This morning, thousands of people received a text message from a mysterious number. And this is how the message ran:
Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.
Or, at least, that's what it would have said had it been in English and not in Ukrainian.
Yes, if you were in the city of Kiev during the riots that took place last night or some time thereafter or something (I don't really have the details, I'm not CCN), then you may have received a polite message from the Ukrainian government letting you know that they, quite literally, have your number and if you don't stop throwing bricks or punching policeman or whistling in the dark (again, I don't really have the details, I'm not CCN), then you can rest assured that the next text message you receive will be less polite... maybe even fatal.
Okay, so maybe that last bit where I implied that the Ukrainian government has the ability to send SMS messages with the power to take lives isn't true (in my defense, I once received a chain message that said if I didn't say the name of my crush into a mirror five times she'd get voodoo-murdered, so I'm constantly on the lookout for killer text messages) but the rest of what I wrote is reasonably accurate and, today, the mainstream media has been abuzz, awash and, indeed, all ago-go with articles peppered with the word "Orwellian" to the point that they're a little hard to swallow without sneezing so hard that the eyes you tried to roll out yesterday rocket out of their sockets, fly across the dining table and kill your butler.
The trouble is, of course, that we already know that the people in charge are watching every little, mundane, boring, fart-of-a-thing we do under their microscopes - like they're the anythings from Mars we were once told the chances of them coming from Mars were a million to one, they said.
That's why, when Edward Snowden blew his "look-out-they're-listening-to-your-calls-and-reading-your-emails" whistle, it made a raspy wet noise, as if it were filled with the seaweed of our already knowing that, thank you very much - because it had been filled with that very seaweed!
We all know that our electronic messages and magic-talking-box conversations are being monitored by men in trench coats sitting in dank cubicles eating pistachio nuts and spitting the salty shells into overflowing bins in front of giant tape-machines that fill up the bulk of their offices. We've known that since the 70s, for Gorbachev's sake!
And who cares if the big-big-big-big are listening to our private chinwags or reading about how much milk is in the fridge and the ensuing argument about whose turn it is to buy some more? I mean, we live in a world where most of us voluntarily give up that kind of personal information anyway, on this, the internet.
You've told advertisers what to advertise at you under the false assumption that the people who know you also want to know that you prefer Nutella to peanut butter. You've openly admitted that you think someone should smash Sarah's head in with a length of rusty pipe, thus giving the police a nice lead if Sarah's head is ever found smashed in with a length of rusty pipe. I have, literally, just this second, no word of a lie, received a text message from O2 about a competition to win BAFTA tickets based, I am sure, on the fact that I often send tweets via my O2 phone and they are, on occasion, about films and television.
We will let anyone read our Facebook wall to avoid the inconvenience of having to type out our email address and password again.
So the Ukrainian government sent text messages to people in and around Kiev in order to dissuade those planning to riot from doing so?
Well, whoop-dee-fucking-do!
Wake me up when something unexpected happens.
