It’s a Forbidden Friday!

We’ve had to give this Betabot a special designation: F-1. It is the first (and perhaps the last) of a remarkable line of Betabots- The Forbidden. Like all Betabot’s, The Forbidden have a mission to communicate, but the “Eefs” focus on communicating though- and about- fear.

Meet F-1*BETA,

Or as it has been nicknamed by the Lab Techs; the “Betabomb”.

The reason for this nickname becomes clear after review of this video of F-1’s operation.

F-1 was meant to challenge observers hollywoodized ideas of what a bomb is- what it looks like, sounds like, and how it operates- but precisely because of the way it communicates about the fear of terrorist bombings, the F-1, has, regretfully, been determined to only be suitable for a controlled environment and inappropriate for field-testing.

When conceiving this Betabot, it was felt that the fact that an observer could cancel F-1’s one-minute countdown at anytime after they, themselves, had initiated it- would be enough to prevent a possible… over-reaction by an observer. However, after consultation with several special analysts the decision was made to never release F-1*BETA into the Toronto urban environment. Instead, the F-1 will be broken down and salvaged for parts.

If I may use this report to state my personal opinion for a moment, I would like to say that I maintain my faith in the populace of Toronto’s ability to interact with Betabots in a curious, levelheaded way- without panicking or being reduced to quivering victims of a culture of fear-conditioning.

That said, I do recognize that the greatest risk with all of the Betabots is the fact that they use electronics and wires- and are unexpected objects installed within public space. In today’s world, anything matching that profile runs the risk of being misidentified as a bomb. Most Betabots are made with an attempt to diminish that risk, but the F-1, by its very design, strains that risk to the absolute limit of the breaking point- and that is unallowable.

Even accepting this, I would like to reiterate that I still feel strongly that there is room in this world for a really excellent Betabot (or perhaps some other sort of experiment) that comments, criticizes, and challenges contemporary attitudes surrounding risk identification & management- and related issues such as our current obsession with “security theater”- but I’ve come to concede that this Betabot isn’t that experiment.