Who are you, and what do you do?
hi hello this is avocado. tyvm for asking. Avocado is a fruit. It tweets. At first for about 10,000 years avocado was just a fruit and didn't tweet, and tbh that was fine too, but now it tweets and plays with other human technology at a shockingly amateurish level that people still seem to enjoy; for example, avocado's Twine game, the time it made guacamole with Michel Foucault, and breathing.website, which just launched to several retweets' worth of acclaim tyvm.
Sometimes people will say an avocado can't make tweets, but come on. There's really good voice recognition software now. Accessibility is important and you'd better design it into everything, designer humans. (Avocado's websites are never as accessible as they could be, but no one is paying for them also? So avocado apologizes while encouraging the people whose job it is to do things well to do things well.)
But you asked "who are you" and that's, like most, a slippery subject for avocado and at various times the answer has been various people. Right now it's one person. Some people know exactly who that is, which is a good safety mechanism in case suddenly avocado goes bad (classic avocado tbh), and others sometimes get curious, and most don't care at all, which seems best to avocado because you wouldn't recognize the name if you heard it, it's not like this is a side project by Enya, although if you're reading this, Enya, hi from an avocado ilu, and at least one person has asked never ever to find out that avocado is anything other than a talking avocado that tweets thoughts about capitalism. So avocado tries to honor everyone's privacy and preferences around that and keeps tweeting and also keeps waiting for an email from Enya. Which seems to be the human condition mostly too?
What hardware do you use?
Are you asking which logo is on the silicon and aluminum mined by let's face it children actual child-size small humans real children are doing some of this work in 2016 and processed in factories (let's get back to hardware) by workers who probably lack the protections won for so many people over a long span of time by violence and labor unions and whose actual human death-is-coming life expectancy is lowered by their exposure to heavy metals, polluted water, and stress while above them sit supervisors and boards of directors and chiefs who believe themselves to have earned pay that's let's say about 300 times more if we're going to be demure about it and defend the destruction of a social safety net, a destruction performed by laws written by lobbyists who are freely able to visit doctors at all times, a destruction by these colonizing capitalist tax-avoiding firms lowering effective wages and increasing the divide between rich and poor while shedding companies' liability for the welfare of the human beings producing their profits through labor, where all of it - the supply chain, the abuses of labor, the human beings who can be fired or exiled or killed with little consequence just for being trans or tired or born in a particular place in the world, the idea of desert in the sense of (1) executives deserving their pay in a world that has this world's history and (2) a desolate landscape where only highly adapted life survives and (3) a feeling of abandonment - is a prerequisite for reading tweets from an avocado? It's an apple.
And what software?
[tk detailed description of the composition of avocado flesh and the processes of photosynthesis]
Also archive.org a surprising amount. Wikipedia. Tor. MUBI is very interesting as an indulgence. This is a good place probably to mention the Callisto project to make reporting sexual violence easier and safer. None of this software lives exclusively on an avocado's computer, how 2016.
What would be your dream setup?
ok remember trees? Enya did a whole album on this so you're probably up to speed but trees also remember things; you can tell because a tree's memory is an accumulation of carbon and a certain volume of cleaner air. It sounds like hippie stuff sure but what's wrong with sounding like hippie stuff and also you can measure carbon capture and air quality. Well, for a big enough "you." From now on that's the "you" avocado has in mind. Trees collect what you produce and make the world better so trees are also like libraries.
That's maybe a good place to start: there are places that ideally would become inviolate palaces, where your wealth, human society's wealth, could flow to be made available for absolutely everyone to use all the time forever (avocado knows the sun will go away but you're not planning anywhere near that far ahead tbh and anyway the question is about ideals so ideally maybe the sun wouldn't explode? or maybe it will be great who knows tbh). Libraries, parks, community gardens, hospitals, transportation hubs (but for the hubs themselves, the materials and the staff and the perpetual upkeep, not the consultants submitting plans about which mall shops go where), the unbelievably fast trains powered by nuclear fusion (their own or the sun's, you can figure out the details) running between those hubs, all of those would ideally be palaces. Your palaces, all of you, free. But if everyone is going to use them, you're going to need to close a lot of prisons and free the human beings who have been locked up for the terrible crimes of being born black and/or poor and/or with whatever aspects of biology make some of you nervous (while also that nervousness can be decreased using free and abundant mental health care - you can train people to be careful with each other, isn't that an amazing thing).
Those crimes will need to become not-crimes too, and whenever an avocado says get rid of prisons and crimes and treat each other with care people say other things back at it, but who are you going to trust tbh. In this dream setup, a society, or "you," would meet, acknowledge, accommodate, and encourage the full humanity of every person, which makes things like healthcare and work and education start to look different. Trees will still collect carbon for you. They can't not. People will be themselves still, and more supported during their time on earth. Companies will begin and end and often claim to be helping, but it will invariably be people who help each other. Avocado is a fruit in this vision in case there was any doubt. Enya will probably continue forever, maybe even longer than the sun.
You may have noticed avocado didn't mention states or militaries or the cloud (the cloud is other people's computers) at all. That's true. A trouble with dream setups is that they tend to blithely and dreamily erase things that aren't erasable blithely and dreamily but only through centuries of patient scrubbing. A good thing about dream setups anyway is that sometimes we're all wrong about what can be changed. Sometimes that's everything.
tyvm again for interviewing an avocado this was fun. If there's one thing to remember, it's that avocados used to be dispersed in the poop of giant mammals but now there's Twitter and globalized capitalism.