A Satire by David Jure, Victoria

  What with the cyber tweeting, bleating and completing these days it’s a wonder we can see, hear or feel ourselves think. The bard must have had one hell of an uninterrupted inner monologue to produce 37 plays and many sonnets.
   The information age offers enlightenment but also a world of grief. Tweet-thumb, text-thumb, carpal tunnel and chunnel syndrome. What were we thinking? Is this new technology here to liberate or enslave us? Television advertising is now a feast of Inspector Gadget-style doodaws and gizmos in defiance of the open wheat field or expansive forest retreat.
   I recall the advent of the biro or ball point pen in class at a London elementary school in 1959. There were no personal computers then. Life was simple – up to a point. The original computers were noble huge goliaths designed to crack the German Enigma Code. The Germans actually invented the internet in World War Two.

  What with the cyber tweeting, bleating and completing these days it’s a wonder we can see, hear or feel ourselves think. The bard must have had one hell of an uninterrupted inner monologue to produce 37 plays and many sonnets.
   The information age offers enlightenment but also a world of grief. Tweet-thumb, text-thumb, carpal tunnel and chunnel syndrome. What were we thinking? Is this new technology here to liberate or enslave us? Television advertising is now a feast of Inspector Gadget-style doodaws and gizmos in defiance of the open wheat field or expansive forest retreat.
   I recall the advent of the biro or ball point pen in class at a London elementary school in 1959. There were no personal computers then. Life was simple – up to a point. The original computers were noble huge goliaths designed to crack the German Enigma Code. The Germans actually invented the internet in World War Two.
   I recall sending a sneaky secret message to a pot-smoking chum in Toronto via a primitive computer at the Open Space Gallery in 1978. And my mind, even then, was reeling with fuscha shock or future shlock. Special effects are out of control in the movies and people yearn more and more for period pieces, techno free and reckless Renaissance values. What on earth are they cooking up next? Will we all be wearing microchips and personal communicators in the years to come? I miss the long-winded old fashioned rotary phone and eight tracks and I still collect cassettes, which cost me fifty cents at the thrift store. “Thrift Horatio Thrift!”
   I once almost had a breakdown in Toronto from pure future shock and realized that my fate was to go home to Victoria, ignore the new, embrace the old, venerate the ancient and let the microchips fall where they might and they did.
   Without the internet there would be no internet luring, kids would be playing outdoors and we would all be far more athletic and dare I say, sensual in our approach to daily life and art. They say you can’t stop progress but I disagree. Is a world-wide obsession with broadcasting every disgusting nuance or every foreign war to be considered any advancement over the age of Grand Gwignol or the Spanish Inquisition?
 I’m a big fan of the local society of creative anachronism (the wrist watch in Ben Hur?) and all for just plain running away from these ticking time bombs!! When people say books will be a thing of the past, I inwardly smirk because a little non-mechnical birdy tells me that books and candles will be around long after the coming solar flares have burned out the worldwide power grid and we’re all living in caves on the leeside of Sooke, which was, mind you, a native habitat long before Windows XP was ever conceived of and believe me – I don’t do windows!!
   All in all, I’d rather be on the tennis court batting balls than hunched over YouTube watching Lady Gaga throw up all over her little monsters. Lord, what fools these mortals be.