You Wouldn't Tariff an Email
The holographic display filled the center of Matsu’s workspace, a shimmering tapestry woven from light and data. Tendrils of pulsating cyan and gold represented the sprawling mycelial fiber networks beneath Baltimore. It was a beautiful complex biological system that could be observed through tiny, microscopic sensors.
Matsu leaned forward and traced a flickering anomaly with a stylus, zooming in on a node cluster showing unexpected cadmium uptake.
"Wei, can you confirm the baseline deviation on sample Seven-Three-Five?" he murmured. "Cross-reference the heavy metal ion saturation against the flow rate from three days ago?"
"I'm processing that now," Wei replied over the integrated comms.
Her own focused face appeared in a small inset window on the holo-display's periphery as data streams passed across her view.
"Got it," she observed. "The cadmium's spiking well outside of predictive norms, Matsu. Correlating with the synth-leather tannery discharge schedule... Okay, it looks like there may have been another unscheduled purge."
In another corner of Matsu’s vision, muted on a flat side screen, was the livestream of President Jaxon Buck. His face beamed, flushed and indignant, at a rally somewhere across town. The sound was off but he made his familiar gestures: the jabbing finger, the chopping hand. His intent was clear. Buck was the champion of the "real people" and the scourge of the "screen-gazers".
Wei must've been tuned into the same livestream.
"Hold on," she said, momentarily unmuting the president's voice, catching a fragment of his rant.
"...new tariffs!" Taggard bellowed, his voice sounding tinny through the speakers. "Tariffs on their imported processors! On their fancy cloud computers! On the garbage they feed their minds! It's high time these cyber parasites paid their way!"
The crowd roared, their noise over-saturating the cheap speakers.
Matsu barely looked up from the cadmium spike on-screen.
"More noise," he sighed.
He made a slight adjustment to the nutrient feed and confirmed this change with the holo-display.
"Did that replacement sensor drone for the Epsilon sector arrive, by the way?"
Jia's avatar onscreen rolled her eyes dramatically.
"Stuck in customs, naturally," she reported. "The price jumped thirty percent thanks to the 'Protecting Real Components Act' or whatever the fancy acronym is supposed to stand for. Annoying."
"Can you calibrate the adjacent sensor nodes to compensate for the gap?"
"Yes, I think I can work on that. We shouldn't use too much resolution. It's just friction."
"Exactly, friction," Matsu agreed, muting Buck’s feed again.
The president's angry face was replaced by a calming fractal screensaver. The tariffs on imported, physical goods and the populist grandstanding were just background irritations. It was a bureaucratic inefficiency easily absorbed by minor workarounds. Their attention returned to the MFN display.
"Okay, let's model a remediation pulse. Try the Aspergillus strain to sequester the cadmium before it filters downstream," Matsu suggested, turning his attention back to the network.
Marianne’s office was the antithesis of Matsu’s: cool gray tones, sharp angles, and discreetly humming servers projected an atmosphere of minimalist control. She stood before the president gesturing with a sleek stylus towards a projection displaying economic impact charts. There were flat lines where Buck had expected soaring graphs of pain inflicted upon his opponents.
"As predicted, the physical tariffs inconvenience them," Marianne explained flatly. "They generate some revenue for the government, but they don't fundamentally hurt the remote work sector. Their profit margins aren't tied to the impost cost of a specialized keyboard."
She tapped a section showing digital service subscription prices that haven't changed.
"Their real vulnerability isn't goods, sir. It's flow."
"Flow?" Buck leaned forward over his polished desk with a scowl. His fat finger jabbed the display. "What is flow supposed to mean? Talk English, Marianne."
"The data, sir," she clarified. "Emails. Cloud uploads. Video conferences. The constant exchange of terabytes is their work. That is where their economic value is derived. Their productivity and their global collaboration relies entirely on cheap, unrestricted digital transfer."
She paused, letting the implication hang in the air.
"We should tax that, directly."
A slow understanding dawned in Buck’s eyes. The frustration was replaced by a sinister grin. He slapped his palm onto the desk, spilling coffee from his mug.
"Tax their emails?" he asked, his eyes gleaming. "Tax them sending their spreadsheets?"
