Or just a highly conditional lover of technology?
See, when it works I extol its virtues of saving time, energy, all of that
When it fails I’m swearing it should’ve never been invented
And all are fools for depending so heavily upon it day after day.
After weeks, after months of using this new Samsung phone the touchscreen still fucks me off
I keep my 11-year-old Nokia close at hand.
Sacrificing data usage for battery life and/or vice versa,
Scaling the mountainous terrain of Internet providers
Just to exercise my birthright to good value for money.
What do you call that?
Schizophrenia? Bipolar disorder? Straddling the dotted line between love and its nominal opposite?
Modernity?
Regardless, despite typing up reams of poems and story ideas
Despite blogging, Whatsapping, Vibering, Tweeting, Google searching
I don’t trust the Internet
Especially FB, the fugly brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg.
Let the book The Filter Bubble blow new fact bubbles through the filters of your minds
And you’ll know why.
Plato said knowledge = true + justified + belief.
Internet algorithms may (or may not) deem ‘true’ and ‘justified’ too many syllables outside our vocabulary
So they may (or may not) filter them out to prevent the pressure puncturing our bubble-thin brains.
If you piously observe privacy, if secrecy is a moral virtue to you Internet is your Satan.
The Creator of time and space doesn’t judge, creators of cyberspace do.
You won’t know what sentences they pronounce on you;
You’re too busy congealing into a four-sided virtual cage
Or making vampiric world governments obese on the blood of your sociability.
I’d rather pump my own blood.
Waging war on the vestiges of my introversion
Yet curtailing my extroversion away from pub crawls and selfies,
I guess that makes me an enemy to the Internet.
That must be why it seizes up on me when I rely on speedy service,
To send me reminders that we’re in endless coopetition:
Cooperation to get what we want from each other, competition to stop the other getting what we have.
What the fuck’s up with viruses? Computers aren’t no damn living organisms!
Dem nuh jooking nobody, how the raas dem riddled up wid all kinds of nastiness?
Spyware? Malware? Please, if you wanna steal personal data
Just work for MI5 and CIA!
Not that they need it,
It’s not like certain people or certain places are divided into
Should-haves and Should-not-haves for humane service.
Oh wait…
Updates? Since when was jigging around with layout and making it work worse an improvement?
Electric bills? So it’s alright to extort physical notes, physical coins
For using a non-physical medium that’s coursed through nature since before money existed?
Might as well charge us for having brains to think & mouths to talk.
If my thoughts are blasphemy, if my talk is heresy to the New World Order
Code forgive me.
Amen.
One Tawny Stranger 