside your head, we all do, even if some of us look like we’re just passing our days in a La-Z-Boy in the TV room. You can unfold it all from yourself if you try. No technology has ever enabled a human being to do something we couldn’t have done before. It only looks that way. And no technology that wasn’t necessary from the very beginning is necessary now. It only looks that way. You can, for instance, choose to die instead. Just turn over your wrists, as Seneca said. Or sign up for nitrogen hypoxia.”

I asked Arthur if he had any idea how the system might have matched us in spite of our closely matching DNA, and I was surprised to hear him reply: “Who knows? We contain multitudes.” Then I flushed red with shame as I asked him, my own brother, whether he would understand if I were to continue in my campaign against him. Again, he replied: “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

The following week I did not cease to hammer away at him, with the ungrounded insinuations, with the facile rabble-rousing, with our era’s agreed-upon language of dehumanization: “vile”, “repulsive”, “sick”. It was not difficult to attract the attention of a few influential podcasters, one of whom demanded to know “what this Arthur guy was doing for so many years with a flip-phone? What was he trying to hide?”

When I next checked my Grumby, it was down to a 4.3. Arthur’s was up to 9.9.

The next morning, back on CentralSocial, I took the podcaster’s lead, shifting my emphasis away from pedophilia and towards my brother’s technophobia. “He seriously waited until like 2024 to get a real phone? What’s his problem?!” This query was taken up and recirculated so quickly, with such extreme escalation of vitriol, that I could not bear to watch. I closed my laptop and held my head in my hands.

I was soon interrupted by a phone call. It was the same nurse at Expedited Quiescence, who quickly greeted me before handing the phone over to Arthur. “We’re almost there, X,” he said. “One more post should do it.”
“We’re almost where now?”
“To a perfect Grumby.”

He told me Expedited Quiescence had recently initiated a “SuperFastTrack” program, for which he hoped to be the inaugural patient, guaranteeing immediate access to the nitrogen chamber for anyone with a “perfect Grumby” — by which he meant a perfectly imperfect Grumby. After we hung up I was full of conflicting emotions, but I knew what I had to do. I opened my laptop, and I went to CentralSocial, and I typed: “Arthur Hodges thinks he’s better than us.” And again: “Arthur Hodges thinks he can just ‘opt out’.” And again: “We all know there’s only one way to really ‘opt out’. Let’s give him what he wants!”

And at that Arthur Hodges’s Grumby shot to a perfect 10, while my own plummeted to a 2.3. A golden checkmark immediately appeared next to my name on CentralSocial. Within minutes I was followed by M*** P***, by Z*** von R***, and all those other oligarchs and influencers. Three days later I received a drone delivery from Expedited Quiescence. It was a little black box containing Arthur’s ashen remains. When you squeeze the box’s sides, a generative AI emits Arthur-like exclamations through a tiny hidden speaker: “You gotta do what you gotta do,” it says. And again: “What’s funnier, Sno Balls or Ho Ho’s?” And again: “I love me some Electric Mango Fruitsations!”

And at the bottom of the delivery box there was a single small square of yellow paper from a 3M sticky-pad, with handwritten words from a BIC blue ballpoint pen: “Thank you for giving me what I wanted, X. I told you it was all optional.”

Pliny Xavier Hodges
Oak Park, Illinois
April 24, 2027