It’s rather like cursing in church, or copulating on the Queen’s lawn. No good opinions, I know, will come of it. But how do you start your digital week? With junk, with spam, with a standard crop of 58 e-mails offering to “energize my baby-maker,” prevent “death by swine flu,” and dispense “scintillating orgasms” to all and sundry. Welcome to the 21st century, and a great deal of what we hate about it. Impotence, disease, frustration.
And such starts, on examination, do not get better. Just sit down and consider the most dire dishes of the day. Shall we obsessively discuss the death of newspapers, the end of five centuries of print? Or maybe we could go one worse and ponder the demise of books themselves, a bonfire of our literary heritage turned to ashes by Kindle? There’s porn and pedophilia, of course: giant helpings of fear and disgust on demand. There’s terrorism and the latest sinister warnings from Osama and Co. There’s the end of civilized life as we know it.
Whatever happened to community? Walk any high street and you’ll see the shutters coming down. Remember the ghosts of Woolworths past and sniffle nostalgia. Traditional, human Britain is closing for business — just like a globe where bank failures spread like viruses and viruses spread like bank failures. Will leaders arise to rescue and inspire us afresh? Not British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, alas, the man with the toxic grin. Not those who serve and defend him most zealously. Not our parliament and its elected representatives, buying bath plugs and toilet seats on Joe Public.
This is surely the way the world really ends: not with a bang, but with surges of nausea amid mounting heat, rising seas and carbon despair. Can mankind somehow be saved? Well, we could always switch the damned computer off.
For the Web we work on, the digital connections our government now seeks to spread as a universal right, the keyboards in our studies and living rooms, are blights as well as boons, misery-makers as well as enablers. We won’t automatically be better with no books to finger and caress, or shops to sell them, Amazoned out of existence. We aren’t better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street, or US President Barack Obama twittering away when he could be thinking instead. Before there were computer disks to steal from the fees office, there was privacy, secrecy and supposed decency undisturbed.
Before there were computer disks to nick, nobody cared how many houses British Member of Parliament Hazel Blears could score in a year. Before e-mail, there was no former Brown adviser Damian McBride hawking his poison from screen to screen. And it becomes increasingly necessary to weigh the revolution that has changed all our lives on an updated set of moral scales.
The figures aren’t definitive, to be sure. We can’t be certain how much energy will go into 10 minutes of Google searching. We can’t blankly endorse the Gartner company analysis that put the IT industry worldwide in the same energy-using bracket as airlines. We can probably argue a bit about Stanford University estimates that show US Internet usage either overtaking the energy levels of all color TVs in the US or devouring the equivalent of two months’ worth of UK electricity. We can question posited rates of Web expansion in the crunch and hope that technology will get us off the hook when the bills for digital power get back to growing at 10 percent a year.
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