Lap Dog

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Recently my laptop had to be in the shop a couple of days when a component went bad.  This became a period of discovery for me.  My laptop is my constant companion.  I’m not a big phone user and I have no other devices.  Suddenly I had to live without something I’d come to rely upon.  It was, in a way, a grieving process.  I’ve grown accustomed to being able to check in on the internet when a thought occurs to me.  Flip open the laptop and look.  Or, if I want to watch a movie, streaming it.  Even if it’s a matter of my wife and I wanting to see a “television” series for an evening’s entertainment after work, it has to be done through my laptop.  (No other devices will connect to our television, which is, unfortunately, beginning to show signs of requiring replacement.)  Just ten years ago this wouldn’t have been such an issue.

Getting the time to take the laptop in required advance planning.  This blog, for instance, is dependent on my laptop.  I can’t tap things out with my thumbs on my phone—I don’t text—and my phone isn’t that new either.  I had to pre-load several blog posts before the laptop went away and figure out how to launch (or “drop,” as the terminology goes) them from my phone.  I’m not sure of my neurological diagnosis, but I am a creature of strong habit.  That’s how I get books written while working a 9-2-5 job.  I’m used to waking up, firing up the laptop, and writing for the first hour or so of each day.  I had to figure some other way to do this, without wearing my thumbs down to nubs.  This blog is a daily obsession.

And then there was the emotional part.  The day I dropped the laptop off—it had to be a weekend because, well, work—I was despondent both before and afterward.  Listless, I couldn’t start a new project or even continue work on any because I’d already backed up my hard drive and would risk losing any changes made.  (I don’t trust the cloud.)  Then I thought, how did I ever survive in the before time?  I only became a laptop junkie this millennium, and the majority of my life was in the last one.  I recognize the warning signs of addiction.  During this period I decided to unplug as much as possible and read more print books.  Perhaps that’s the most sane thing I’ve done in quite a long time.

Wired for Good

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I spend entirely too much time untangling wires. Recently I read a survey asking whether you’d rather face a robot uprising or a zombie apocalypse. There’s no question that the devices have already taken over. And they’re eager for your source of power. The work laptop, the home computer, the aging iPhone, the iPad—they all want feeding, like a nest of hungry chicks. And their cords get tangled. It’s up to the human servant to come along and try to introduce some order into this chaos. Then there are the devices that go the way of the iMac, and yet their cords somehow remain. We have boxes of cords that look like an octopus orgy—uncertain to what device they once belonged we’re afraid to send them to the recycling plant because you may have accidentally rid yourself of one you still need. If there was a robot uprising, they’d be tripping over their own umbilical cords.

We used to go camping. Completely unplugged. These days of state parks offering wifi, even a trip to the wilderness isn’t really wireless. I’m a little afraid of this new dependency. The joy of memorizing has been replaced with the internet in my pocket. Life has become much easier in some respects, no doubt, but it’s not a one way street. Technology has its price, as this tangle of cords I’m facing reminds me. There’s no cutting this gordian knot without going back to the Stone Age, it seems. What would I do if I couldn’t post on this blog daily? What would remain of me?

If electricians are the acolytes to this new religion, then programmers are the priests. Each keystroke produces a recognizable letter because of their prayers and supplications to the great god Internet. Without it my job would be impossible. It knows how much money I have and where. What I’ve spent it on. It even flatters me when I search for something I wrote. The robot uprising, you see, need not be violent. It’s subtle and gradual. When you can’t live without something—when you adore it and depend on it constantly—it’s become a deity. The god, however, depends on us for providing it the constant sacrifice of power that it demands. It hasn’t figured out how to extract electricity from the air, or suck it from our fingertips as we type. And for its needs it requires cables. Like a good servant, I’m going to sit down and sort them all out again.