The Luddites are Coming.

Dead lock your doors. Close your windows. Unplug your phone, and pull the cable out of your telebox. It's the stuff of nightmares: The Luddites are Coming.

Listen carefully. Don't panic. Stay calm. Stay in your homes. And, do not, under any circumstances, go outside. If you approach the Luddites you will end up a gibbering wreck, traumatised, with an unlubricated iPhone shoved right up your little poo hole.

Actually, don't worry - it's a joke. The Luddites are dead! Including this chump: Ned Ludd. In fact, he's so dead he might not have existed in the first place. According to the Wikipedia he might not have, maybe, possibly was, the Luddites' leader: smashing looms, subversing, inserting phones where the sun don't shine, and generally getting up to no good - the impolite working class bastard.

"Death to the machines!" he might not have said "they tread on your future, and stamp on our dreams."

But, for someone so apposed to technological change, I do wonder what he would think of his very own wikipedia page, or of the collaborative spirit which defines ‘the web 2.0', or the interweb's ability to transport a message across the world instantly, or of the sheer empowerment of having access to more information than you can possibly ever imagine imagining. Surely even Mr Ned Ludd himself would have had the common sense to embrace the digital zeitgeist. It's a bloody beautiful thing.

Isn't it?

In July 2008 Nicolas Carr published a landmark article in 'The Atlantic', entitled 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?' Within it, Carr makes a bold and compelling argument that the interweb is, potentially, far more harmful than we have ever realised. He argues that the internet, with it's vast database of knowledgeness, on demand demandingness, hyperlinking webbyness, attention grabbing contentingness, and one click hittingness, might just be tinkering with our stupid little brains, impairing our cognitive abilities, and stealing our ability to concentrate. Carr posits that the internet is changing us; Google is making us stupid!

Carr argues that we are loosing the ability to contemplate deeply: Why think when Google tells us the answer? Why think when iPhone apps can "solve all of life's little problems?" Why embrace ambiguity, when we can fix it with logic? As Carr puts it: "In the quiet spaces, we make our own conclusions, draw on our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas....if we loose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content', we will sacrifice something important, not only in ourselves, but in our culture." Worryingly, it seems we are no longer consuming content: the content is consuming us.

This consumption reversal, also know to professional paradigm shifters as "#Epic Fail", is a growing trend. And it was almost a year before Carr's article, on June 29th 2007, that #Epic Fail finally hit the mainstream. Because on that day thousands of humans stood outside stores across the US waiting for the elusive prize, the holy grail, the solver for all of life's little problems: the Apple iPhone. Not surprisingly, it's massive launch signaled the start of a strange and exciting new era: the dawn of the ubiquitous age.

The genius of the ‘internet enabled mobile device' (or the iPhone as Apple call it) is that it's technologies' missing link. It bridges the gap between the "desktop paradigm" of computing and everyday life. In today's 2.0 release of the digital zeitgeist, computers have metaphorically jumped off the desk and are literally holding on to us for dear life - deviantly doing what ever they can to survive: buzzing, beeping, txt alerting, informating, distracting, app-ify-ing.

"Hold on to me" they might say "and gently finger my interface."

And, by holding on to us every second of every day we can now be fully consumed with content, with facebook, and twitter, and flickr, and mobile apps, and emailing, and messenger, and more. The web can now touch us anywhere, like some kind of perverted pervert - and it has no intention of letting go. Even more worryingly though, the trend seems to suggest that we are no longer in control of technology; technology is in control of us.

Wether we realise it or not, we may be strolling towards the tipping point of #Epic Fail, where the carefully designed abstract models of the world begin to betray us. Because lurking behind these abstractions is the heartless logic of computation, deviantly offering to offload the burden of human cognition, of human effort, of human anxiety, for it's own self gain.

The digital zeitgeist, paradoxically, may not liberating us. Instead, it maybe be driving us towards a remote and automated future. A future designed with a ruthlessly cold logic. A future driven by 0s and 1s. A future that grinds through the numbers, with no room for human err0r.

"The machines! They tread on your future, and stamp on our dreams."

return 0; /* #EPIC FAIL */