You always know where you are with contemporary technology: it always lets you down, and always lets the worst politicians in.
I wonder if like me, you too have sat waiting for a multiple person intercontinental videofone hookup to get started, and then waited some more while geeks keep telling you everything will be just fine in a minute. (Trans: one geek minute = a human millennium). The last one I attempted three months ago started with five members in sound and vision: it ended two hours later with two people of only peripheral relevance talking out of sync ,, but only they could see that.
Overclaiming is a key core vakue in the New Technology space. At the bottom right of the strip on most pc screens is a set of bars that shows you ‘reception’. What that doesn’t have is any relationship whatsoever to bandwidth. Furthermore, I ask you this: have you ever been on Skype, lost the call, and then seen that message telling you they’re trying to get the call back? Did it ever work? No, it didn’t for me either.
Yesterday, I wasted three hours at WordPress going round and round the Chateau D’if trying to work out why my font size (following yet another forced software update) kept leaping from 2pt to 28 pt and back again without warning. I emptied caches and banished cookies at great inconvenience but to no avail, until in sheer desperation I typed in ‘how to change font size in Microsoft’. A user (not a supplier, mark you) took pity on an old bloke and explained ctrl + or – on the keyboard. How difficult would it be for WordPress to flash up a panel saying that if and when it happens? Everyone involved in this www (Wild West Web) seems perfectly capable of sending me dick-extension spam every time I Skype someone in Hong Kong, so whyTF is the simple stuff so difficult?
Some months back, a nice and very wise MP said to me, “Here in Westminster, the impossible we claim to do immediately. The easy stuff we immediately claim is impossible”.
I knew exactly what he meant the instant I heard him say it. But more than that, I knew precisely what, in 2013, makes the straightforward impossible: engorged egos that feed on the unnatural desire to acquire money and power.
I’m not sure I (or anyone else for that matter) has yet bottomed out the solution to this species enigma. The best I can manage at the moment is that – in the short term – we must take money out of national politics; and in the medium to longer term, we must remove power from those who would guide the Sovereign Nation.
I posted last Saturday about the logical ramifications of such thinking. Unfortunately, I think most citizens are so removed from such a line of thought, it may yet be generations before they work it out. Tragically, I’m not sure Homo sapiens has that much time.
The Slog 