On the Everyday Madness and the Mad Marvels of Technology

I have always found it remarkable that modern technology has led us to the point where we now seriously sit and watch a symbolic hourglass through a pane of glass.

You only have to stop and consider what progress has achieved.

For centuries, all an hourglass required was some glass, a little sand, and gravity. Then humankind invented electricity, semiconductors, microprocessors containing billions of transistors, memory, graphics cards, and high-resolution monitors.

At last, we were able to display an hourglass.

Under glass.

At least the sand no longer spills out when it falls over.

By now, even the hourglass has become technologically obsolete in many places. It has been replaced by a little circle that spins. That is more modern. With an hourglass, at least you could see that there was less sand at the top and more at the bottom. The circle, on the other hand, simply spins. You have no idea where it started or when it will be finished.

That is what we call progress.

Perhaps the next stage of development will be the sundial.

It could be displayed in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Naturally, also under glass. There it would reliably show the time, provided the sun happened to fall on the monitor at a suitable angle.

If there is insufficient sunlight, an external flashlight may be used as a temporary substitute. Care must be taken to ensure that the resulting shadow falls exclusively in the direction appropriate to the correct time of day.

That sounds simple enough.

It isn’t.

Modern operating systems take security very seriously.

Unknown light source detected.

Windows could not verify the manufacturer of your flashlight.

Using this light source may put your computer at risk.

You click “More information.”

There you learn that the publisher of the flashlight is unknown. Fortunately, there is a button:

Illuminate anyway.

You click it.

This setting is managed by your organization.

This is surprising when you are sitting at home alone.

It is even more surprising when you are the administrator yourself.

But administrators are funny things. They possess extensive powers of which they themselves are occasionally unaware.

So you give up on the sundial.

You could, after all, simply look at a clock — provided the administrator has declared this device permissible.

That should settle the matter.

A monitor is, in general, a remarkable device. It shows us things that are right in front of us while at the same time reliably ensuring that we cannot actually get at them.

I was reminded of this recently by a piece of text.

I had it on the screen. A perfectly ordinary piece of text. Letters, words, sentences. The text was visible. I could select it.

The system then offered to let me ask ChatGPT about the selected text.

I could also “Start writing.”

The one thing I could not do was copy it.

That was unfortunate, because copying it was precisely what I wanted to do.

One must acknowledge, however, that humankind has solved greater technical problems. So I began considering alternative methods of data transfer.

The simplest option would have been colored pencils.

You copy the text from the screen letter by letter and then type it back into the computer, again letter by letter.

This method requires no driver and works largely independently of the operating system. Only the transfer rate leaves room for improvement.

A more modern solution would have been to photograph the screen and then have Google Lens convert the photograph back into text.

This struck me as technologically appropriate: you take a digital text that already exists, turn it into an image, and then use another piece of software to turn it back into digital text.

After all, progress is not defined by how short the route is.

Only by how much technology is involved along the way.

For a moment, therefore, I considered an even more direct method.

Since the letters were already plainly visible behind the monitor glass, surely all one would have to do was smash the pane, carefully remove the letters from the device, and transfer them mechanically to the website.

They could be attached there with adhesive tape.

Should its adhesive properties deteriorate over time, thumbtacks would be an obvious technological upgrade.

For larger headings, heavy-duty wall hooks are recommended.

At this point, however, a structural engineer should be consulted before the website is published. It would be distinctly unpleasant if a poorly secured paragraph were to fall on a visitor’s foot while they were reading.

The question of liability would also need to be clarified.

Would the website operator be responsible? The web designer? The manufacturer of the heavy-duty hook? Or should the visitor have recognized that they were standing beneath a paragraph of body text that had not been adequately anchored?

There are probably specialist lawyers for cases like this.

If there aren’t, there will be once enough websites have adopted this technology.

In the end, incidentally, the problem was solved without smashing the monitor.

The text made it onto the website.

The colored pencils remained unused.

The monitor’s front panel is still intact.

One should acknowledge one’s successes.

After that, I wanted nothing more to do with computers for the rest of the day.

I got up and went into the kitchen.

I opened the refrigerator.

The light came on.

Unfortunately, some of it fell through the open door and reached the computer.

The screen lit up.

Unauthorized light source detected.

Use of this light source has been prohibited by the administrator.

I took a can of beer from the refrigerator and closed the door in accordance with regulations.

One final message appeared on the monitor:

This incident has been logged.

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