Help!

19th January 2018

My Christmas presents this year are dragging me kicking and screaming into the era of technology.  I have given up my flip phone for a smart phone, and I am writing this blog entry on the latest and greatest laptop that defies all my befuddled brains expectations of reality. The door flew open, and I was sent headlong into a new age, and I don't mean the sage-burning drum-beating Om-chanting new age. This is the cold steel era of data and gigabytes, terabytes even. This is the future, so I am told, and I'd better learn to love it.

But it's a living nightmare,  a swirling world of passwords and passcodes and Siri and mouseless mice. It's a trapdoor world where if I pick up my phone and hit by accident a few buttons on the side, before you know it, I'm back out in the cold and this little Hitler in my hand is demanding a password to let me back in. Even when you think you remember your password, you are sorely mistaken: the long stream of letters, numbers and capital letters, all of which you were careful to include (because the contraption told you that otherwise your password was "weak") no longer seems to work. Or the security question which there really is only one answer to: what was your first album? I know the answer. I give it. But the phone thinks it is a security breach and starts sending me emails (which I can only get to on my old and faithful almost-as-clueless-as-me IPad) that a terrorist has infiltrated my little castle of passwords and passcodes and thumb prints that never even work.
                                             

If you have read best selling author Yuval Harari, you'll know that he thinks we're heading into an era in which data and technology will take the place of religion and where the very gods shall be supplanted by this new iteration of ourselves, Homo Deus. But if Harari is right, I might as well off myself right now. I might as well put my pillow over my head and let myself escape back into the burning sage fog of gods and goddesses, of myth and story. It might be outdated, but it is a much warmer place to live.