So, the computer finally died. Six years old, it updated itself dutifully every Friday, into the oblivion of a Windows 10 black hole. It wouldn’t boot, as they say in the trade. It was goosed as they say elsewhere. And in-spite of my tenderly intensive and not exactly inexpert administrations, it was tired of the fray and pleaded with me to let it go.
I’ve not totally given up on it, have laid it somewhere safe. After all, it’s physically flawless, and its demise seems painfully premature to me. My car is seventeen years old and still drives like new, can accelerate from 0 to 60 as fast as it ever did. I have a watch in my collection a hundred and thirty years old and it still tells the time very well. It has not gradually ground to a halt year on year.
The ultimate salve will be a copy of Windows 7 (64 bit) which should make that old computer fly as never before, provided I never connect it to the Internet again, and that’s fine for drafting work, for when I’m writing out in the shed of a summer’s evening. For sure the Internet’s the problem, and a stormy sea these days for the fragile craft that old computer had become. But for now, sure, I set it aside, and since we cannot manage without access to the damned Internet any more, I ordered a fresh machine of similarly middling specification from the Amazon. With free delivery, (which cost me £4.95) it arrived next day.
This should impress me, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t need it that fast. I might have waited a week or two – the rest from wrestling with I.T. would have done me good. Who decided I wanted it straight away? Why not deliver it by drone within the hour? What kind of sluggish operation are we running here? Or more to the point, what wages were depressed, what workers were oppressed in order to merit this specious tick in the box of customer service excellence? Oh, I know, I’ve written about this before when I sat on my phone and broke it, and isn’t what I really want to talk about now – what I want to talk about is quality. Human quality.
Of course my old computer sank to the bottom of the Internet ocean with an awful lot of data on it: pictures, backups, bloat-ware. All gone, winked out, gone supernova. But you never keep anything on a machine you can’t afford to lose, so I don’t mind that it’s gone now. Anything precious is on a pen-drive, backed up to a portable hard-drive, backed up to another portable hard-drive.
So you fire up your new machine and it seems slick by comparison, but then they all do at the start. And you begin rebuilding your email, your browser shortcuts, your passwords – oh, damn, my passwords – set your background theme. Fiddle about, deleting that bloat-ware. Say NO THANKS to that invitation to partake of the sinister behemoth that is Microsoft Office 365 for eighty quid a year and it’s never actually yours. So by now, an evening’s passed and you’ve done nothing else, added nothing to the sum total of your self, which begs the question what does add up?
Reading a book, perhaps? Having a conversation? Going for a walk in the countryside? Going to the shop for wine and cheese? Watching Sandra Bullock? in Gravity. Again.
What have I added to myself by this slavery to the machine? A pleasant memory, perhaps? A stimulating fact? The renewal of my corporeal self by the imbibing of copious amounts of country air? The renewal of my superficial spirit by the Bacchanalian delight of cheap corner-shop wine? No, none of these things.
In the world of Manufacturing, we concern ourselves very much with those human activities which add value to a product. Activities that add nothing, or worse, take value away must be got rid of. And so it is with human affairs. But what is it that adds value to your life? Our machines help us out for sure; they furnish us with information, they control systems that sustain life and which no human being could ever grasp, and they enable otherwise unknown writers to disseminate their thoughts. But do they add value to us? I don’t think they do, or at least not as much as we like to think they do. Indeed, it seem obvious to me the machines are evolving rapidly away from us into a pointless universe of their own, and the worst thing we can do is follow them while believing our liberation, our true value comes from continuing down the path of servitude to these unfeeling, unthinking things.
I don’t know what it means to be human, except that part of being human is accepting the paradox of trying to figure out what it means, while running the risk there may be many answers, and none of them true, or just the one answer that is unobtainable by the mortal intellect. But I do know I’m closer to it when I’m looking up at the stars or watching the sun set, or striking out over the hilltops, much less so when I’m staring at a damned computer screen. How many hours in the day do I waste doing that, adding nothing to myself?