August 1 2002

Daily Junk

     Commonly accepted as true is the belief that technology has increased, or is increasing, the speed of life. This widely-held notion contends that our modern, techno-savvy culture requires active participants to struggle constantly to keep pace with a rapidly expanding sphere of electronic knowledge. To generalize, we can more or less accept this vague statement on simplistic terms but it is my assertion that personal experience proves otherwise. What I am saying is that I am faster than the computer and so are you. Honestly, the fact that computers make us wait and slow down each day for unobvious reasons should lead us to consider otherwise.
     Hours are spent each day patiently waiting for machines to perform their tasks. Turn on a computer and half a minute expires during the startup. An ATM machine will make you wait for your receipt and card. How many days in our lifetimes will be spent waiting for websites? Sometimes all of this waiting makes me just a little bored or impatient, and I start to think about other things like, why am I always waiting?
     Is there such thing as an impatient machine? Perhaps all machines are impatient by design, needy for the next routine, command, or instruction. In this consistency of impatience, its perfect and perpetual anticipation of programmable usefulness, it has lost all resemblence to an impatience of any human character. Consider then that most computers make you wait and while the machine is busy it is lagging behind you and your needs.
     The promise of technology fails to deliver. Electricity may conduct through silicon circuits at a rate a million times faster than across human synapses but I am always functioning and responding to my environment in real-time. The uninstructed computer just sits there thinking the same thing over and over again which by all definitions is rather stupid. I, on the other hand, am always thinking, never thinking the same thing exactly twice. I may be stupid but stupid in an imperfect way. In contrast the idle PC is perfectly idiotic; so systematically stupid that it expands into an idiocy of never-ending, symmetrical precision.
     Hit the right switch and start the right operation, and watch as the computer processes enormous numbers with incredible speed, performing repetitive mathematical functions to calculate and display useful information for my personal consumption. Now it is my slave. Or is it really the other way around? In all my waiting perhaps the computer has me chained to a digital dungeon, replete with sadomasochistic lashes of pixilated torture. It is as if the space bar is my feeder bar, and I am patiently awaiting my info pellet from the magic Skinner box. This level of dependency is well documented among laboratory mice and other small critters addicted to narcotics or other stimuli, compelled to perform behaviors over and over, even to their own physical detriment. Am I a junkie? I don't think so. I do not feel compelled to turn a computer on when it is off. Off is off and on is on. I can stop whenever I like.
     Some speak of addiction as if it were intrinsically negative. We all must eat and sleep everyday but no one speaks of it as an addiction. We are oxygen junkies and heartbeat "deadbeats" and don't even know it. No one considers procreation as the single most lethal human behavior but it's true. Life is the leading cause of death. On that uplifting thought, consider the oft-quoted words of someone who I can't quite remember who said: "a well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny." Who in the hell believes that crap?

--B.T. Walker (the desperate and uninspired voice of our generation)