Quite Random

Kerrrr-pow! Zing! Vroom! Brain Rot!

I’ve just got super-fast broadband from Be - it’s very impressive. It downloads so fast that you’ve often got a page loaded up before you even thought of looking for it, and you’ve checked the weather, answered your e-mails and read a blog or two in the morning before you’ve even woken up. Small problem – there’s still bugger all worth looking at on the Internet a lot of the time, and broadband won’t kick me out of bed or make me a coffee. It’s a bit like buying the nicest, newest, spankiest telly and there being nothing good on, or getting the sportiest, fastest, shiniest car, and then only being able to drive it round the car park at Sainsbury’s. Movie trailers, hell, entire movies, downloaded at breakneck pace. Music streaming. Videos of talking dogs. All of these are available in no time at all – but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s healthier not to turn your computer on in the first place and get outside instead, or that you are forced to share the Internet with people who write things like “That is so lame lol wtf die die die”. I’m not even getting in to online gaming – I’d be found months after disappearing from society, crouched before my screen, stewing in my own juices, muscles wasted, skin white as a sheet, a Boo Radley for the new millennium.

Where will it stop? The alarming pace of technological development is such that we will soon have breathalysers in our mobile phones to tell us we’re too drunk to call our ex (really), access to the Internet from absolutely anywhere via laptop or the new bluetooth tooth, phones in our nostrils, TV in our retinas, a USB port in our brains, and wireless access points up our bottoms (though why eludes me at the moment). We’ll want so much information and entertainment that sandwiches will double as MP3 players and laptops will double as pets or furniture. More information is being piled onto us all the time, TV programs getting more and more frenetic, entertainment becoming interactive whether we like it or not, red dots left, right and centre asking us to participate in the news, pulling us in to some hive mind. Doctor Who recently featured a story where the people of London were brought, entranced by messages through their earpieces, to have their brains removed by machines and entombed in the metal bodies of the Cybermen – how far off are we, when the white headphone cords of iPods dangle from every other ear and catatonic, glazed expressions greet you every morning on the train in to work?

We are becoming the Eloi. Cast off your earphones and smell the flowers!