The reborn computer, optimistic fable

I spent an entire day restoring connections (cell phone, landline, computer, internet), with the help of, well, the operator, and I realized how completely dependent I had become, like a human newborn who doesn’t have the capabilities of newborns from other species and needs more time for the protection of adults.

All the necessary and known telephone numbers, all the pertinent information about my life, my work and my finances, were suddenly no longer accessible to me. I already know that, just as there is no Santa Claus, the “cloud” is materially located inside a gigantic data center, where only the network can introduce us. But no external disk can protect us from a blackout.

The blackout has therefore become the greatest vulnerability of our societies, making cyberattacks increasingly deadly and terrible. After coming out of this computer nightmare (which didn’t last that long, but no, I’m not telling you who my operator is) I understood that I lived in a world based not on feet of clay, but on databases.

Although some claim that we have started to live solely on intangible services, someone has to build these databases, someone has to connect these networks. How does someone have to sweep the streets, take care of the fields and sell us food, even during the pandemic, for some spent teleworking for intangible services.

And we continue. Our obligation, Sartre taught me, is to understand our time in order to criticize it. But it is increasingly difficult for us to distinguish the false idols of the tribe, which seem to bring with them clear evidence of what must be.

If Humanity had followed these false idols of “it has to be, there is no alternative”, we would still be discussing the advantages of polished stone over chipped stone. With only one basic piece of evidence: any of these stones is lethal if applied with maximum force to an individual’s skull.

Discussing whether cyberattacks or nuclear attacks are the most destructive of the human species becomes a discussion as empty as the issue of stones. It suited us for Humanity to survive, even if this survival was at the expense of some imperial ideals of power, which rest in the most primitive side of our brain. It suits us humans, it’s just a saying, it could be that stronger and transhuman powers rise up to destroy us or it could simply be that we walk towards the abyss with the joyful unconsciousness of this and there is no cabal of nature against us, it is only us who are faithful to our nature, like the scorpion that follows the frog’s ride.

But anyway, I escaped the computer blackout, just as Humanity will escape this sinister ghost of the transhuman, something between Frankenstein and Nietzsche, which is the dream of online millionaires. Humanity has always escaped, the price is sometimes that it has been too cruel in deaths and wars.

I had promised to write a truly optimistic text today. I apologize to anyone who asked me for not being able to keep that promise.

Diplomat and writer