Pretext of Absence
The folks at Britannica remind me that today is the birthday anniversary of the fusion bomb, [Link] so this seems an auspicious time to take up the blogging perversion anew. Those few, those happy few, to paraphrase Billy Rattlelance, who frequent the blog have noticed my comments have been absent the last couple of days. Part of that has been preoccupation with the mundanity of computers. For those who follow the seasons of Linux, a biannual[1] version update of Ubuntu was issued this week [Link] And while I have not yet begun that activity of installing this update, 9.10, I have been and still am doing various things to get to the state where I may actually install this pearl of rare price on my Ubuntu boxes. Some of these modifications are of a software nature, but others are hardware upgrades that have been deferred because they involve sitting on floor and while getting down is tractable, rising again from is almost not. The rationale, of course, is that one does not combine two risks into one given that most hardware is peverse and requires twiddling to get to work, happily a less frustrating undertaking with Linux than Windows, and hence one does not combine that with the necessary twiddling with a new OS, or even a version update lest one be left with smoke and ashes. Kadish has been said for more than one computer in my youth for that error.
The other reason for scant blogging has been that, in and amidst the waits while hardware and software do their interminable thing, was the realization that society, having become assymptotically global, has become banal. The popularity of social web sites has demonstrated this amply. Look at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and see what the tenor of conversation and discussion is. It is banal. An article I read several years ago, for which I lack the reference, predicted this sorry turn of affairs, claiming that while population rose logistically, positions of meaning in society rose logarithmically. Hence the vast population of the planet, which by its numbers dominates the social sites, has nothing meaningful to do nor any expectation of anything meaningful to accomplish. The tenor of society is no longer improvement in knowledge or understanding or even relations among humans, but the constrained banality of individual existence. Theordore Cleaver has been inundated by Edward Haskell; deeds have been whelmed by experiences; and serfdom has been reinvented with a finality that is alarming.
Of course, it is very easy to think dark thought when one is diddling with the innards of computers. Scant wonder that surgeons and automobile mechanics fit poorly in society at any time, and that those who alter reality, or our perception of it, are alienated and haunted. In some strange sense social inertia is conserved and when one disrupts it that conservation is added to one’s burdens.
[1] Ah! A lovely word. In that it has opposite meanings, being either a frequency of twice a year or once every two years. In this case, the former.
