French politicians have passed a bill that will ban social media use by under-15s, a move championed by President Emmanuel Macron as a way to protect children from excessive screen time.
The year is 204X in the United Soviet States of America. Its the end of my first term at Michael Parenti Technical Highschool, and I’m late for homeroom.
I make it to my desk just before the bell rings, and it looks like attendance hasn’t been taken yet. I pull my Tuxbook T40 out of my bag.
It weighs like 20lbs, its battery light is amber, I’ll have to charge it soon. Its been almost a year since I last plugged it in.
The room is a jumble of humming fans, idle chatter, and the sound of post codes from our laptops.
Our substitute is taking attendance on a note pad, he can’t figure out how to launch the TUI for FOSSschool.
My laptop finally boots. It runs EdtechOS, some atomic Linux distro the Tech Education Workers Collective makes us use.
[ Welcome Student! You have(5)newmessage(s)!]
I type Mail into the terminal. EdtechOS doesn’t have a GUI. Something about ‘unnecessary allocation of labor’
its mostly junk. I have a message from my Political Economy teacher.
She gave my report on the socioeconomic conditions of the Second Great World Anti-Fascist War an F… She said its revisionist, and to see her during my flex period.
No problem, I think to myself, typing pkg --search --remote --regex='.*emacs.*' | pkg --install -. Gnus has me taken care of.
4 hours of config hacking later i can finally read my email. I see a message, “please fix the revisionism in your term paper, if you do not fix it by 11:00 there will be consequences”. I check the clock, its 13:00. My emacs timer i just configured to fetch mail regularly dings, and a new message appears. “Please see me after class” it says.
[ Welcome Student! You have (5) new message(s)!]Amber.
Good bot