FROM MY CORNER: State of The World

Athens, Greece . . .

October 26, 2021

Visiting Europe is constant navigation through a digital maze. Most people everywhere are wandering about glazed eyes glued to their cell phones. Interaction between people is sporadic and erratic.

The art of human communication has become very strange indeed. Some people simply cannot talk to other people anymore. Their entire existences are dominated by their cells. When they do talk, it is in abbreviated digital speak.

Telephone calls are frequently forced conversations. Dealing with airline schedules and hotel reservations is almost entirely a test of one’s ability to maneuver through the ever-daily-changing program changes of software by individual companies.

There appears to be little, if any, real attempt among different companies to cooperate in any common software language. The entire process is – in truth – nothing but digital anarchy. Daily a program you used yesterday is changed today. :You are required to change on the turn of a dime.

From one country to another, one’s cell phone stops working how it did yesterday as its internal programming struggles to communicate with the new country’s digital system. You find yourself in the middle of reserving an airline ticket and a notice pops up warning that you are now in danger of being hacked.

You retreat, try again, and find the program you were just working on has disappeared, replaced by some company advertisement’s digital software selling you something else other than what you are desperately trying to buy.

Trying to read the day’s news from major international news sources, advertising constantly litterly pops up and mixes with the news to the point you literally cannot tell where the news ends and the hype begins.

It is a nightmare of the first order. Among all the allegedly legitimate corporate advertising the professional conmen and conwomen roam freely, bilking all us planetwide of billions, possibly trillions, of dollars.

Law enforcement is not only incapable of coping with the them, it seems utterly unaware of them. I suppose the multimillions of tax dollars simply allow politicians to continue their circus-like charades because someone on their staff is somehow handling the maze.

Mail between countries is erratic and unpredictable. Planning for anything is a spin of a digital roulette wheel. The common payoff is not what you ordered when you expected to get it, but more often a long, long, long wait for anything to happen at all.

Amidst it all, everyone spends hours daily in European cafes and restaurants ,sharing food and drink And talk. Is it about the digital game? I can’t say. Traveling alone, my various talks with the residents of, and travelers to, different countries has just become part of incoherent and infamous Babble. In many languages.

We all just seem to be either smiling through it all or – occasionally – simply suffering silently.

It is not a brave new world. It is not a digital godsend. It is, I suspect, mass rhetorical chaos played out as if it were as natural as rain or snow or sleet and hail. Something one must just put up with, wondering if it will ever end and humans will start communicating with each other again as humans used to do.

The youngsters seem to get off on it. It is for them apparently one big orgiastic pleasure. They, the future of the world, a thronging mass of young people, rolling with the flow, drinking, eating, flirting, and – thinking?

I have my doubts.

Hal