Fear not. Science, corporate America, and government bureaucrats are teaming up to keep better tabs on your children by digitizing them better.
In a creepy new video from Microsoft and Los Angeles’s public school district, the narrator asks, “Has this conversation taken place in your home?” before the video zooms in on a cartoon child who says, “Mom, I’m scared about going back to school. I don’t wanna get sick, and I don’t wanna get you and Dad sick.” Yes, there are students who are scared of returning to school, but that’s not the real locus of fear here.
Back in the summer, only 20% of parents told Gallup that their children had expressed any fear for their safety at school. The baseline here is 10%, so that’s 1 in 10 children who seemed to worry about COVID-19 safety. And that was back before millions of students returned to school for some or part of the school year this year, producing a near consensus that school reopening was safe.
The real locus of fear is, of course, the teachers unions. “I can’t teach from a coffin!” they declared in a now-cliched protest sign. The National Education Association even put live a database of teacher deaths in September, falsely implying that infections over summer vacation showed in-person teaching to be a death sentence.
But channeling teacher fears through a computer-generated child wasn’t the creepy part of this video. The Microsoft kiddie bar code was.
The third-grade students in the video, after scheduling their in-house weekly coronavirus tests and filling out a health questionnaire, get a printable bar code, line up outside Los Feliz Elementary, and are one kiddie barcode by one kiddie barcode scanned in by a handheld laser scanner.
In an eerily cheery voice, the narrator explains that Daily Pass is part of the regimen that “our scientists tell us” people “must do to stay safe.” Can’t disobey “our scientists”! That would be anti-science. You’re not anti-science, are you? So, you should be happy that “your school, with the help of Microsoft Corporation, has created another” … thing we must do to stay safe.
The more musts, the better!
In an introductory video, before tossing to Microsoft’s vice president of modern life, Superintendent Austin Beutner calls Daily Pass “a real breakthrough for keeping your child safe when they come back to school.” Increasingly, “keeping your child safe,” even more so than “keeping you safe,” is a code word for some ominous totalitarian innovation by people in power.
Microsoft’s VP for modernity speaks earnestly and gently about satisfying the needs of “educators, students, and their caregivers.” You see, “teachers” and “parents” as words are too fleshy and particular. In the corporatized modern life that now includes your child’s school, we insist on blander, less human words.
But why limit it to school? Why not bar-code all students at all times? You know, to keep them safe.
