Monday, May 24, 2004

...it really amazes me...

...how much people "black-box" computers.

The other day I cam back from the computer shop with a new DVD-ROM drive and told one of my flatmates I was going to go and fit it. She thought I must have done a course. Her brother had to do a course to learn how to do something that complicated. Fucksake.

Trouble is, I think this is a general thing and not just isolated stupidity. People just don't have a clue how easy it is to eg. build, upgrade or configure a computer system.

Why is this? We're pissing money away training people to do a task that should be the reserve of 15-year-old work-experience trainees, and telling them it's a fucking career. It's the same mentality that leads to us paying some twelve-year-old in MacDonalds 50p above minimum wage and telling them they're the assistant manager. The tories solved the class problem by giving everyone a middle-class title and labour have put a cherry on it by telling the impoverished that they aren't being fucked and trying to convince them they're partners for fucking change.

At the heart of this is the "don't let 'em get any better than we need 'em to be" attitude of the big corporations. We can no longer, as individuals, produce the food we need to survive. Increasingly we're being encouraged to subsist upon pre-cooked packaged shite and insipid carcinogenic take-aways and are gradually losing the ability to even prepare the factory-farmed biological waste that's shovelled-up and shrink-wrapped for us by the almighty Tesco. We can no longer perform childishly simple modifications to our computers because the plasticated monstrosity that is Microsoft Windows frustrates every attempt at understanding how a computer actually works by forcing us to view information technology through the virtual equivalent of a baby's activity centre. Pretty soon we'll all be living in a world where those that "don't need" free access to information will be spared the "inconvenience" of having to learn to read it.