Where did IT (Information Technology) come from? And what is it’s underlying premise? The factually inclined rush to their Wikipedias and mime out the history. But suppose you wished to distract two or three generations of logically oriented career seekers away from reality? Could you do better than to ‘invent’ IT?

they got the ball rolling, I surmise
somewhere around the late 1940s
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki
slowed the hellish fuming
of their green-black ethers
into the shocked timespace
between earth and morose moon

I suppose it a convention
a congress of fallen Archangels
lower ranked invitees looking on in silence
maybe they convened in New Orleans
nourished by the ambient lusts
not materially, of course
but looming just above
the loom of men’s enthusiasms
gleaming, self-satisfied
in the pre-glow of hyperactive modernity

each seven sunyears they convened
these spirits committed to obstruction
to hone techniques of soulplay
to discourse on coming trends
or deliberate the half-truths
most advantageous to seed widely
but mostly, to them sacredly
to become of one mind
as to their clandestine agenda
how history will really become
and also appear to become
for the next seven years,
a kind of occult Davos

and the eldermosts deliberated
with tongues capable of tasting souls
whose biographies to manipulate
in which fruitful directions
and much care was devoted
to how best conceal their artifice
within the raiments of human inspiration

certainly they’d need an Alan Turing
a brilliancy to seed the concepts
but geniuses had clear heart maps
dark spirits knew well the methods
for distorting their probing contemplations,
piecewise torturing their sensitivities
making them twisted by degrees,
their loving knotted in pretzel logic

thus, after mere brief decades
but a respiration for an archangel
they’d fertilized a generation
with the forceful fever of algorithms and efficiency
with sclerotic bloodless lust for the virtual
till they took the modeled for the actual
and novel cleverness for authenticity
calculation for heart, and logic for goodness
until many millions labored sleeping at their screens
and most well concealed of all,
hijacked the directions of our deepest cognitions
away from any penetrations toward the spirit
away from wondering the deepest of depths

and initially rewards came manifold
for the ones who bought the saccharine early
so cleverly was moneylust entangled
with the deceptive allure of the digital morass
so unthinkingly the imbibement
of convenience and novel amusements
at the world-ignorant pushing of buttons
so deferred until a later unspecified moment
the actuality of veil-piercing love

but something secret goes amiss
when not enough looking and hearing and scenting
what is the natural living debris of creation
sculpts out the experience of our souls
some field goes fallow inside us
and a soil once fertile of possibility
ossifies into narrow oft-walked rock paths
leaving us hungry for an oxygen unrecognized
but intuited amidst lives’ brief undistracted instants

and even thinking too goes misshapen
what was held up and advertised our pinnacle
for the new intelligence has no stomach
for what individuality can uniquely fathom
in fact, no stomachs at all, just a mouth
for devouring data with an infinite appetite
and an anus for spewing statistical verity
or something distantly resembling it
while we scan among the web of excrement
for ever more sparse nuggets of goodness,
or of self

and now you brazen few
shrieking your awakeness
in the faceless face of ignoring markets
perceive the extent of the opposing power’s temptation
and with a resoluteness
not quite brave, rather embryonic
like one million saplings pushing upwards
through the carpet of clutter in an April
must muster unlustful your clear-eyed loving
and fashion a weapon of your innermost being
that flashes forth from your yet unknown spirit
while somehow holding at bay your clamoring ego
as the battle lines emerge into sunlight

_______RS

I will not allow them praise
Who broke the harmonious globe into splintered fragments
and yet they moved perforce with a perfect pattern
complimenting harmony with discord
and light with darkness.
– Robin Williamson

[ Image : detail of a drawing. ] (link)

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