Let me help you with that

‘It looks like you have finished looking at porn sites, would you like me to clear your browser history?’

‘It looks like you are writing an email after midnight to an ex girlfriend, would you like me to save it to ‘drafts’ when you hit send?’

‘It looks like you are looking at porn sites for the tenth time this week, would you like me to order keyboard wipes from Amazon?’

These are just three useful prompts that your computer could give you when engaged in everyday activity involving IT.  Thanks to Downton Abbey and Brexit, more of the population has been given a taste for having servants do shit for them, with less chance of the economic climate making that achievable, than ever before.  This has led to the popularity of those internet speaker things that sit on the corner of your room, spying on you for North Korea and occasionally giving you either the weather report or playing some music should you remember to bellow ‘Alexa, play ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA’ across a room, an exercise requiring the clarity of diction that would make the Queen think she had better take elocution refreshers.

The idea is that we can interface with the internet by simply shouting at a speaker.  The notion of speaking to technology is not new, the notion of it actually doing what you tell it to do is.  If only PCs had been able to understand the simply command ‘work you fucker’ in the 80s, a lot of grief could have been spared.

Not that I am quite sure that the technology is quite there yet, there’s still a few years for lazy sitcom writers to get a joke out of the following:

INT. DAY.  TOM and CINDY’S flat.  TOM is showing off his new purchase, an Amazon Echo.  His girlfriend CINDY is there, as is all her family and TOM’S family.

TOM

Alexa, play Dancing Queen by ABBA.

MACHINE VOICE

Did you say play secret recording you made of you taking your girlfriend’s sister up the chuff?

TOM’S MUM

Oh Tom, not again.

CINDY’S DAD

What have you done to my little girl?  I’m going to kill you you cunt.

And so on.

Software trying to assist us is not new.  Anyone who struggled with early versions of Word will a) deserve a medal and counselling and b) recall that shortly after you started typing anything, a little animated paperclip would appear and ask you if you needed any help, without ever offering any advice that was either practical or appropriate.  If the little fucker had suggested ‘Hi, it looks like you are trying to write a novel.  Let me tell you now, you have no chance, so best you shut me down, fire up my cousin the spreadsheet and put your creative energy into optimising accounts and devising ever more elaborate ways to brood about increasingly younger writers than you winning literary prizes, topping the bestseller charts and getting huge movie adaptation deals’ then that might have been some use, but it was always ‘Hi, looks like your making a list, can I help?’.  Yea, yea paperclip, putting bullet points next to the words bread, milk and cat food is really, really going to add value.

Why was it a paperclip anyway?  Microsoft is essentially trying to engineer the paperless office, so the avatar they chose to annoy you was something that they considered so pointless they were trying to remove from existence, which is something all Word users would cheerfully have done to animated paperclip, the tossers who created it and, collateral damage being a feature of any just but extreme solution, anything in a six block radius of their office.

So yes, for a time, the Word paperclip was the most irritating thing about technology.

(Obviously this was before some douchbag handed Donnie Trump a smartphone and told him about this thing called Twitter.  Jesus Christ, what is wrong with that guy (now there’s a question for Google)?  When you get sent to prison, they take your ‘phone off of you.  This is presumably so you can’t organise an escape attempt or play Angry Birds, but also presumably because it’s not a good idea to give certified scumbags access to social media.  Except the problem with Li’ll Donnie is that his Tweets get reported in the national media.  Daily.  It’s like somebody gave a certified scumbag, like some clueless idiot who had been given a community sentence for interfering with goats or something, some orange jumpsuited idiot, a smartphone and a Twitter account and told them ‘go nuts!’ and then broadcast every thoughtless Tweet on a billboard in Times Square.  Sad.)

Not anymore.  For a while now (well, since Steve Jobs sadly passed away without having the foresight to upload his consciousness to a mainframe) Apple appear to be engaged in a worldwide social experiment designed to test the loyalty and, lately, sanity, of their consumers.

Every time they update the operating system for their iPhones or iPads, you get ten messages a day urging you to upgrade, so you eventually snap and upgrade the fucker and three things happen:

1.  No obvious change.  A pity as you were hoping that this would be the upgrade that delivered on that holographic display you’ve been secretly waiting for.

2.  Except your battery doesn’t appear to last as long as it used to.  WTF?

3.  Every single forum you visit warns you not to install this upgrade.  Some of these posts are dated 2011.

By the way, THAT’s how you make a list!

The latest upgrade installed a new security feature.  It requires you to enter a pin that is sent to another Apple device you own.  The two day process of actually getting the fucking thing done was so rage-inducing that the best use of my Apple ‘phone was researching Android ‘phones.  Luckily I had a breakthrough before I had a breakdown and eventually managed to get the thing sorted before I had to resort to calling the North Korean secret service, who were probably listening to my attempts to sort my technology issues via my toaster anyway, for technical support.

But it was all just so unnecessary.

The trajectory of the technology is for more voice activated stuff, quietly upgrading itself in the corner of the room to be more useful and do more on command than play Dancing Queen.  But it’s still a long way to go to get the same effect as pulling on a cord in the corner of the room come the Cocktail Hour and unleashing a flurry of activity on the other side of the green baize door.

Under an orange sky

The sky turned orange.  Was this Armageddon?  Was it the result of Brexit, or the fault of the orange buffoon squatting in the White House, as these are the two Modern Social Evils most often linked with catastrophe, usually for good reason?

No, it was the result of storm force winds picking up dust from the Sahara and the wildfires on the Iberian Peninsular.  Thanks to Google, everyone knew this, and so there wasn’t the sort of low level weather anxiety that we would have enjoyed twenty years ago, religious awe that we would have experienced a hundred years ago or primal anxiety and possibly the sacrifice of the Most Unpopular Member Of The Tribe that would have been the result a few thousand years ago.  And in some ways we should mourn the passing of those simpler, if not happier, times, before the Internet spoiled wonder, awe and a primal fear of clouds.

Just because we knew the cause didn’t make things less impressive.  From about two o’clock onwards, the sky did start to go a very odd colour, normally only found in the 80s action films of directors who loved a bit of a tobacco filter.  By three o’clock, it was unusually dark and cars were driving along with their lights on.  It was not unlike that sort of sickly yellow light you occasionally get before a thunderstorm, or in any city where the regime in charge think a climate accord is just another way for the rich nations to oppress developing countries.

It was actually very impressive.  Everyone loves an unusual weather event and even if this one didn’t result in an alien invasion or a rain of badgers, or rain of rain for that matter, it was still odd enough to be unsettling in that creepy fun way when you know the reason for something, but the part of your brain that’s not that long out of the cave is thinking that if this doesn’t end soon, we might have to sacrifice Darren from Accounts to appease the gods and make the sun shine again.