Maybe you’ve done it too. Kissed the posterior of technology. Up until three years ago I didn’t pay bills online. I waited for a bill, wrote a check, stamped an envelope, stuck it in the slot and forgot about it. Then I started getting overdue notices. My payments were failing to reach their recipients. I switched to online payment—it seemed like the only option. That has worked fine for two years but then something else started to happen: my email notices failed to show up. I started to get overdue notices again. I went to websites and enrolled in auto-pay for all my regular bills. Then the emails began showing up stating accounts were overdue. The actual websites said the bills had been paid. There seems to be no pleasing the technological beast.
You see, I’m a simple man of pen and paper. I don’t read ebooks unless I have to. I don’t trust most of what I find on the internet. Mine is the mindset of a working Post Office (or at least Pony Express), paper payment for which you receive a copy back. Some solidity. Live Science ran a teaser headline that the next solar storm could lead to an “internet apocalypse.” All records wiped out. With no shoebox full of receipts, how are you going to prove you’ve got the money you say you do? (That could be a boon to braggarts such as Trump, but the rest of us will be waiting timidly for a letter from our banks.) Technology seems to be chasing an invisible goal. Doing it because we can without thinking of the consequences. Shooting rockets into space with no certified astronauts on board—what could possibly go wrong?
Tech isn’t bad, of course. It has preserved many of our jobs through a pandemic. It makes it easy for forgetful guys like me to be able to find information quickly. But functioning is only as good as the coding behind it, and it feels terribly vulnerable to me. Coronal mass ejections, apart from sounding slightly dirty, are rare according to the story by Brandon Specktor, but they tend to happen every century or so. A century ago a working landline telephone was a luxury. The computer as we know it hadn’t been invented. We were about to plunge into the madness of a second world war in which tech would be used to kill on a massive scale. Now I guess we await the apocalypse. The safe money says to have plenty of paper on hand.
