This week I saw a man wearing a T-Shirt that detected wireless hotspots and lit up whenever it entered one. Fortunately I was wearing a harness with a flamethrower attached to it that is designed to detect twats and it lights up whenever it encounters anyone with more computer interface leads than friends, so he won’t be bothering us anymore.
But it got me thinking. With all this modern technology that pours out of our internet cords, updating our lives with a never ending stream of binary sludge isn’t it time we stopped and wondered what’s happening to the air around us? For instance, what if it’s not coal or our Clarkson footprint that’s making bits of sky burst apart like the doom-mongers say? What if it’s the great big cloud of wireless that’s hanging round all over the place like a networked fart ? Think about it. It’s still new technology. We don’t know what it does yet. It might do nothing except sit there, but there’s always an outside chance it could gain sentient intelligence and start eating us like The Blob, but a Blob made out of wireless instead of a Blob of whatever The Blob was made out of.
It’s like when the microwave oven became de rigour. My parents got one sometime around 1983 and have only recently stopped eyeing it with suspicion on the grounds that me and my two sisters didn’t grow up with three mutant heads each and a single, shared, glowing spleen. It turned out not be all that dangerous. Well not if you used it properly. Ours was dangerous but that’s because when they went out I used to experiment with it; exploding eggs, light bulbs in cups of water that would glow with the ferocity of a pregnant sun - and to this day my sister still doesn’t know the real reason her Barbie went all melty. I told her it was because while she’d been at school, Barbie had opened the Ark of the Covenant.
More recently of course it was mobile phone masts that were going to smash our brains off. Then it was something else, I dunno, podcasts made of asbestos or something and parents worried that their child’s playground was too near to the site of a download or an mp3. Should we worry? Wireless used to mean the thing in the corner made of valves that had the Home Service coming crackling out of it but now we have to call that a radio and a wireless is something that lives in your house sending music and films invisibly through the furniture. I’ve just bought a new laptop and when I switched it on it instantly knew all about my wireless. It speaks to everything else in the house in friendlier terms than I speak to my neighbours. It never ceases to amaze me just how it all works, this marvellous futuristic technology. But the downside is that it’s made the air in my office smell funny. Kind of like electricity that’s on fire. And there isn’t a fire because I’ve looked. Plus the cat won’t go in there anymore. But the fact that I can move files from desktop to desktop through space and also look at the internet in the garden kind of outweighs all this.
I’ve got a safety plan though. My friend Andy has even fewer wires than I do so I’m going to wait and see what happens to him. Films, music, internet - all of it streams wirelessly through his house. He’s actually quite disappointed that no-one has yet found a way to stream food from the fridge directly to his stomach because then he wouldn’t have to leave his chair at all. He lives in hope. And if and when his face melts, I’ll be in my house, pulling some plugs out.
So is it safe or shall we one day wake up, peer hopelessly at our routers through milky, metallic eyes and rue the day we all went wireless? When the robots come, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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