Y2K22
The “millennium bug” is back to plague those who own computers — who, as these Essays are broadcast only on the Web, must include some of my readers. The problem is a product of the cybernetic mindset, which feels compelled to reduce whatever it touches to jargon, abbreviations, and “protocols.”
As clocks passed midnight for the New Year, this latest glitch appeared. It could not be fixed immediately, because the computer techies at the Microsoft corporation, and myriad others, didn’t see it coming. The company’s system for dating and thus prioritizing its anti-malware programs did not become more incomprehensible than it ever was. But it slipped over its 31-bit space allowance, and thus went poof.
Customers must now instal a new system, but first, the techies have to invent it. Meanwhile, emails pile up invisibly and irretrievably, and those attempting “workarounds” are exposed to the malware.
Many of the world’s problems, I have concluded, were not given to me to solve. Being shut down by a corporate decree, or a viral disease, or a moronic computer glitch, is no worse than death; and having these problems solved, by anyone, is little better: for they condemn us to go back to work, picking cybernetic cotton.
Except, better than death, is to watch the scenes of chaos, after the experts get their way. And besides, if you are charitable, you might volunteer to help some of the experts’ other victims.
There is however a partial solution to the botheration of modernity. It is to give up on progress, now that it has revealed itself as unmistakably demonic.
To do anything worthwhile, or well, requires time, and space. The progressives demand that we make everything smaller and faster, and quite unfixable: warp-speed interplanetary rocket rides, and little wee implants to control us.
But the world is large, and moving fast enough. By ignoring the experts, we can be happy.