Silicon exactitude
The first day of school is always an exciting time; new books, new shoes, new teachers, and seeing those you went to school with last year. Today my school bus comes to its stop, a big white Butte Regional Transit carriage, repainted with B-Line indicia.
I get out my shiny student id card when I get on and run face to face with it – the obelisk.
It stands about three feet high, has a brushed metal case with a grey plastic cap, through which passengers insert various methods of payment. Called an electronic fare box, it will give the bus line an accurate account of their daily ridership.
Businesses like silicon exactitude for its immediacy and complete control of resources. Wells Fargo lost much of its monetary record for a time last week; I just worked through a network failure at Chico State where when the servers went down, the network connections were gone, and for the most part, so were the computers.
This over-reliance on computers is one of the problems with today. I remember while being a sophomore at Chabot College a quarter century, or does 25 years ago sound better, and we used manual typewriters, cassette tapes, and the only network we knew of was Ma Bell and our telephone. We made copies with xerox machines, and hardcover books in places called libraries to the place of the Internet. Cut and paste was done with scissors and contact cement.
Back in the day, there was a humanity about things, before we had to deal with the modern trinity of plastic, silicon, and magnetic media. The silicon age has a lot of capability, but at what price. Silicon's very exactitude is its most attractive feature, saving us from having to think, to dream, to emote. Fact is, humanity and emotion is antithetic to silicon, hiding society from the consequences of their mistakes, by making sure they don't make any.