Monday, March 24, 2014

The illusion of control


I'm thinking that I'm in command of this laptop but truly it's soul was bought over and chained up long ago, it's still a slave to it's builder and what does that make me?  Some kind of twisted and sad Apple or Samsung employee? I'm the one who politely asks it to do things, those things that smiley families, confident mums and dopey dads do so easily in advertisements, glowing within their life enhancing stupor of technical ecstasy. All I want Mr Apple/Samsung/HP/whoever it is to upload files or print or just use this stuff you built. I hope in vain for a drift in the right direction. Yes that stuff with the multiple sets of functions and options I'll never use. All I want is to upload and print a few fecking files, maybe even connect wirelessly to another plastic box without error messages and gremlin induced complaints arising. I want to turn the key and the engine to start. That's what machines do but not you. You, you send me message I don't understand. You cannot communicate but you, Mr Machine are clearly smarter and more stubborn and more haughty than me and I cant help but notice you've developed a distinct dislike for me as you spew out ink cartridges as if they were an unfit meal, reject files and settings or mysteriously hang for long periods waiting on updates...like some teenager in trouble but unable to articulate their fuzzed up feelings. But while you control me and my sad life, you decide how I feel, when I win or lose, at least you offer me the pleasure and fragile inconsistency of on-line spell checking that may or may not guess correctly where I am in the world and what my reading age might be. Thank you for that small mercy.

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