The once and future darkness.

The once and future darkness.

We live in an age of light, of electricity and computer powered things, from cars to satellites, from monstrous mining equipment to robots that can fit on your fingertip, from safes that lock away our precious items to hermetically sealed doors for our labs. Power governs most everything – but the old saying is true even here – power corrupts. So what happens when the power goes off?

I thought I’d do some research for this particular topic and I was struck by something – As many will know this year marks 100 years since the beginning of the great war in 1914. It may surprise you, dear reader, to know that my lovely little country first had electricity brought to its fine shores in 1886! And though it did not become common until 1917, it was here, so that by 100 years ago we had passed out of our previous darkness and, as it were, stepped into the light.

But even then – had we somehow lost the wonderful spark of light – we would not have been so badly off. Many, if not all, would have been able to very quickly adjust to life without power, as they had  experienced the phenomenon coming into being in their own lifetime. It is perhaps also worthy of note that, as I write this, through my research I find that on August 28 1914 the first Kiwi volunteer for the great war was buried in NZ. Lest we forget.

So that was the old darkness – the time before electricity came – some would say a simpler, easier time. A time with no computers, no cell phones and yes – no internet! Some of my friends say that they were born for such a time as that, “When men were men” Etc. Etc. For myself – I am a child of the digital age – almost everything I do requires not only electricity but also electronics; from driving my truck to washing my clothes not to mention the many and various tasks involving computers that set about making up my everyday life.

So what, then, is this future darkness? Well, in short, it is a thought experiment. Imagine if you will today’s world, a world of computers, supermarkets, and online finical records. Now imagine a global Electromagnetic pulse (fries everything with electricity running through it) and here you are in the future darkness. No electricity generation, everything that uses electricity blown, and no quick fix.

So, first up let’s deal with the practical stuff and start at the bottom – Shelter. New Zealand does pretty well here; we don’t have many high-rise apartment structures and most of us live in our very own self-contained house. Aussie would do ok  if they could get out of those densely populated cities. I would hazard a guess that any city the physical size of Auckland with more than say 2 million people living in it has a problem. New York, London, and Tokyo are just plain gone. OK, so that’s shelter. What about food and water? Supermarkets with their large refrigeration and distribution warehouses, not to mention transport network, are dead, but again NZ does OK here. Most of us have the capability to grow our own food and catch our own water (though my gutters need a clean), and if we thought about it and shared with neighbours, we should be all right. Farmers actually run into a slight problem here; they have to get rid of some of their stock in order to keep the herd healthy and viable. Also people will start wanting their own cows and sheep, and may just outright take them. The aussies don’t fare quite so well here but could do OK – Australia has a harsher climate to grow things in and so may suffer here without pumped water. Again, any big cities are dead.

So we’ve come through the worst of it with most people being reasonable and nice to each other, realising that we are all in this together. It’s time to start talking to each other – So far any given town doesn’t know (but assumes) that they are the only ones affected. Well good news, New Zealand; we actually have a few horses and other beasts of burden not too far outside our towns, so we can start to set up a communication network again. Also Kiwiland has some of the best sailors in the world, so we can even go and talk to our Aussie friends – if only we can find some of those celestial navigation charts again.

But all of this has been broad strokes stuff – How would this affect your daily life? How often do you get up at dawn and go to bed around sunset? How much sex would you be having without contraception? When was the last time you ploughed a field or hand milked a cow?

Personally? If this happens, I struggle a bit. I’m a big guy, so would probably be useful lifting and pushing things. I don’t have any real farm knowledge, so I would have to learn that, but I think I could be a useful teacher of it once I had learnt. But first things first – I would have to get home from Invercargill to Hamilton…

By the way – if you found this an interesting thought exercise and thought “Oh, cool idea but that could never happen,” check out this.

An Electrical Perspective

11/10 of my friends would say that I’m weird. I am an English geek who can’t spell, a sound geek who can’t play an instrument, and a computer geek who can’t clock a game without the cheat codes.

Hi, My name is Rowan, and I’m an electronicaholic.

But then, dear reader, so are you. Perhaps not to the same extent that yours truly is, but still, in no small measure, you are an electronicaholic. This, not all to shocking realisation, has come upon me as I travel down the South Island of New Zealand. I have been looking at some stunning views, thinking how easily Sir Peter Jackson filmed here, as it dawns on me: I live my life through an electrical perspective.

I, until today, have never been farther south than Christchurch. A little city on New Zealand’s East coast – and while I have seen all of this before, it seems like so much Lord of the Rings, so much movie set – and in my mind, at least, it all exists in two dimensions.

We see so much, too much, that way now. We take pictures – not for the memories but for the instant buzz when someone likes our flattened moment of time. Ironic, then, that since the digital age has become more prevalent that our pictures have become more permanent – no more slide shows at Nana’s house when she comes home from a three-month long cruise and relives the memories. Instead, we live it in the instant moments after she has taken the picture as it pops up on a news feed halfway round the world.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that all this technology is a bad thing – nor indeed that we should go back to those old fashioned slide shows – but I do believe that we should recognise that we more and more experience the world around us through a digital lens – either ours or another’s.

