The Flood and the Algorithmic Ark

The following was originally composed on a 1950’s Voss manual typewriter.

I just made the mistake of turning on the computer. It was too easy, too close to hand and I fell to the temptation. Temptation is easy to fall into, like the beckoning of the third Manhattan. The third one gets you, that’s the one to watch out for. Not the first.

Now I’ve clicked on my name and am one step closer to falling into the time absorbing arms of the internet. I could rationalize it and say it is on my list of daily tasks of work to do, but that’s not so. I want to fall into its arms and let my life be taken away, let the times of my life be absorbed into the Ethernet, into the cloud to join the angels in the clouds playing harps and biding time until the clouds rain down their data bits. And the Lord releases the bits stored in the hidden vaults under Yucca Mountains and they rise and inundate the earth with bits and bytes. No one thought of building an algorithmic ark to rise above the flood of data that overwhelms and drowns the innocent. 

The machine calls, like the whale calling to Ahab. Must I go? Must I give in? I enter the first letter of my password. Now it is there forever. If I backspace, the keystroke, the human action that touched a key to send an electronic signal, will be remembered. This machine is so unlike my typewriter that is free of radical electrons and can’t get cancer.