CLEARVIEW AI

by Alan Walowitz

So the way it works is that you upload someone's face—a photo of someone—to the Clearview AI app, and then it will return to you all the places on the internet where that person's face has appeared, along with links to those photos. —Kashmir Hill, author, Your Face Belongs to Us, on Fresh Air, September 28, 2023

 

The haze stalls long enough

to allow us to continue our work:

to make ourselves seem here, and not here,

in equal measure—to assure anonymity

yet convince the world, and us, we’re real.

Our wish to be seen, but not a target,

of the law or of derision.

Though it might be wise to wear bright colors

when we walk among the trees.

 

The sun in our eyes or an unsteady hand

might account for any low resolution,

what the app might call, Failure to recognize. 

Still, we might someday desire

to see the face from our dreams,

who’s bound to be found, among the billions

of images kept in the cloud

for moments when we’re lonely.

 

No one owns our face, we claim,

not the sun, or the trees, or the gently bleeding sky

where our image has been scraped from the assorted

public places we’ve foolishly lent ourselves.

This the price for being bound to this planet?

Though, in the end, perhaps a Court will claim,

we had no inherent interest being here. 

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.

FLASH NEWS

by Angelica Whitehorne

I heard there was a time when the news was dropped off at your front door, tightly wrapped like a present of sorts and printed with dark black importance on the backs of dead trees, your unrolling of the world’s enrichment, the first sacrifice of your morning, right after sleeping, the last sacrifice of night and right before your first ritualistic kitchen devour. And I imagine how these readers of past would go to find a place, probably the same place as last week, and flap open the butterfly wings of the newspaper, nonchalantly hungry for the best worked happenings, so they could go into the talks of their day feeling primed, well read, and ready, aficionado on stock prices, lost dogs, drug scandals. And how sweet it must have been to read the typing of the world, curated and succinct. And even more how sublime it must have been to have it all end, to put the paper down and be done with it, close your shades to society and its grimy violence, back deals, syrupy success stories, headlines of hazard. To go about your day untethered to it—now the news envelops us always. I open the app to see my friend’s faces and there it is, news of a baby falling from a 12-story building. I scroll to my home screen and Apple positions all the world’s affairs in front of my eyes, and it is like lightning across the window of my phone, who could manage to look away? Our world is like a car crash, no like a highway pile up, and all these news sites are like watching the fenders collide into each other over and over again. The notifications announce themselves to me this midday and I see that another story of nature’s revenge, hurricane or tsunami or landslide has come, I slide the message away, but I do not turn them off. Turning them off would be like turning away from the awful. I grow guilty whenever I do not hold the tragedy of these stories second hand, continual consumption seems the least I can do. Me and my entire generation have lost our ability to put the paper down, and so we read from morning to night and roll it all over a second time in our dreams, almost as penance for the bad news not having our name in it. 

Angelica Whitehorne is a New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, and Hooligan Magazine among others.

UBER UNSAFE

by Susan Vespoli

"Uber's Approach to Safety"

Uber said on Thursday that it had reports of 3,045 sexual assaults during its rides in the United States in 2018, with nine people murdered and 58 killed in crashes, in its first study detailing unsafe incidents on the ride-hailing platform. —The New York Times, December 5, 2019


Atop Uber’s report
about 3,045 sexual assaults
by its drivers is a photo of two
                        beautiful women
customers, one
                        clad in a sleeveless
dress, bare legs, the other in tight
                        denim jeans, bare midriff. Of course, Uber-
employed drivers would be
                        enticed to rape
female riders, to
                        fuck or fondle them if they
get into cars wearing revealing
                        get-ups like that. Spoiler alert:
hip-app swipe of Uber equals the
                        hazards of hitchhiking. But,
it’s just a fraction of 1.3 billion rides
                        in 2018, company spokesmen
jaw their jargon of
                        justification.
Kind of ironic,
                        keen of Uber’s
legal team to
                        let this disclosure drop
mid-impeachment
                        media mayhem when
news watchers would be focused on
                        notorious nuggets
other than the apparently now common
                        occurrence of
passengers assaulted by
                        predators who supposedly passed
quasi-background checks, drivers who
                        quietly waited behind wheels
ready for
ride-hailers who
trusted a company
                        to take them
somewhere
                        safely. 3,045 in one year
unwittingly became
                        Uber’s
victims of lack of
                        vigilance.
“What it says is that Uber is a reflection of the society it serves,” is Tony
                        West’s (Uber’s chief legal officer) way to
(e)xcuse,
                        explain away, exonerate, shrug
your concerns off,
                        “yes, but” your fears, your outrage at their
zest for profit, their lack of
zealous background checks in the first place

Susan Vespoli is a poet/writer who splits her time between Arizona and Washington state and who will no longer use Uber as part of her transport equation. Her work has been published in spots such as Rattle, Mom Egg Review, Nasty Women Poets, TheNewVerse.News, and Nailed Magazine.