“Oh, How the Tables Turn”

 

                Reading the article for this week was an interesting, and somewhat creepy, experience.    I am sure that in 1946 when this was published, most readers thought it was insane, unlikely, and almost impossible for such things to actually happen in real life.  This had to be just the imaginative rantings of a technological mind.  Fast forward nearly seventy years though, and it is like reading the local newspaper about what is happening on a daily basis.

                The ability to simply “google it” has become an everyday, common luxury.  If there is anything that we want to do, and don’t know how to do it, we simply ask the “logics”.  I found the wife’s reaction to the new services absolutely hilarious!  She was nearly hysterical that anyone and everyone would be able to find any available information about her, and wanted to put a stop to it right away.  But not before, of course, she was able to look up all her neighbors and dig up whatever dirt she could find about them!  This is today’s society to a tee.  We all want our privacy, and to be left alone, in general. Yet who among us hesitates to read the latest tabloid style story posted on any random website about the newest so called celebrity we love to hate?  Careless users today may text, or post inappropriate pictures of themselves and then are devastated when the unintended person, or people (sometimes numbering in the millions), are able to view it as well.

                I do not believe that there is one person who uses the internet on a fairly regular basis who has not ever had the experience of searching for one, innocent thing, and having the dreaded pop up of explicit, and usually unwanted pictures.  "It was a nice kinda world once," I says, bitter. "I could go home peaceful and not have belly-cramps wonderin' if a blonde has called up my wife to announce my engagement to her. I could punch keys on a logic without gazing into somebody's bedroom while she is giving her epidermis a air bath and being led to think things I gotta take out in thinkin'.”  I personally live in fear of this exact thing happening to my poor unsuspecting children.  I monitor their computer use very closely in my own home, but they have so much access, in so many places, it is nearly impossible to watchdog every approach.

The idea that stood out the loudest to me was the conversation between the two workers. The main character is in a panic, and insists that they just turn the entire system off to stop the chaos that is happening.  The co-worker’s response to this is epic! "Shut down the tank?" he says, mirthless. "Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doin' all the computin' for every business office for years? It's been handlin' the distribution of ninety-four per cent of all telecast programs, has given out all information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement— Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization. Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run!

Wow.  Now THAT is prophetic.  There is really not one single aspect of our lives in general anymore that is not completely overwhelmed with technology.  We have become utterly dependent on it to the point that it dictates and governs most of our choices day to day.  It is unimaginable to contemplate what the world would become if we were required to shut down the internet.  I am picturing widespread hysteria as everyone re-learns the incredible processes required to function and communicate in a world that is suddenly round again.  Who could have known that the machines we created to serve us, make our lives easier, would one day turn the tables and have us wholly in their influence?