Got a forwarded message from friend. It was an article about technology and how we puny little humans have become slaves of it. My friend didn't say that. The article did, written by John Haughton, a critic of technology and gadgets.
Right now, I feel enslaved not only to technology but also different forms of "engineering". There's socio-political engineering. We are in the process right now of being made to love and lust for Petronas, which is a live giver. Well, how could you cook your "bubur" if the tong gas is empty? And of course Petronas' masters, the politicians who never forget to remind us to be grateful. I feel enslaved to gratitude. I know that I should be grateful to a lot of things, so many it has become fuzzy, nebulous and outright intrusive to my piece of mind. And all these are delivered by technology. What would we do without technology. Never really thought about that. I have a sneaky feeling we'd be quite good at conundrums or teka-teki. And all these are delivered quite efficiently by digits in audio, video and very very loud, ho!!!
Teka-teka, mind you is no ordinary thing. Even the former US Fed Chairman, Greenspan was said to bemuse himself with conundrums or teka-teki. And after the eeny-miny-mo, we get to pay. And pay dearly as usual.
So Haughton says that he
"had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going - so far as I can tell - but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think."
Which is very very true to many. Years ago, in the not too distant past, there was this ad on TV and Radio that blared morning noon and night---"IT IT IT IT"--- first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I think it didn't work in Sarawak. It could have in Malaya. The reason was that when you sing it fast "IT IT" becomes "itit", a duck in local Sarawak Malay dialect! In Iban, too, I think it's the same.
In Malaya what it meant was something different. It meant Mahathir's Magnificent SuperDuper Corridor; the yuppy people who chew up a 20-ton old mainframe with Microsoft's JScript and C-Language. I've forgotten what has happened to this since then. You know, your brain loses atoms when you age---I dah lupa! The SuperDuper Corridor could have become sitting ducks for lunch break jokes! Jadi "ITIT"! Ducks, quake, quack, ducks! ITIT!
But what Haughton has stated is no joke. It's real, so real he himself has become a proponent and admirer of technology, at least Apple's I-phone because he himself believed that Apple's success there was about "core values". I believe the guy. Over the years my savings have dwindled, and lately interest earnings are so silly, we should be using cockle shells to pay AirAsia.
But maybe Haughton was just experiencing that sort of pause in aging. We all age. Sometimes, we get chemical imbalance in our system. You forget to eat spinach and you might get iron deficiency and get ulcers in your mouth. And of course you might mumble mumble a lot! When you get hormonal imbalances you fall all over and can't get up! But all that's temporary.
The real thing that's so obscenely ubiquitous is the handphone. You are doomed to the handphone. I once attended a funeral, solomn and sombre, bowing our heads to the Ulama's citation of the last rites. Then like shattering glasses in the stillness amongst the eternally silent, the damn thing rang in some idiot's pocket! Well, even the gravely still are not spared by technology!
But has it eaten away at my brains? I really wouldn't think so. If I eat my spinach, I should be alright.
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