In response to the recent citations of four Mountain Justice student protesters, MJ has decided to dramatically escalate their divestment campaign. In order to do so, MJ has enlisted the help of a large team of computer science and engineering students to fully automate the divestment campaign. With the help of a web crawler, Facebook chat bot, and neural network, MJ will be emailing a new divestment petition to every current Swarthmore student, every newly admitted member of the class of 2021, every living Swat alumnus, and unfortunately more than a few deceased alumni. This petition will include a new feature for alumni where they can list dollar amounts of donations that they’re not giving to the school because of the college’s refusal to divest. Although the petition is expected to yield signatures far exceeding the size of the present student body, the petition will likely not return a number of signatures rivalling the size of the endowment and will therefore be entirely ignored by the administration.
“Our new divestment campaign is going to be bigger and better than any divestment campaign so far. Obviously, we’re bringing back the petition, that one’s always a fan favorite. We’re also really going to double down on the sit-ins, because that seems really hot at the moment, but to really make a statement, we’ve decided on a quadruple-headed approach this time and are introducing two entirely new campaign,” said Jessica Terra ‘19.
One new campaign focuses on sending the Board of Managers hourly updates of the number of individuals who’ve signed the petition and the amount of money not donated to the school. To avoid the MJ email address simply being blacklisted, MJ is asking students to install a new app they’ve created on their cell phones which will rotate between users of the app, occasionally utilizing the user’s phone to email, text, call, fax, and LinkedIn DM members of the Board of Managers. The app will be available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and Nokia flip phone and the the hourly update duties will be distributed among the set of users using a neural network.
The sit-in protest will also be fully automated. Engineering students have constructed a group of humanoid robots which will sit in the offices of Vice President of Finances and Administration Gregory Brown, Chief Investment Officer Mark Amstutz, Associate Dean of Students Nathan Miller, and President Valerie Smith for an indefinite period of time. In order to comply with the Student Code of Conduct, these robots will be fully functional personal assistants, assisting (and not interfering with) the day to day work of the administrators. In order to be effective as a protest, however, the robots will continuously emit subliminal pro-divestment messages, which largely consist of polar bear trivia. The technology, of course, utilizes neural networks to govern the robot’s administrative assistant capabilities.
When it was pointed out to MJ that these robots probably are already against the Student Code of Conduct and, if not, definitely will be by next year when the college updates the Code of Conduct to bar even more forms of student protest, MJ members responded by saying that the robots probably don’t count as students and can’t be cited and weigh approximately 800 pounds each so it’s not like PubSafe could really move them even if they wanted to.
The fourth head of MJ’s new quadruple headed approach is an innovative new protest technique where MJ is combining their Responsible Endowments Fund with a million layer neural network to actively target the college’s fossil fuel investments and decrease their value through a series of minor market exchanges indecipherable to the human mind.
“To be honest, I’m not even sure what this one does. It sort of makes sense, but this isn’t something that should actually work, is it?” said MJ member someone someone.
“This should definitely not work,” said Associate Professor of Computer Science, someone someone.
MJ to fully automate divestment protest process
