A Sea of Talk

Simon Gautier, a young French hiker, died from a hemorrhage after falling down into a ravine and breaking both legs in the Cilento region, Southern Italy. After his fall, Simon made a last, desperate emergency call from his cellphone on August 9. “Help me, I see the sea but I don’t know where I am”, he whispered, but rescuers and searchers will only find him after nine days, when it was just too late. Indeed, autopsy says he died very quickly, so maybe nothing could have been done anyway. And yet this story, already tragic in itself, sounds like an Armageddon for mankind, if you only think that sophisticated and invasive GPS localisation systems allow Big Brother to constantly track you for any nefarious desire in your heart while in car, bed, toilet, shower, and so on, but all his AI and robot-Supermen hadn’t been able to find or help a man who fell into a ravine and phoned for rescue. I don’t say Big Brother’s guilty. I just say that something is rotten in the state of Big Brotherland. Photo © KrisVlad.