I wanted a Secret Sender 6000 so bad, growing up. It wouldn’t have done me any good— no one else I knew had one. My infared pulses about farts, homework and angry librarians would have faded into the atmosphere every time, cementing the alienation of my lonely, pre-cyber youth. But what if I wasn’t alone? What if all my classmates were wielding Secret Senders, sending out insurrectionary missives 28 characters at a time (and you thought Twitter was constricting)? We could have built an underground telecommunication system connecting elementary school classrooms across the globe— a decentralized peer-to-peer network liberating students from the authority of their parents and teachers!

The New York Times reported this week on iPhone-related mistrials. There’s an epidemic, apparently, of jurors accessing the Internet from their phones to look up prejudicial information, text confidential trial tidbits, and tweet jury-room secrets. The Secret Sender’s fantasy of easy disobedience within the educational system has begotten the reality of total structurelessness within the system of criminal justice. Did Casio Cool not think of the ramifications?! Need I mention the havoc and disarray that supposedly secret texts have wrought across the cultural landscape? Kwame Kilpatrick? Chris Brown? Nonetheless, our telecommunication dream come true is not a total dystopia: secret messages are finally being used for the spontaneous outbreak of benign, faux-subversive fun that Casio promised us, in the form of flash mobs. Pillow fight!! Pass it on.