As a Video geek (OK, OK, I’m a fully-fledged geek), I perhaps observe this more than others. When going to a concert, one of the most common sights is people filming the concert on their cellphones. Now, again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but why have they paid $100+ to go and see a concert only to view it on a five inch screen with awful sound? An electrical perspective? And a bad one at that. Especially when you can buy the concert on a medium of your choice for less than $50 and enjoy it with all of your friends, at a time and place of your choosing, in comfort, with places to sit and nary a fear of missing anything.

The Digital World is not coming – The Digital World is here. We spend our days looking at computer screen – electrons flying in different patterns governed by an endless string of zeros and ones. When we get home we watch TV or play on the computer where our digital movements are recorded and analysed by mainframes, so that, along with the rest of our digital footprint generated while shopping and getting those fantastic discounts, the annoying ads that pop up will be less and less annoying and more pointed to what we would like to see. So after our phone has tracked where we have been and what we have done for the day, our supermarket has logged what we’ve bought; our gym has noticed how long we were there for; our car has tracked how hard we were on the engine; the insurance app has recorded every time we have been over the speed limit; our bank has noted where we spent our pay check, how quickly and on what. And finally, after all that, our internet activity is logged, our faces tagged, our profiles linked with friends. We must come to the inescapable truth that not only do we all have a digital footprint; we all, Dear reader, are eletronicaholics.

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Punch The Keys

"Punch the keys dammit!!" Finding Forrester had it right: while writing, one must indeed punch the keys. This is true not only of the typewriter but also of the laptop. I, at least, find the need to be very noisy when I write. I’m not sure why this is; I just find it gratifying. But perhaps the thing that I miss most is the ability to express myself in my own words – not to have to muzzle my expression while being around those who constantly require the definitions for my words. 

The requirement to explain myself is annoying and almost degrading to the other person; I feel as though I belittle such people as I speak to them. I know that this notion is incorrect, and I am aware that, in truth, I am in fact expanding their mind and their vocabulary by educating them in the art of the English language, both in diction and in knowledge. Yet still I feel almost aloof, and so I do what I must to avoid the long and mind-numbing explanations that come with speaking at my level of language. I tone down my vocabulary to the lowest level, the lowest common denominator, so that all might understand. I’m not sure that everyone can appreciate this dilemma. I fear that it is one only experienced by those who have been brought up to love the English language and appreciate its finer points, to be able to argue it down to the definitions of words and why one should use one word instead of another when addressing certain types of people or making an argument in a certain arena.

Some might say that I’m an English snob, and there is a certain truth to that. I cringe when I hear “th” pronounced “f” or those who mumble, mispronounce or otherwise mutilate the mother tongue. It bugs me that people do not take enough care to communicate effectively with their speech, let alone the murderous way they portray the English language on common social media websites, especially when they are trying to make a point that they wish people to take seriously, or indeed when they are commenting on a major life event. These are the times when accurate and precise language are needed so that all might share in the news or appreciate a strongly held belief.

Now it is true that language evolves, changes and grows. But what we are currently witnessing is more unto the reduction of language foreseen by Mr Orwell is his Novel 1984 – we are killing language, reducing its form and size until we are left with a strange mutilation involving numerals and symbols, to the point that a person living 50 years ago would not understand the diatribes polluting the internet, and as such our common use of the English language, so that we all lose our extended ability to both recall and use words, words, words, as Shakespeare once put it.

Read this book.

This loss, therefore, is suffered not only by me but also by the public at large as we bring up children who not only use acronyms to describe how they are feeling in online situations but have started to use these same acronyms in everyday “speech” going as far to say LOL rather than laughing and to say BRB rather than the full version, be right back, for fear that the extra half second it costs them may in some way be massively detrimental to their life and that they may miss some experience because they uttered a fully formed sentence rather than the only slightly shorter and yet far less descriptive one. And some would say even more heinous acronyms, like WBU, that they have become accustomed to using. And all the while English loses so much of its expression to the point that one must oft even define ‘acronym’ itself to the very culprits who use them as common place language, as they know not what they do.

This sad predicament that we now find ourselves in is largely due to technology. The very thing designed to make our lives easier, better and more knowledgeable has had the opposite effect, culling the language of Shakespeare, of Milton and of Wilde to a state where none of those giants would be able to recognise it, let alone read it.

Perhaps in punching the keys all too often we have killed the very thing we were trying to create – not by a thousand paper cuts; but instead, by a million million strokes of the keys, we have stabbed and typoed our way into a pseudo English scarecely worthy of our predecessors.

Perhaps we should all put down the laptops and pick up a pen every now and again, open a book instead of waiting for the movie to come out and speak – though speak with elegance it would, like those who came before us.