In college, we studied the film 2001, as a monumental statement of man’s lack of vitality in the future, and some would say the present too, that of course would lead to machines not only working to make our lives easier, but in effect ending our lives too as they saw fit. In today’s Internet connected world, the planet seems smaller, and there is a lot of communication going out, (like this weblog), but there’s also static. The system eventually gets inundated with all the messages going back and forth, to the point that we become nothing more than peers: clients, customers, users, nodes, ip addresses, etc. We lose our identity and become a number. When that realization smacks up against you on your computer monitor, all of a sudden our instincts take over and we want out of The Matrix. Eventually our senses calm us down and we settle back into our cooperative and normal operating procedure, we just live with it.
This brings me to my own personal email inbox and the occasional annoying spam email. It annoys me because someone sent me an email about something, when I never asked them to at all. The fact is pretty clear that it is also worse than this, they don’t really know me at all, to them I am just a number, an email address, and even if I contacted them, I would be identified as email address so and so, still no recognition of who I really am. Somewhere out there a script or program ran and it grouped me from a list of addresses and emailed me. There really is nothing personal about the whole thing. Imagine if a complete stranger walked by you and threw a piece of paper in your face. You’d most likely smack him back, but in the digital world you can’t.
You start to think, well if a machine did this to me, I can just correct it in a matter of seconds, right? I just go to the website and input my email address and tell the machine to no longer email me right? And I do just that, and the message that my monitor comes up with is, “Please allow up to 2 weeks for this change to take effect…“! You are kidding me right? The computer took probably less than a minute to add my name to an email and send it to me, and I am really to believe it takes the same computer 2 weeks to remove my name from it’s database! I hardly doubt there is a person who is going through all these email names and removing them one by one. The truth is that the machine does not know what I am or what responses I can have. It does not care if I get angry or am happy. It just executes the commands it has been told.
I am a number. Yet I am not a number.