The Siren's Code

Cancel culture

A smattering of scantily clad gap year packers sauntered past her, a shining example of everything she was not. They always looked like they were having so much fun, with lots of friends and self assurance, all things Cassie at that moment felt she lacked. Yes she had her principles, she was not a traveller but a worker and an integrator, but she sighed, there definitely seemed to be an unwritten etiquette surrounding them that even if she wanted to join in where did she find the rule book?

Putting her 'everything's fine' face on, she grabbed the tray, cloth and eco-product Bear had put on the bar and walked to the nearest table that needed clearing, the restaurant was buzzing already, the day arming up to another heatwave. Neatly and as quietly as she could as she liked to listen in on conversations – always a source of interesting comment, people were a lot less guarded on holiday, open to discussion and receptive to opinion which gave Cassie a snapshot of what people actually thought about life, and today it seemed everything was definitely not fine.

She stacked the stuff on the tray, clearing up all the used napkins and empty sauce sashes, putting the tops back on the chill flakes, salt, pepper, sugar and all back into the holder in the middle of the table.

As Brexit and QAnon had faded into history and Covid was just another strain of common cold, there were other elements of human existence rising to fill their void. Kids who had grown up on TikTok had moved on and as a generation lead by Greta Thunberg they were socially aware, scathingly sustainable, quick to 'get' a brand, savvy enough to see through it, and now with the rise of a new app called Boicot their opinion counted. If a brand rose up to significance and did it in any other than an exemplary way then people pledged to boycott it on Boicot, and as it gathered traction a business could literally wake up one morning to find their customers were gone. 'Vote with your thumbs', being one of Boicot's less imaginative straplines. The name, a play on words from 'boy' to the more fluid 'boi'.

There were many success stories heralded across the app and AI driven advertising. There is the hole in the ozone layer for one, or lack of it predicted by the end of the 30's. This, the prophets of the app put down to the large Boicot of greenhouse gas emitting brands – not as yet confirmed as factually correct.

There were the unscrupulous corporations coaxed to change their ways or market-places that had lost theirs, all replaced with thriving entrepreneurs. Where there had been one behemoth there were now many happy small businesses budding through. Reminiscent of when the dark web's Silk Road was cut down. A triumph in early clunky cyber policing, but just as quick as it went down a plethora of smaller more agile Silk Lanes popped up, bad news for law enforcement, and perhaps this situation wasn't turning out to be so different.

In the face of it, what Boicot facilitated was most definitely bringing it back to the people. Something petitions, strikes, protests and riots of the past decade had not managed to do. It was an interesting premise, at its heart is altruism, 'I will Boicot _______ for its single use plastic, or stop eating _______, for the destruction it causes and I will stop wearing _______, until they are ethically certified by the FTI (Fashion Transparency Index).

Everyone has a cause, something worth fighting for, and so to go without to make the world a better place is a small price to pay. A pledge is placed on the app, backed up by a declaration selected from a drop down of current declarations. Then once authorised it is listed as live Boicot – Boicotters have to earn the right to add new declarations through positive app activity... thinly veiled addiction.

With the power of influencers, whether self made or substantially backed, waggonists were again at play, and ironically there was little evidence of fact checking in the authorisation process so the weight of Boicots and the speed at which they could flip left some perfectly legit, sustainable and good businesses quickly and without warning plummet into bankruptcy and beyond, through no fault of their own. The power of this app was getting so strong that CEO's, COOs, and an array of Brand Ambassadors were being hauled in front of government panels to try to 'understand' and force the app to 'self regulate' not something a platform making a lot of money and promoting free speech was keen to do.

This coupled with WikiLeaks about unethical funding, under age users, that lack of fact checking, corporate espionage and environmental damage, was creating a new headache in the realms of Tech Giants in the twenties. Where there had been waves, there was now a tsunami. Think TikTok where every like had the power to destroy someone's livelihood.

The app had a leaderboard to expose how brands were fairing, the higher up the leaderboard the less customers they were getting. This was volatile and, on occasion, detrimentally affecting money and conglomerate markets around the world, making those with big bucks – and therefore usually their own say in make or break of businesses – quite angry at their loss of control, taking it upon themselves to offer up their own form of retaliation which was now coming back to bite the very armchair warriors the app had given so much power and kudos to in the first place.

The sting in the tail here, and what general conversation in the restaurant seemed to be about, was that this was not the final move from black to green energy, the ethical diamond in the Climate for Good initiative, but instead a cluster fuck of strikes over the Christmas period. Meaning some holiday makers were stranded as their flights home were grounded, cities were having timed black outs, lorries were nose to tail up miles of motorway, containerships stuck in transit, not only were people and presents not getting through but worst of all they couldn't facetime their loved ones at Christmas.

No one, it seemed, had taken into account, or no one merrily Boicotting each day on the app anyway, that these same very companies with all the money they had made from 'bad' energy had over the years been the highest investor in green alternatives, carbon capture and geoengineering R&D, meaning not only was bad energy going off grid but all energy, the clean energy pioneers suddenly finding themselves in just the same pickle.

Everyone had an opinion, Boicotters were surreptitiously 'Un-Boiccotting' as the world was back to the equivalent of lock downs and shortages akin to the beginning of the Covid crisis.

Here, due to Remi's foresight and Bear's brilliance, Isla de Blanca wasn't much affected as it had always styled itself on self sufficiency and sustainability, along with the military grade fibre optic, which Remi had somehow managed to get, by 'pulling a few strings', the island was running as normal. This gave it a bit of a Blitz feel, no one could go home, the world was coming to a standstill but the party must go on.