Prophets of the past always paid with their lives, but now they just swipe their phones. There are apps for prognostication, persecution, and all shades between, though the icons are ambiguous and signify nothing, except perhaps sound and fury. It’s easy in the oncoming rush to tap the wrong tile, and open a call to the restless dead or, worse still, a perfect simulation of a perfect storm. A tangerine avatar, chipper as Clippy from those steam-powered computers and gross as a bloated teddy, fills the screen and prophesies profits, a gun clutched in his tiny hand and oil oozing from every orifice. Even if you swipe left, he’s there again – and again, and again, and again – his butt-hole puckered mouth pursed in predictions of a beautiful apocalypse. A text pings up from Nostradamus. It’s wordy and obscure to the point of incomprehensibility, but you have precisely eighty-five seconds to weigh up the doubtful profits and incalculable losses. It is, after all, your life.
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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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