HONESTY IN SPEECH VII – Emotive Engines

Can a head ever beget anything of the heart?

Funny that a writer should ask this of a reader. It’s a bit like asking a fox whether it’s possible for him to raid a chicken coop. Given an audience, that fox may be tempted to share in painstaking (and gory) detail every step of that plan, doomed as it is to succeed every time.

For those who wish to see precisely that, I suggest watching Fantastic Mr. Fox . To have the answer to the original question, we will have to understand how emotive engines work.

In the following two pieces, written within the last year, look for the phrases in bold to parse the emotions used to drive the narrative. For example, in the first story, the emotions expressed in the first two paragraphs are, in that order: nostalgia for a simpler time; fear of being fooled, fear of the unnatural, fear of lives degenerating into entropy, fear of being fooled; nostalgia for a simpler time.

Thus, nostalgia – an emotion rooted in memory; that most precious human faculty apart from the five senses and reason – bookends that most primal emotion: fear. The reader is interested – “whatever next?” – on the most basic level, primed for whatever other emotions the ensuing paragraphs may bring. They happen to be uncertainty; disgust and the feeling of being polluted and surrounded; danger and dismay (in bold), but the reader must read until the end no matter what s/he uncovers, as the curiosity circuits have been started up.

(Scroll down for a breakdown of the emotive engines used in the second piece.)

End of the World Dept.

Meager boulder, intraterrestrial

“Plastic rocks?!

You read that right.

There was a time – Earth Science class in junior high school – when there were three types of rock to know about: sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic. Not too long ago, there was even a time when continents of trash in the open ocean were the type of plastic we had to worry about. Now, pieces of rock and unwanted plastic have come together into a monster born of everyone’s business – but, this time, no one wants anything to do with them.

Plastic rocks. What are they?

Allow us to illustrate with an analogy. Fool’s gold looks like gold, but isn’t. It’s a base metal (pyrite) masquerading as a precious one – gold. Plastic rocks look like rocks, but aren’t, really. They’re Frankensteinian amalgams of silt, sand, plastic, and the sundry pulp and detritus of human lives rendered as suitably unsightly clumps masquerading as real rocks or stones – the sort from which you would construct a building back when buildings were built of stone and there was no plastic on the planet.

Frankenstones, for short.

Alternately called plastistone, plastiglomerate, plasticrust, plastitar, plastisandstone, and anthropoquinas by scientists, the formations are uniformly off-putting in appearance. Their provenance is more a matter of debate: disparate ingredients melded as a result of being burned in a campfire, or small plastic particles hammered into rocks by waves continuously slamming into them are the two leading theories. Predictably, the prevalence of Frankenstones is greater in some places: cities, mulched agricultural soils, plastic-waste dumping sites.

The strange, ugly, environmentally hazardous amalgam of rock pieces and polymers from discarded plastic is now found across the globe – both on the coast and inland, in 11 countries and 5 continents. Plastic rocks have been discovered in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Hawaii, India, Italy, Japan, Peru, Portugal, the Spanish Canary Islands, and the U.K.

The increased prevalence of Frankenstones illustrates the extent of plastic pollution throughout the world and poses a danger to the sustainability of ocean life, and ultimately to human health, through their leaching of microplastics back into the ocean that had once shaped them. Thus, ugly though they are, plastic rocks would illustrate the beauty of the circle of life were they not contributing to an environmental death spiral by being a hazard to most living things, and thus truly ugly inside and out.

We wish everyone a fantastic weekend.”

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Take whiffs of borderline conspiracy theory, a pinch of something vaguely scientific, and a reference to eons and evolution in the same phrase, and then a renaissance, and you have a recipe long used by science-fiction writers – especially those of the industrialist sub-genre – who, it turns out, must first bring a civilization down, then employ smart-sounding scientific jargon and great (robot-assisted) human effort to make it all whole again. (Of course, there is also dystopian fiction, which reverses the process, but that’s a conversation for another Honesty in Speech.) To round out the list of emotive engines used in the first two paragraphs, let us mention: cheering on for the little guy / underdog; staring down an existential threat; surviving against all odds; improbably making it after all; and lasting into the present.

