Natural Essays

Digital mash-ups and the anxiety of the keyboard

By Richard Phelps
Posted 12/31/20

I better write this fast. No telling how much time I’ve got. I’ve gone through the usual channels of repair and renewal. I’ve re-booted five times this morning. It’s all ok …

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Natural Essays

Digital mash-ups and the anxiety of the keyboard

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I better write this fast. No telling how much time I’ve got. I’ve gone through the usual channels of repair and renewal. I’ve re-booted five times this morning. It’s all ok right now, like being in the eye of a storm; you know the center cannot hold. We are all tied to these electronics. It’s going to be smashing when the Russians actually do fry our grid.

It feels as if there is something running in the background all the time. It comes to the surface like an alien in your stomach. I turn the computer off at night as the last thing I do, trying to give it a rest. I swear, like a fragment of nightmare out of Edgar Allen, it turns itself on during the night. It’s on in the morning. I know I saw the green, then black, screen at night. Should I cover up the camera with foggy tape? The FBI says they do that. How much time have I got before it crashes for good?

All the photographs, all the columns, just about everything in life is in peril at any given minute. I’m so bad at redundancies! Why wouldn’t everything just automatically go to a cloud or a stack, an external stack, or, or a what? A stick, a thumb drive! Oh brother.
It all seems so simple. Why don’t I do it? Am I lazy? Techno-lazy – a new condition. Like a car, I just want to turn the key and drive it. Anything more than putting gas in it is asking way too much. Then, of course, the collapse of civilization will be easy to explain. “They never backed anything up,” said the techno-archeologist Quantum Jones, shuffling through files captured and then recovered from a previously undiscovered digital receptor deposit layer in the Van Allen Belt in the year 3030.

This PC is just the right size. The screen is 24 inch. I hate laptops. I want to work at my desk. If I spin it around, I can still read the print from the other end of the 6 foot couch. I just had my eyes tested. The attractive female doctor said, “I’ve never seen eyes this good on someone so old.” Well, OK. I’ll take that as a compliment. I said, “Raw carrots.” She said, “What?” I thought maybe her hearing was bad. “Raw carrots,” I said. She said, “Maybe good genes.” Squinting at her through my dilation, I could make out she had a little smile, like carrots might be quackery to her doctorate. I left it at that. To get a new computer will cost what? Twice the next “stimulus” check? How long can I hold out? Congress is so irresponsible.

Our whole culture is so tenuous and fragile, held together by thin threads, wires, and sometimes, increasingly, no wires at all. Yet, other outcomes to our societal progress manifest remote. We are on a path of increasing speed, our human aura is shining like Apollo, our cities hum and stream in 5G, and our power grows beyond the ochre caves of arithmetic. Our phones hold everything not lost in the great fire of the Library of Alexandria and we know so much we think we know something.

And now the “T” on the keyboard is sticking, as if on a sympathy strike with the PC itself. Norman Mailer (a name you never hear these days since his great rival Gore Vidal died) wrote a book called “Of a Fire on the Moon.” It dealt with the psychology of machines mystically increasing their own level of control over themselves. One needs not mistreat their feelings. Let’s hope it hasn’t come to that yet, as I am still having trouble dealing with that same regard in humans.

Yesterday, lost in research inspired by my Christmas book gift from my daughter on the ancient civilization of Carthage, and while trying to understand the words “topos, topoi” I re-entered the old world of Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” long left for dead back at Fordham, and I came across this: “If the beginning of a thing can occur, so can the end: for nothing impossible occurs or begins to occur.” Well then, this stuttering computer might go as Carthage, its nemesis Rome, or so too Trump. The end is nigh.