OK, I get that the internet makes a lot of things easier, but it also is extremely frustrating and certainly adds to everyone’s stress.
I’m sitting here trying to do 4 things with the moment of internet access I have. First of all, I would never go into the garden to do 4 unrelated tasks– the gardening tasks would all be spatially related at minimum, not to mention being part of the overall mission of growing food and medicine to save my family, friends and community from unnecessary interference from The Empire. But that’s even beside the point.
The point is: If I wanted to look up info on getting a driver’s license in West Virginia (which is one of the 4 things I’m supposed to be doing rn) and I went into a library, I would have to locate the correct section, find a relevant book, use the Table of Contents or Index pages to locate the pertinent info, and read/skim as many as a dozen pages until I found the exact information I needed. It would take some time, but all the time would be spent in active pursuit of a goal, and so would not be particularly stressful.
I would almost certainly NOT get to the section only to find it blocked by an impenetrable force field. That has literally never happened to me at a library. However, I feel it happens constantly with the Internet.
I’m sitting here with a computer that works, with electric charge flowing through it. Right above me is a wireless router plugged into a DSL connected telephone line, for which I pay quite a pretty penny to keep Internet flowing through the mostly-empty air in my house in Baltimore (we’re still working on moving out of there…).
Yet, despite multiple attempts, I am unable to cause these two machines to fully acknowledge each other in a way that would gain me access to the realm of disinformation, e-commerce, smut and drudgery known as Thre Internet, which I hope also contains info on how to switch my Driver’s License to West Virginia.
This is extreme, but how many tiny delays do we experience while working online that leave us feeling impotent and frustrated? What is the psychological toll of those micro-frustrations?
The *solution for sale* is ever faster internet and processing speeds. But is the issue really the length of the delay? Or is it the fact that our momentum is suddenly severed? That we are, momentarily but acutely, made aware that the machines are in control?
For now, I’m saying *fuck it* and going to make the new Farm Hand Salve I just dreamed up. I probably better take my Maracoc tincture, too, to bring my blood pressure back down. And in general, I’m doing as little as possible online these days. I’m finding that the slower pace of reality is much better suited to health and wholeness than the lightening speed of the Stupid Internet.
