T’was the night of halloween, and all through the smart shity,
goblins and ghouls were stirring, ready to get busy,
with expanding surveillance furthering control by cops and the state,
we all are called to retaliate.
so come gather near, with all the tricks you can bring,
and show your rejection of homegrown companies no different than flock and ring.
Summoned by these verses, fifty tricksters descended on Willowdale Avenue, to the Outremont lair of Pierre Racz on Halloween night.
Pierre is none other than CEO and founder of Genetec, the local surveillance technology enterprise responsible for supplying Flock-style automated licence plate readers (ALPRs) to the SPVM. Genetec’s shapeshifting PR measures fail to entrance us (we are not journalists for La Presse), and our visit left several tokens of our malign antipathy toward mass surveillance in all its forms. Our fireworks dazzled the trick-or-treating neighbors, who were handed flyers enumerating Pierre’s misdeeds. Eggs and toilet paper were tossed to redecorate the multi-million-dollar home. Upon which the word PERVERT was scrawled, blood-red.
When our haunting chants — and ringing the doorbell — lured him from his home, the graceless truth was laid bare for all to see: behind an empire of technological dystopia, which would crush the most vivid dream of freedom in exchange of the most meagre profit, stands a monster, yes, yet a man of flesh and blood, of stiff, hobbling gait, straining but accomplishing nothing, who cannot fathom the earthly ills that await his hellish plans.
We are watching you, Pierre.