I'm anticipating a computer meltdown. Well, I'm hoping to cool it off before it gets that extreme, but even as I write I'm backing up the files I value onto our external harddrive, because I know that in a day or so someone's going to suggest, if it isn't me, that my computer needs a rebuild. Bad vibes emanate from computers just like they do from people, you just have to learn to read them. Right now I'm getting bad vibes from my "little man" (how else shall I refer to it, "she"?) that he's tired, sick, maybe infected. I've run some tests, but the doc may say that he needs surgery.
I'm not going to get into it - maybe it was a bad website, a stray USB drive, an errant email opened. Call me calloused, call me jaded, but you just have to resign yourself to these things. As a non-mac, non-apple kind of guy (I also don't eat at MacDonalds, or shop at Wal-Mart either, and yes I do put Apple computers and their lurid come-on that they'll "do it all for you ... right out of the box" to get you lusting after and addicted to a product that simply requires that you subject yourself to its whims and directions, and then all will be well, even as you get dumber and dumber and fatter and fatter and fill your house with mounds of plastic crapola that you'll end up dropping off in the back alley of the MCC store, driving away feeling self-righteous in a guilt-ridden sort of way) I value these moments as reminders that technologies, the things we make to help us, will fail, and that I have the power and control, if I understand the signs and symptoms, to manage that process and start again. (Not that I really admire Microsoft, but you have to choose your devil, and these days I'm a lot more impressed with Bill Gates and his generosity than I am with Steve Jobs and his "if you've got a problem with one of our machines you didn't have to buy it" stiffness.)
Ultimately I am the one who is responsible for how this all works out. Sure the machine may fail, but all machines do. And it may be the most dangerous ones that take the longest to fail, because they'll take over. (Not as in The Matrix take over, but as in the "wow, the machine was doing that for so long that I totally forgot how to do that and now, when I want to do it, I can't, because the machine was doing it for me ..." kind of taking over.)
Over the last couple of days two articles have been circulating where I work. One is about how a school stupidly got itself into an ethical mess when a student used a webcam inappropriately, and the other tells of a school in which an English teacher convinced a couple of his classes to fast from technology for four days. These articles appear to present polarized views about what to do with all the gear we're currently using - fear it, for it will harm us, or run from it, and return to the past - but they really end up in the same place: the technology takes the blame. The technology takes the apple.
I'm trying to understand this tension between the stunning advantages technology offers, and the soul-sucking morass we could eddy into. The way I'm getting better at it is to make sure that the technology I use isn't too good. That it needs me. That I need to understand it. Listen to it. Help it along sometimes. I want to resist the lazy impulse to let it do it for me, even when it does it better. There's no art in that. No tension. No resistance. I need to feel the resistance. It helps me feel like I'm working. It helps me get better.
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