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Most of the time I'm really glad that I'm such a pessimist: I mean what other state of mind could so happily ensure that I've never ever been tempted to gamble? Though there is of course another side to this un-flipped, un-bet-upon coin and that is that, as a pessimist, I can't escape the realisation that pessimism does, indeed, have its slight disadvantages: the main one for me as a technophile being that I have a tendency to rehearse over and over again how terribly thin is the thread that modern high-tech life dangles from---it's like the story of Damocles told from the sword's POV. I mean there you are way up high and hanging by a thread dangling day after day in terror of falling, and hoping above hope that when the inevitable happens to your thread that there also happens to be some guy, and preferably a big fat one, sitting under you on the throne to break your fall and save you from getting a really nasty, painful chip knocked out of your point.
The point of my story is I'm sure clear, that as things get what we like to think of as 'better' for us in what we like to think of as the 'developed' countries they get more complicated and more interconnected, and that all this carries the seed of its own destruction: that we hang around, not so much at the Mall, as at the end of threads depending from threads depending from threads, high above the hard ground ...or rather throne, ever more precarious and liable to tragedy if but one of them breaks; the knots becoming ever more complicated and as hard to maintain as this metaphor.
So. Demetaphoring now.
Imagine what it will be like; for example for me, if this does all break down: apart from the mere loss of income, we are talking real hardship here, just think; I get an idea for an essay---perhaps about my pessimism that that our high tech society will fail---I have to look around for a pen and some ink, and something to write on; and by the time I've found a goat and killed and skinned it and scraped the skin and dried it to make the parchment and ground up the oxgall and stuff for the ink, and got a feather for a pen and napped a flint to a sharp edge and trimmed the pen, I've forgotten the idea! And even if I haven't how in the Helheim am I going to record it? Or send it to the station?! Which probably won't even be there!
Or take this slightly less personal example; ages ago (and so, please note, when things weren't quite as HeathRobinsonish1 as they are now) I was reading, in the State of the Industry column by Rachel Parker in the weekly computer magazine InfoWorld, under the heading 'We Must Learn How to Manage The Computers We Depend On,' (which is a startlingly novel idea for a start) about Sun Microsystems, a very high tech high-tech company, having terrible difficulties and (horror!) loosing money when they changed the computers that, in effect, ran their company: her message more or less being, "if these guys, at the forefront of the industry could screw it up what about the rest of us?" She expressed her concerns in a memorable, frightening phrase, and a phrase that absolutely forced me to include this particular example, "Sun's example," she wrote, "should be a bellwether in a rough sea…"
… I, of course, immediately took telephone under chin, and called both the Animal Liberation Front and PETA to apprise them of the fact that InfoWorld definitely has an animal laboratory and that some pretty weird stuff is obviously going on in it in the name of testing computers. I mean---Oh, the dreadful image that "a bellwether in a rough sea" conjures up. The darkling sky stabbed with lightning; the roar of thunder; the wind whistling; the waves crashing; the spume spewing! And this little woolly head desperately trying to keep itself above water; and round its little woolly neck a big bell: and in the momentary silences of the storm a plaintive "Baa-aa, baa-aa, tinkle, tinkle, glub, glub, glub...": (sniff) and maybe, since a bellwether is after all the lead sheep, straggling out behind it, you can just make out the waterlogged fleecy backs of the rest of the flock trying sadly to follow their leader.
Oh! I can't go on, it's too horrid I…
It's too much even for a pessimist so...
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton.
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Notes:
This essay could just have easily been called "Swords and goats and sheep, Oh my!" but it wasn't.
1 That's RubeGoldbergiform to you Yanks
From the British Artist W. Heath Robinson, the translation being from the American Rube Goldberg
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