talonkarrde | Cupertino effect

It was marketed first as a treatment for those who had Tourette's — specifically, those that had the verbal tics where they would swear uncontrollably. Conceptual Medical, the company that brought it to market, said that would censor some of the most offensive things that sufferers said, turn them into a better form. It wouldn't cure them and didn't promise to, but what it claimed is that they could do this procedure on a person and render their tic much more unoffensive to the public, and thereby decrease the shame they suffered.

They had passed the USFDA's pre-clinical and clinical trials without a hitch, as it happened, and was able to persuade one of their clinical test subjects to become the face of their marketing campaign. He was a pretty typical everyman: A Ronald Johnson, age 28, friendly and affable, with a wife and a three year old, a good job, a nice house.

Oh, and an unfortunate propensity to yell 'fuck' every couple of minutes in conversation.

In their initial reveal, they played a clip of him from years ago, and it was horrible. He was clearly trying to be nice, but it was just terribly distracting, and his message was completely lost. Fucks here and there, every few seconds. But then they brought him out live and had a normal conversation with him, and what do you know — instead of saying 'fuck' every few minutes, he would randomly blurt out 'duck' and 'much' and 'luck' — words that were close in phonemes but distinct, as their linguist explained — but never 'fuck'. I'm sure it sounds a bit silly, but it was something that was much less distracting. For me, it was simply easier to dismiss as an odd tick. Sometimes, he would even be able to control it, and say 'good - Luck!' which was almost natural.

It was a hit, of course: the treatment was spread widely, all under ConMed's guidance and profits. After the initial surge of interest from those who suffered from verbal tics,it started spreading to others — wives wanted it for their dirty-talking husbands, and parents wanted it for their children that had such foul mouths they couldn't believe. It wasn't too many hops and skips away before the government was met with a challenge on the legalities of giving it to others — specificall children — and in one of the most honored/reviled cases of the twenty-second century, Lindson v. Conceptual Medical, the Supreme Court declared that parents had the right to subject their children to the treatment, that it fell under the rights granted to parents, even though this was a neurological change that was being proposed. While the dissent was fierce, it ultimately made no difference.

As for the effect — the world held its breath as popular opinion was that you shoudl give your children this treatment, in the same way that you should vaccinate them. In a way, it was just another type of vaccination, many parents thought. Well, in the decade after Lindson, playgrounds got friendlier. And then, unsurprisingly, high schools got friendlier as well. And society in general became more polite — sure, there were the dissenters talking about free will and every person being responsible for their own soul, but by and large, it was about the effect, and not about the means.

For a time, it looked like it was a great solution, and people started wondering what else could be done — other words or concepts to be tweaked, perhaps? No more hate speech? Written changes as well as verbal ones?

But then, one of first children that was subject to the treatment went from being Mr. Dawson to Senator Dawson, and was in public making a speech about domestic policy. According to the remarks the press got, he kept trying to say, "We must care for the poor!" and what kept coming out was "We must care for the spoor" — and then "for the lore" — and then "for the Coors", which was might have made some people working there chuckle but wasn't the point. He realized after five or six attempts, and gracefully tried to recover, but the damage was done — it was splashed all over the evening news, and from there, other cases started to surface. Apparently, the language block was affecting more than just a specific set of words that ConMed promised, and had started expanding to other, perfectly innocuous words. And for these people that had been subject to the treatment for decades, it wasn't simple to reverse it.

When the president of ConMed made a speech to defend it — well, he had been taking the treatment too, as a sign of good faith — and the rest is history: "We believe strongly in our copulation with the government to resolve this issue." That was pretty much the end of ConMed, and certainly the end of the procedure, named after an old, old century's poor autocorrect failure.