The Way without Reversal

The Way without Reversal

If hell exists, it will be computerized

For a long time, I resisted the computerization. When I already had a computer, I had to get myself a printer. A modem had to be installed on the computer. The fax was on the verge of a sort of forced and incidentally incurred. That's exactly the way that there is no turning back. Beginnings are harmless and seem to bring us only new comfort. The sequel may not be an entry into hell, but it's certainly computerized as soon as hell exists.

The latest computer is aging so fast that after a few years it's just junk. Generations of new computers push the previously built and praised into an uncertain abyss: Americans who are in love with statistics claim computer life is short. His life lasts between three and five years. The population of these devices, which no one had even thought about half a century ago, today counts hundreds of millions worldwide.

Of course, one wonders what happens to the millions of outdated computers? They die? Do you have your own cemeteries? Or do you end up on the dumps? Where can you find their bodies? There are hardly any camps for deceased computers as a junk room. I have to admit that in my cellar there is an Apple computer packed in 1984, which I bought for my son when he attended American International School in Vienna. In his time he was powerful, but I do not dare to confess what kind of performance and storage capacity he had. At least he succeeded: nobody threw him away somewhere. It may not have been many years, but it is about the same as the current generation of average computers, like a satellite to a morse code transmitter.

However, I would like to repeat the question of what happens to computers displaced by newer generations. I hear from the American press that they are stacked as fate wants it: in the camps, cellars, in the attics ... But they are not cannibalized. They are outdated. The heart of the computer is the hard drive, its perfusion or perhaps the innervation is represented by the processors. The equation of these centers with the human or animal brain is a significant exaggeration.

Here, my thought suddenly and unexpectedly makes a turn for me. Everyone knows that a willful poisoning or contagion of a thinking system, such as the brain, is punishable. On the other hand, you can infect a computer, and this can be done insidiously with viruses, without having to be afraid of the court or even of the jail, unless it is an act that is considered an offense or offense against significant public Values ​​apply, as is the case for every bank and every general staff in their fortified seats. Tracing the hackers who are capable of damaging the computer's memory by deliberate action from one terrestrial hemisphere on the other employs the special investigative services only exceptionally. At present, cipher art is spreading and evolving significantly, the art of delegitimizing the information sent to someone else by someone else, not just as a branch of cryptography, but rather as a veritable baobab grown from it. While some are trying to program antivirus filters and locks, others are trying to track down any virus spreaders, especially on the routes over which financially important information travels.

If you look at the global nature of this struggle, it turns out that we are dealing with a process that is slipping away from the power and will of its original creators. Their first intention was to create a communication network that had no center at all, so that an enemy, possibly nuclear attack could not paralyze such an organized communication link as a whole. The way of thinking that gave rise to this decentralization, which at first was the origin of the internet and other networks, is due to the strategy of the Cold War. I am convinced that none and none of the developers of this project has come up with the idea that they unconsciously play the role of sorcerer's apprentices who awaken powers that can no longer be mastered.

The nets have grown all over their heads. The networks have not spread any content relevant to military and political issues, but sexual and perverse ones. For sure, no one in the epoch of ENIAC thought that the pedophile pandemic was possible, which cannot be trampled on or extinguished like a constantly stifled, reoccurring conflagration. The point is that effective and effective censorship of all content worldwide would mean destroying the web. It has now penetrated into military, economic, political, and moral subjects, and has been linked to millions of private affairs. A successful expulsion of pornographic iconography from the net, which focuses on everything that even taboos the most permissive culture, is, to be honest, just an unrealizable dream.

The human coronary arteries have a network of additional, over time decreasing connections, caused by the inevitable aging of the vessel walls, which ultimately leads to heart attacks. Infarcts in the electronic network can also happen, but they happen simply as a result of the IT-related congestion. Therefore, the networks need more, not yet blocked by the news excess connections. In this way arise over the old newer levels of the network. So something of the kind of specialization comes to the fore when banks communicate with banks, universities with universities, television stations with other stations, and so on. At the same time, the address abbreviations of the individual internauts must always be longer. Frightening, how long the addresses will turn out when the network has to render the all-round communication of billions of senders and receivers.

At present, the growth, fight, and competition processes are in full swing. I dare not predict if the Net in 100 years will not be our main enemy and maybe our killer, as the global motorization. It is well known that people agree with what they feel like or what they consider necessary. More Americans died in traffic accidents in the US than during the Vietnam War. The death of the soldier, however, aroused despair and disgust, while the victims of traffic accidents are mourned by no one but the families. This comparison may seem pathetic, but it is nothing more than a summary of facts that have set the world in motion and accelerated, and that are heading in an uncertain direction with us. Of course, it is easiest to cover the matter with a new name: the twenty-first century will be a century of computer science. However, this name does not explain anything. We do not know if the electronic Juggernaut will prove to be a technology-built tree of knowledge that the Bible told us in a non-technological way.