Once the reader gets a taste for the tale of a scrappy fighter – the emotions set off by triggers set out in italics above – read on s/he must. Imagine test tubes filled with dopamine, the levels regularly topped up by mentions of the corresponding trigger emotions (in bold) as the story unfolds.

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Comeback of the Year

Blackberry Fields Forever

“If you had all of a sudden learned that blackberries smartly employ a special mechanism evolved over millions of years to exploit the winter solstice so as to more efficiently spring back to life in the spring, you might think, ‘Good for you, blackberry, you resilient little fruit!’ Now, if you heard that BlackBerry was trying to use that same special day – December 21, 2023, the dark nadir after which things can only get better – to stage an incredible and unlikely comeback, you would be forgiven for thinking, ‘How are they even still around – that resilient little firm?’

Of course, berries first appeared about 66 million years ago, just as dinosaurs were getting ready to stomp off into the sunset – and when that sun did set, as clouds of dust from pulverized rocks blocked out the sun for anywhere from 2 to 15 years (analyst consensus of 8) berries were one of the tiny survivors that have lasted into the here and now.

Founded in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario as Research in Motion or RIM, the company released its first device, a pager capable of email, in 1999. Following the release of the company's first smartphone in 2002, BlackBerrys quickly became must-have pieces of technology, first among businesspeople and later the general public. However, in the early 2010s they struggled to keep pace with competition in the smartphone market. In 2016, RIM announced it would outsource all hardware production to other companies, instead focusing on software development.

RIM has a history of standing strong in the face of adversity. During the 11 September attacks, its network remained intact when other wireless systems broke down. From 2003 to 2006, RIM fought a patent infringement suit before a settlement was made for US$612.5 million. Revenue in that year’s fourth quarter suffered, as the number of BlackBerry subscribers fell by 120,000 as the uncertainty created by the lengthy litigation caused US customers to defer planned BlackBerry purchases. Still, the company survived the setback and went on to claim 30% of the U.S. smartphone market the following year, which was also the year when the iPhone, with its keyboardless touchscreen, superior operating system, and eventual App Store ecosystem, came out. Despite appeasing customers by launching keyboardless touchscreen devices as well as hybrids, BlackBerry was never able to surpass the iPhone’s sales numbers.

In 2015, the company’s focus then shifted to the development of device-management software, which helps businesses track employee phones to keep sensitive company information secure, and next year, BlackBerry announced it would leave the smartphone manufacturing business.

In July 2017, the National Security Agency (NSA) endorsed BlackBerry’s software for encrypting phone calls and text messages. As a result, BlackBerry gained the approval necessary to sell its commercial encryption software, SecuSUITE, to members of the US government.

Around the time of the winter solstice, RIM announced that it had appointed John Giamatteo, the head of its cybersecurity unit, as CEO, shelving a plan to spin off its Internet of Things (IoT) business. As an internal hire, the new CEO comes at a bargain price and is looking to reduce expenses as part of the company's restructuring. RIM/BlackBerry, which, as it abandoned consumer-focused smartphone hardware, had slipped off of most people's radar, turns out to be not just alive, but even quietly thriving.

In late-2023, the company reported a surprise quarterly profit on the back of resilient demand for cybersecurity services amid rising online threats (as we've written in our recent Signal From Noise publication). Overall IT spending has contracted over the past year, but cybersecurity-related expenditure has remained stable as businesses and governments spend to buttress their systems against hackers. Recently, casino giants such as MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment famously experienced large data breaches, thrusting the need to prioritize cybersecurity into the spotlight.

Looks like BlackBerry is using the same putative evolutionary hack of its namesake to stage a comeback for the ages – and the sky, now reliably cleared of all that post-asteroid dust, is the limit.”

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