Today’s little dose of intrigue comes after I used the kiosk hashtag for possibly the first time ever, I just don’t remember. I frequently include the @ tag but not the # hashtag, so maybe the company’s social media acumen is about as sharp as mine. What happened today was I posted a photo of a murdered kiosk in Times Square and said that from a distance it looked like it might have been an art overlay. Not an especially memorable post but welcome to my world. In the moments that followed I see now where three people from the company that owns these kiosks followed me, using their personal accounts. One name I recognized as being among those who had called in to the previous number I used after the began their “investigation” into this critically important matter. They have to have known that when they called that number their own phone numbers and full names would be revealed to me… right? Or maybe they expected that when they called that number they would be able to ask for the ice cream man and get a full explanation for what is going on here, or even what could be construed as a confession?

Or maybe they are on to me once and for all. They followed me from their personal accounts, presumably thinking I would not know who they are. But I have them on caller ID. Hah. Time to figure out their phone numbers and plague them with calls playing the ice cream jingle from spoofed caller ID making it look like the calls are coming from the kiosks.

I will not do that.

I don’t know but the posturing and lies are for naught. But to keep it real I recognize the scope of things here. It is not a crisis for the company but, social media being social media, that is what it has been conflated to be. It is not much different from the misunderstandings and conflations that invade interpersonal relationships in which parties involved spend so much of their time online. Stuff gets blown out of proportion to nuclear levels, and while it is fair to say that such misinterpretations happen in so-called “reality” I think the problem takes on an outsize scale when our minds are left to make our own conclusions without so much as eye contact or any kind of physical interaction.

I’ve been thinking again about the new Digital Divide. There is a point at which communications terminate, where entities and individuals curate their online existences to such a point of perfection that it is artificial. Not to harp on this as an example but the kiosk kids know what is being said about them on social media and elsewhere, but they continue to dutifully pump out phony and fallacious accounts of their triumphs and their engagements with assholes like me to demonstrate that they actively captain the helm of their (doomed) ship. They do not actively captain the helm of their ship. They don’t even know what is going on out here, relying instead on social media reports to feed the puny public image that they care and that they want to be beloved members of the community.

Today was… today. So much passing through this head but not enough time to type it all.