The idea was crude. It was brutal. It was perfectly aligned with his desire to punish.
"Do it. Figure it out. Make them hurt."
Marianne nodded.
"I anticipated you might see the strategic value here, sir. I've already started drafting a preliminary policy framework for a 'Digital Integrity and Fair Contribution Act'.
Days later, Buck stood at a podium with Marianne standing composed behind him. Broadcast lights bathed them in a bright warmth. The presidential seal shined on the lectern. Marianne had prepared a statement and placed it in front of him, which he now channeled through populist conviction.
"For too long, foreign data streams have flooded our beautiful info networks. Our digital highways are clogged by corporations and elites who refuse to pay their fair share! Today, I'm taking action," he gestured grandly. "I am enacting the Digital Integrity and Fair Contribution Act!"
He continued, rattling off a series of buzzwords.
"We must secure domestic data sovereignty! Ensure digital commerce contributes to our national prosperity! Level the playing field for real businesses!"
The specifics were glossed over in his speech but journalists were already pouring over the specifics of the act. There were policies defined for "micro-levies on excessive data packets", "bandwidth contribution fees", and "communication surcharges for International bulk transfers". It sounded technical and bureaucratic, almost reasonable.
Behind him, Marianne allowed herself the smallest of smiles.
The announcement of the act landed like a cheap phone on a concrete street. News feeds across the city exploded in a cacophony of confusion and speculation.
DIFCA Sparks Global Condemnation — Legality Questioned!
TECH STOCKS PLUMMET ON DIFCA ANNOUNCEMENT
Buck defiantly tells big tech to 'pay its share'
Economists warn of 'catastrophic' impact on digital shopping
Buying Stamps for Email?! DIFCA Explained
Matsu stared at the monitor. The glowing MFN display had been forgotten. He was looking at a budget projection automatically calculated by the university's finance AI. The line item for "Data Transfer & Cloud Processing" had been added with a vibrant shade of red. The projected monthly cost was astronomical, doubling their existing cost.
He tried running the numbers manually. Maybe the AI made a mistake? But no, the number remained terrifyingly high. A knot formed in his stomach. This wasn't friction, it threatened their whole organization's existence.
Meanwhile, Jia was locked in a circular conversation with the ISP's automated help system. Even after escalating to a human operator, they couldn't help.
"Yes, I understand your country has a new federal mandate," she pinched her nose, sounding impatient. "But can you explain what this 'Class III Packet Levy Assessment' actually is? My bill just tripled and your system can't seem to break down each of the data charges beyond 'DIFCA Surcharge'."
The operator apologized and offered platitudes but couldn't give a concrete answer. The system was too new and the regulations too thick.
By the next week, subtle but unnerving changes rippled through the Internet. Email clients updated with a discreet counter near the 'Send' button: Send: $0.80 (DIFCA).
Video conferencing tools added a low bandwidth feature that activated by default, replacing the high-quality video streams with grainy mostly-audio feeds to save on costs. Uploading files to cloud services prompted warnings about potential surcharges based on peak network load.
"I compressed the Bravo-Four-Two diagnostic logs by sixty percent to stay under the primary transfer cap today," Matsu admitted during an audio-only call with Jia. It was all he could do to compensate for the transfer caps.
"Sixty?" Jia winced. "That's aggressive compression, Matsu. It must be highly lossly, barely even useful. We'll lose all the subtle anomaly markers in the noise."
"I know," he snapped, instantly regretting his tone. "I know it's not good enough, but if I sent the data as an uncompressed burst... well you've seen the cost projections. We'll have to double-check everything manually on local server downloads."
Their day-to-day work had brought a new hesitation. Every click, every file transfer, every modicum of data now had a tangible cost attached. The organization had a fixed budget. Grants were not likely to come in, due to other organizations also suffering new budget constraint. If they made a mistake... used too much data... it'd lead to losing their jobs.
Casual messages grew shorter, reverting back to the acronyms and shortened words of their high school years. Days went by without any live communication. Non-essential data sharing dwindled. The effortless flow of information, the very medium that allowed their advanced work, was started to coagulate.
