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As much part of the morning ritual as getting children to school or travelling to work is, at home or in the office, switching on the computer. And many people will be doing that today in some trepidation having been warned by software experts that following Friday’s global attack on major multinationals, on the Russian banking network and on our own NHS, there may be more to come. An alert on the screen informs us that we can’t access our data without paying a ransom. A modern form of piracy then, but not one that attacks us on the highway but sitting at our desks: not so much your money or your life but your money or your files.
People of my generation whose computer experience started as adults, are often described as digital immigrants; in contrast to the twenty-somethings who have grown up in a virtual world, who are described as digital natives. As a digital immigrant, I use computers every day, for both work and pleasure, but despite my best efforts I’ll always be reliant on a set of machines I fundamentally don’t understand. And the dystopian glimpse of shutdown that we experienced this weekend reveals our individual vulnerability; and our institutional dependence on, in this case, what you might call a digital elite; the ones who know; the software engineers, code writers, and on the frontline, the life-savers in IT support. Like a Latin-speaking priesthood remote from the people, they are the only ones who know the language, able to perform the rituals that will pacify the gods of the internet.
The benefits of hi-tech computer systems are obvious; they help us scale up our ability to heal, to teach, to learn and to connect. But even in this sophisticated environment, our instincts are still pretty simple. Just like our agrarian ancestors, whose livelihoods depended on appeasing the God who sent the rain and the sun, we are perfectly capable of creating other littler gods that in our minds govern the environment for our work; these gods too make the weather: the god of efficiency, the god of profit maximisation, the god of billable minutes, let alone hours. And it’s not difficult to start to feel at the mercy of these whimsical gods whose instincts we frankly can’t trust, who seem to own us, and who seem constantly to demand more from us without limit.
One of the key insights of the Christian tradition is that it is in our vulnerability that we find deeper truth. This technical vulnerability is no exception, revealing to us our various dependencies and priorities online. And so as I switch on my computer this morning, I will ask myself to which littler gods do I in practice swear daily allegiance? And then as I type in my hard-to guess- password, I resolve to resist all their attempts to enslave me.