I embrace
technology, but it sickens me. A
cell phone to me spells death. I can instantly fuse to it, though. My finger knows which buttons to press before I can even read the owners manual. But I am as afraid of getting a cell phone as I am of getting a
credit card. It means
death. Death to privacy, death to paper. Death to all things
tangible. Death to youth and innocence, and birth to the
New World Economy.
I fear the purse I carry, the car keys I own, the bank that holds my non-physical cash, the need to stop by the ATM. I fear web-ready microwaves and translucent colored plastic gadgetry. I fear this terribly, not because I am afraid of technology itself. I love technology, and I marvel at the miracle of the Internet. I marvel that knowledge and information had singlehandedly revolutionized the world.
But it strikes terror in my heart to think that no one knows how to survive on our own.
Years ago I saw panic in San Francisco ring the bells of the headlines around the world. No electricity, no power.
No power in the truest sense of the world. No power, as in dethroned, taken from power, once was found but now is lost.
If we lose electricity, might as well just block out the sun. Our incandescent sun, our fluorescent sun, our halogen sun, our electronic light. We have no need for life now that we can't live. We can't go to work, our databases slipped off into the world that never physically existed in the first place. Even our hobbies -- everything we have typed on everything2, is now home with the invisible ones and zeroes we invested our lives in.
We can't spend money that we don't earn, because without
electricity, there are no jobs but that of farmers and rugweavers, the people we hold to be lowlifes and uneducated. It defies all human comprehension that so much real money and real heart and real time is spent
on digital concepts and void ideals. Without the internet, businesses close.
How will we be able to order flowers, send email, and help our kids with dinosaur homework without the internet? How will we know needless facts and encyclopedic catalogs of useless knowledge without the world wide web? How is so much money spent by services that give away their wares for free? They get advertisers, and the advertisers spend money by giving away their services for free, and *they're* sponsored by advertisers, who spend ludicrous amounts of money giving away their wares for free...
It seems to me like the only supplier of money-fuel to this digital revolution is the X-10 camera.
And Bill with Microsoft will be nothing but unsavored salt once a few bombs explodes the nation's power grids.
If you think that there are too many power plants to explode, please explain to this cavewoman why eight states in July 1996 lost power because of one power grid?
This is how the enemies will cause panic. This is how millions will die.
Because they forgot how to live. They forgot how to live without electricity.
Hell, *I* forgot how to live without electricity.
But I really never forgot, because to forget would require you to know something about it in the first place.