From Ralph

07/11/03

CYBEROTIC NEUROTIC

From where I sit.....

I look into the screen of my monitor and it taunts me. 'Go on' , it winks, 'provoke me. Make my day, punk.' It invites me to rant and rave and pontificate with worthless abandon at the world outside. Luckily I am not line and probably never will be, now'.

That was 5 years ago. Now, I am ISDN-d up, firewired in, web sited, USB'eed, so that all of life's problems are solved, or shared, or magically organized out of existence. I receive visitations from complete strangers with whom I have absolutely nothing in common, but they want my money.

Welcome to cyberspace, if you joined. You are now, like me, a full-bore electronic-street-cred-surf-damaged mugger. That's what I was promised anyway, and was just excited if something worked and for a while it did. I believed them. 'Them' who would flog me anything that throbbed, put me on line, sent around six guys to fix me up with two new poles to support the access wire to my property. Then an engineer arrived who spent nearly a whole day secreting more wires into every tight corner he could find, since I didn't want my studio to look like a giant fuse box.

When he finally got to the back of my Apple Macintosh with his impressive ISDN box, ignition terminal adaptor, expansion cards, Foresight manager software and a voice-threat disguiser, he made a momentous discovery that no one had bothered to check before- not even 'Them'- the force that was so eager to fit me up in the first place.

The interface on the end of their paraphanalia simply would not interface with mine. At the time when I contacted Apple they had no such interface converter and neither had 'Them'.

'Your equipment is too old,' they said. Three years old! I thought. The bastards had sold me a worthless piece of plastic junk and a piece of wire and I was already holding a bill for the first quarter's rental in my hand plus a whole new suggested ground plan to discard my own proven equipment and belch out another six grand 'upgrade investment' like a serious coke user blowing into a Kleenex tissue.

It was then I heard for the first time the word 'provider' - which as far as I could ascertain, was an electronic pimp at the end of a phone in a greasy suit(bound to be!) who would sell me 'access' onto the web, the net, the non-existent black hole in the ether that is already in danger of terminal pollution, AND someone who would sell me my own name, or any other name that I had personally dreamed up for myself. The scam was so huge, the 'front' so inpenetrable, my mind could not comprehend anything beyond handing over whatever 'they' needed. It was a different world back then, of course; we were more trusting, less suspicious, certainly gullible enough to still believe in 'Old World Values'.

It is different now and so much has changed- no, not changed- just increased its critical mass. The blizzard of drivel poured into the World Wide Web from every sad hacker in the universe is like receiving a midnight visit from a toxic waste dump truck driven by a zombie whose nose has melted into its brain on account of a chronic glue habit.

The ability to interact impersonally with another human being on the planet, seems to encourage any poor slob to act out his or her sickest inclinations from inside some mean little tool cupboard beneath the stairs, sitting on a tin of rat poison. This new found access disturbs the hunger deep down in the darkest recesses of the subconscious, churns up the hellish putrefaction within which releases an unhealthy desire to ladle the stink onto some body else's turf and start a new religion.

The cosmic internet is probably what the average surfers believe they are buying into anyway - just common or garden electronic miracles, really - but now 'they' not only want your money and your undivided attention 'they' want your life and soul too. The helpless are out there, desperate to believe in something so why not offer a trip in a UFO, escape your earthly shackles and fly on the wings of a comet, nothing virtual, the real McCoy - web heaven. Plug your eyeballs into that one but don't worry me if you haven't got enough RAM to blast you to Kingdom Come... 'they' will sell you everything you need and 'they' will inherit the earth.

I am surrounded by the detritus of someone else's genius - the plastic gizmos of dreams gone wrong. It is not a sad sight but it leaves me wondering if this is merely a broken stage set, a distressed model of something that pitted itself against natural human ingenuity.

I am not against change since change is not only inevitable but desirable and necessary. My worry lies in the fear that virtual trash becomes the bedrock for civilization in the 21st century. That would mean, that any decent ideas that evolve out of the eternal struggle to survive with honour, would be doomed to crumble in the desperate scramble to escape reality.

Each new generation is born with a longer future and each will require a deeper, wider, more fundamental understanding of self, in order to pursue the elusive goal of fulfillment for all. Modern technology is a tool as useful to us as was the flint axe head to Homo Erectus. If we use a tool as a weapon then the futility of it all will lay waste our efforts and expose its motives for what it has become - a manipulator of empty lives.

If you have time enough to listen to my voice, then you have time enough to listen to the wind in the trees, the evening song of the blackbird and the rustle of unseen life in tangled undergrowth. You will have time to yourself, to catch the sound of your own soul sighing with relief as it resonates with some long forgotten collective experience that reaffirms existence. Disconnect, shut down, go outside and find out for yourself ...