The rhythm of the Myco-Filtration Network changed. At first it was subtle, but became more profound with each passing week. Matsu found himself continually dialing down the resolution on the live sensor feeds. He accepted fuzzier, less precise data visualizations to keep the constant streams alive while staying below the costliest bandwidth tiers. He configured the system to perform diagnostic operations only during off-peak hours. It meant it took a few days to obtain insights, but it kept things under cost. Those beautiful, complex tapestries of light on his display seemed dimmer as well.
While analyzing nutrient flow in Delta-Six-Zero, Jia let out a loud sigh over the audio stream.
"We're accumulating blind spots," she sat, exasperated. "The reduced sensor polling frequency and the aggressive data compression are causing us to miss things. That minor pH fluctuation near T11 lasted nearly twelve hours last cycle. It was benign, thankfully, but we can't keep getting lucky."
Matsu stared at the data curve, now smooth and missing the fine detail he once relied on.
"You're right. We are flagging potentials based on pattern deviation and only run high-res checks when necessary. It's cumbersome. We're just reacting to what has already happened. But running full-spectrum, real-time analysis across all sectors is..."
He didn't need to finish the sentence.
This chilling effect extended beyond their immediate work. While downloading a heavily compressed data packet, Jia idly scrolled through a public forum of scientists.
"You should read this thread," she commented, sending the link to Matsu.
'Impact of DIFCA on International Research Collaboration' was the title.
"Astronomers can't download data arrays from Chile. Geneticists in Germany are complaining about accessing Baltimore gene sequence databases. It's becoming an information drought out there. Journalists are having an even tougher time being able to report without hitting their caps."
Idly scrolling at night, Matsu encountered a pop-up while reading the news. It advertised a "ConnectLite™", a program installed on routers that would "stay connected without breaking the bank!" In practice, it would remove all extraneous network connections, leaving only basic text and low-res images.
He stared at it for a long moment. He had grown up with an understanding, with a dream of interconnected, smart systems which could leverage data and computing for ecological harmony and efficiency. While they were still working towards the dream, it felt like the dream was now in reverse. It was being starved of the information it needed to live.
The free flow of knowledge between peoples and across borders was the bedrock of scientific progress. It was turning into a luxury item, subject to the whims of political resentment and the blunt instrument of a punitive tax. The vibrancy was fading not just from his display but all across the digital world.
Matsu came in the next day. It was dark. The only light from the lab was the dim glow of the MFN display. Sector maps pulsed with their degraded data streams. Overlaid in one corner, stark and unavoidable, was a running tally: Session DIFCA Estimate: $21,483.09
Twenty-one thousand dollars. For monitoring and analysis. For the simple act of keeping the city's bio-infrastructure running.
Matsu leaned back in his chair in silence. He stared at the cost projection and then at the intricate network schematics. A system designed for elegant, efficient flow was now being deliberately hampered by political friction.
He thought about Jia, who had left the project for something better for her career. She didn't need to stick around. She could participate in the broader world of knowledge with everyone else. He reached for his keyboard, perhaps to write a cordial message to Jia or maybe to vent on one of the increasingly quiet forums.
Then he stopped. Est. DIFCA Cost: $1.20.
Even small articulations had a price.
He shook his head slowly.
"It's not about fair contribution," he murmured to himself. "It was never about balancing the budget or securing anything. It was about control and resentment."
He looked at the MFN display, representing the countless unseen connections of data flowing like nutrients through mycelia.
"If you tax data, you tax communication. If you tax communication, you tax collaboration. If you tax collaboration, you tax discovery. You stifle innovation, making the management of anything complex like this infinitely harder, riskier, and expensive."
He let out a deep sigh as his rant only grew him more agitated.
"It's insane! It's absurd! Building a system to deliberately impede the free exchange of ideas, just to satisfy a political grudge? It's like taxing speech. It's like taxing thought itself."
He stopped to catch his breath. His throat felt dry. He stared at the blinking cursor on his blank message screen. The estimated cost pulsed faintly in the dim light. The DIFCA remained.
He felt a chill. It wasn't just about his data stream, it was the uncertainty falling over the future of connection itself. And that, Matsu realized with a profound sense of unease, was utterly, terrifyingly effective.